for that so it doesn't hit us in a sudden calamity. >> do you propose solutions? >> i do at the end, but no good author gives them all away. you turn 65, the government says to you, you can either get all the benefits you are entitled to under the programs, or fore swear them and you are expect from income, state, and property tax. nobody considered that five to ten years ago, but we're staring default in the face. i think people consider unconventional alternatives. >> sarah vowell examines the annexization of hawaii. the author recounts the 1893koo organized by the missionaried and the ousting of the queen.

>> i know it's exhausting. there's microphones everywhere here. i'm going to read for a little bit and then take questions just like every other reading you've ever been to. [laughter] why is there a glob of salad next to the japanese chicken in my plate lunch? they left with the first boat load of new england missionaries bound for hawaii in 1819, and that it's saturday and rainbow drive only receivers the chicken four days a week. a banyon is a fine spot to sit beneath and ponder the box of takeout. none of us belong here. not me, not the food, not the chicken soaked in soy sauce, not

even the tree. like a lot of people and things in these islands, banyons are imports from somewhere else. in this case, india. the banyon's branches shoot off sprouts that drift down and take root into the ground forming new trunks to support more and more trunks until each tree is its own spooky little forest. there is a banyon shading courthouse square in maui planted in 1873 to remember the arrival of the missionaries on that island. it was eight feet tall when planted, and now it stands over 60 feet high with 12 trunks spanning more than 200 square feet. one time, i was in the white house chatting with a woman who worked there about the banyon. she told me that the town gardeners put a lot of effort in

confining that tree to the square because otherwise it would keep on growing until the roots and branches cracked the foundation and broke the walls toppling everything in its path. in fact, the banyon's tendency to crowd out and destroy its neighbors earned it the pet name strangler fig. [laughter] here, the u.s. army museum is hunkered down amidst of the hotels built in the post 1959 state hood architectural style i think of as a very brady brutalism. [laughter] the park where we are sitting appears in an old black and white photograph on display there. the picture was taken in the summer of 1898, a few days after the sons of missionaries who bethrowned the queen handed over hawaii to the united states. the park is pitched with the tents of the first new york voluntary infantry. the spanish-american war had the

soldiers stopping off in this suddenly american city en route to the fill fifteens to persuade the people at gunpoint that self-government really isn't for everyone. [laughter] they named their encampment after the president who based them here, camp mckinly. by august, the administration invaded the spanish colonies of cuba, puerto rico, philippines, gam, and annexed hawaii. the united states became a world power for the first time, because what it is now. hoorah for hawaii theodore roosevelt wrote. he was in the caribbean with the rough riders. one of the end results of that conquest was american control of

guantanamo bay. to roosevelt and like-minded cronies in government and military, the most important objecteddive of the 1898 maneuvers was possession of far flunged islands for ports. he and his friends had pined for these bases for years the way a normal man envisions his dream house. all they ever wanted was a cozy little global empire with island here and there parked with a fleet of battleships. japanese dive bombers sank four of the battle ships on december 7, 1941 and that's how i got interested in hawaii in the first play a few years back. the purpose of my initial visit was a quick jaunt to see the uss arizona memorial, the monument in the harbor perched above the grave of the 177,000 sailors who

died that day. unlike the flip-flop wearers on my flight to hon honolulu, i didn't come for sun or fun. [laughter] i came to hawaii because it had been attacked. after i checked the arizona off my to-do-list, i had time to kill so i swung by the palace downtown to look at the victorian building my guidebook says is the only palace in the united states. a guide let my group into the room where the white businessmen and sugar planters who staged a plan against the queen in 189 # locked her up for trn after her royalist supporters botched a counterrevolution. liluokalani was in the second floor of the palace sewing a quilt on display there. perhaps out of mel colony or

spite, little kings stand guard around the square. she embroidered a scene of a cartoonish man struggling with an umbrella losing his hat in the wind. the guy chuckled over this, but i wonder if it's the woman whose crown has blown away and it isn't coming back. i should mention that i was there in december of 2003, the week before i arrived in honolulu, american soldiers captured hussein who was hiding in his spider hole. when i was standing in the victorian home of a queen deposed by the sons of churchy new englanders, that exact moment the iraqi dictator was behind bars in a u.s. military compound guarded by pennsylvaniaians. not that the queen and a famous

composition and hussein, a mass murders famous for gasessing 5,000 kurds have much many common, but there's an unidentifiable link between the two, an american tends sigh to know what government trendy lingo at the time called regime change. when the tour guide mentioned the day the hawaiian flag was lowered and the american flag went up, she looked like she was going to cry. i couldn't help but picture that scene from the tv news earlier in the year when a u.s. soldier celebrated the invasion of baghdad by climbing up a statue of saddam and covering his face with the stars and stripes, a gesture that's unfortunate as pr and improper flag etiquette. [laughter] it was telling to spend the morning at a historic site like

pearl harbor. it sited the preemptive war as a betrayal of american ideals. the sub text of the dissent was this is not who we are. none of you are standing where i was. it was hard to see the look in their eyes talking about the american flag flying over the palace and not realize from 1898, from time to time, this is who we are. what's more, hawaii is just as theodore roosevelt predicted, crucial to the american's empire military presence in the pacific. it is still the headquarters of u.s. pacific command as it was for all three of america's 20th century wars in the pacific with japan, north korea, and north vietnam, so i started looking into hawaii's part in the epic of american global domination.

americans and their children spent the 78 years between the arrival of missionaries in 1820 and the american annexization in 1898, americanizing hawaii, importing our favorite religion, capitalism, and second favorite religion, christianity. in certain ways, the americanization of hawaii in the 19th century parallels the americanization of america. just as their puritan fore borers set off into the wilderness of new england, the new england missionaries set sail for islands that they thought of as a spiritual wilderness. nine out of ten natives were wiped out by contacts of european diseases, so was the hawaiian population ravaged by smallpox, measles, whooping could have, and other diseases. they brought in the huddled

masses of immigrants, the sugar plantations founded by the sons of the missionaries required labor, primarily from china, japan, portugal, and the philippines, transforms hawaii to what it has become in which every race is a minority, hence the plate lunch. [laughter] two scoops of japanese rise and one scoop of a salad that was air lifted from a church pot luck, is served alongside an asian protein or loco moco a hamburger patty topped with gravy and an egg. that's the meal's most obvious defect, not enough egg. [laughter] they shared food at lunch time

swapping noodles for korea spare ribs and portuguese bread. that habit of hodgepodge was passed down evolving into the plate lunch now served at diners, drive-ins, and lunch trucks throughout hawaii. in 1961, the late man established the rainbow drive-in where i bought my lunch. if fuku had been in the 100th infantry battalion, the volunteer soldiers in the 442nd regimennal combat team serving troops in europe and north africa becoming the most decorated unit in military history and earning the nickname the purple heart battalion. their argument was they were americans, not as the u.s. government classified them and their families as enemy aim --

aliens. the men knew offers many meals and it reads like a list of what america is supposed to be like, a neighborly mishmash. barak obama, the honolulu born president of the united states mentioned once on a trip home his craving for plate lunch listing rainbow drive-in as a possible stop and it makes sense since his mother and father met at the university of hawaii. he's our first plate lunch president. [laughter] i suppose the double-sided way i see the history of hawaii as a painful tale of native lock come bined with a multiethnic saga symbolized by mixed please in which you can coexist, contrasts the history of the united states in general.

i'm a desen adapt of cherokees who were marched out on the trail of tears, but i'm also the desen adapt of european imgrants, swiedish pes cants who left for kansas the same reason why plantation workers sailed to hawaii. whenever i eat plate lunch, i think back to the lure of my swedish great grandfather's voyage across the atlantaic. the only food with him was a big hunk of cheese. then he made friends with a german who had a big hunk of sausage. the swedes shared the cheese with the german, and the german shared the sausage with the sweed. growing up, i came to know america as two places, a repatience country built on the destruction of the original inhas been tans, and a welcoming land of opportunity and generosity built by people who shared their sausage and their choose. [laughter]

in 1899, the british poet published the poem the white man's burden about the new american empire of island colonies of new peoples. four years earlier when he visited washington, d.c. for the first time, he met theodore roosevelt. roosevelt dragged him to the smithsonian to show off glass cases full of american indian art facts. he later wrote, i never got over the wonder of a people having driving their originals honestly believe they were a godly little new england community setting examples to brutal mankind. of the five countries the united states invaded and or acquired in 1898, hawaii is the only one that became a state. that said, i have come to understand that even though

hawaii has been a state since 1959 and an american territory since 1898, a small, but defient network of activists question the legality of both developments and do not consider themselves to be americans at all which is pretty easy to pick up on when they march past you down the main drag of honolulu on the 50th anniversary of statehood carrying signs that say "we are not americans." [laughter] so -- [applause] oh, thank you. [applause] so if you have questions, a microphone carrier will -- [laughter] will find you. >> i know you mentioned your nephew in your novel. how is he doing and how old is he now?

>> my nephew is almost 11. how is he doing? [laughter] you know, i vice president seen him in awhile. i do like to travel with him. i saw him a few weeks ago. we went to some mayan ruins in mexico and guatemala, and i don't know, he's quite a bidding wordsmith. [laughter] he asked if he could sit home next to me on the way home, and i said, i don't know, are you going to be a pill? he said, i don't know, maybe only a chewable. [laughter] teaser. >> i'm real curious how you do your research? what's your process from start to finish? [laughter] >> what is my process from start to finish? well, let's see.

you know, i read -- i read a bunch of books first, a lot of, you know, i read some of the official histories, then i read some, you know, primary documents or diaries, memoirs, that kind of thing. i had a lot of missionary memoirs this time, lucky me. [laughter] you know, official biographies of all of the, you know, players, and then i just start going and doing reporting trips where, in this case, i went to back and forth from my home in new york city to the io lands i think seven or eight times, and i would stay sometimes for a week or several weeks representing an apartment, including one in the building that jack lord stands on top of in the opening credits of hawaii 5-0. on this one, i spent a lot of time on archives in honolulu and

the mission houses housing the missionary papers reading all of their letters and diaries and the state archives of hawaii with a lot of the government papers and the monarchy papers and the bis spot mew -- disshop museum papers and reading a lot of old newspapers on microfilms, the whaling newspaper and going to historic sites and interviews curators and tour guides and other interviews with various locals, you know, some of them independ activists, you know, one of my interviews was with a woman who became a good friend of mine who was a missionary desen adapt, that -- descendent, that kind of thing. oh, yes, sorry. sorry, microphone.

[laughter] >> i was curious to know if you saw the annexization of hawaii as maybe having some sort of modern ripple effect in some ways causing the birther movement? [laughter] >> i mean, correct me if i'm wrong, but i'm -- the birthers, not a word i enjoy saying because i like english. [laughter] correct me if i'm wrong, but i don't know that their entirely up to speed on the history of hawaii in the 1890s. i believe they're focused and concerns are more prompted by anger at who the president is and trying to find ways to, you know, not make him be the president, unless i'm wrong about that. i don't think there's too much. i guess the two things are vaguely linged in that if the

united states had never annexed hawaii, a person born in honolulu would not be eligible to be president, and therefore would not garner such, you know, loathing as the current one, but no, i don't think they are that linked, but i'm not sure. [laughter] yes, you pick. [laughter] oh, mic grace. [laughter] >> i drove three and a half hours to be here with you. [laughter] >> thank you. >> i'm from lorado. >> wow, that's a pin with my face on it even. [laughter] >> yes, you're close to my heart. [laughter] also 38 years old. you've been on tv shows and the last one was david letterman, is he like -- or is he like -- >> david letterman?

>> or even colbert. >> what am i supposed to say? [laughter] david letterman is a youthful hero of mine and he's actually a real reader who's been nothing but nice to me and my books, so i have nothing but kind thoughts for the man which makes a terrible story. [laughter] oh, he's nice to me and helps me sell my books. [laughter] it's a terrible story. i like nonfiction, and if you have to tell the truth, but thanks for driving. [laughter] i hope you road your hippy bikes here. [laughter] >> when coming up with an idea for the next thing you want to work on, do you come up with a bunch of ideas and one sticks

with you, or are you sitting around one day and like, yeah, that's it. >> yep. [laughter] it's different every time, but like i don't have my next idea, so sure i have a million ideas every day, almost all of them lame at this point. [laughter] like kind of know it when you see it. like the last book, my one about the puritans, i started -- i mean, i always wanted to write about the puritans, i mean, who doesn't? [laughter] i love john wint thrks rop's sermon about christian charity, and i was thinking about it and i wrote that book after reagan's funeral and that sermon was read there, and because it's the sermon where there's the image of new epg land and later america as the city upon a hill, and it's a sermon about charity and generosity and that it was

so closely associated with president reagan, a president whose administration was not about charity and generosity, but gutting every social program designed to help one's fellow man, so that was just a little kick i needed, you know, to get cracking. i thought it was a good time to revisit that speech just because, you know, winthrop in that sermon about charity and generosity, he says we shall be the city upon a hill, and to him, it was two sided. yes, it could turn out the way we talk about that image now that, you know, this place eventually, the united states, then just new england, would be as a city upon a hill to be a beacon of hope and light to the world, but he also meant it two ways meaning we can fail and

everybody can see our failure. we'll be up there and everybody has a great view of the failure, and he defines that failure as the con nighs' -- colonists' failure to take care of one another, so i don't know, that why that one. [laughter] >> yes, sarah -- >> hi. >> i noticed on your food plate and you mention poy, and does jim neighbors still have his show over there. >> i don't know what's happening with jim neighbors in the last 40 years. [laughter] but what about poy? it is still a very prized food among hawaiians. it's not just a staple food. it's an object of almost religious devotion. it's the, you know, mashed terra

root. i personally -- let's say i haven't craved it for awhile. [laughter] since i left hawaii, by i mean, this is a whole story there. you know, one of the people i interviewed, a doctor whose grandmothers worked for the last

>> it's languages is so weird, and its story is so strange, and it just reminds me of it's just a jam packed little book, and it's

like cold water splashing on my face because it reminds me of what a book can be because it is what a book can speak and write, but it doesn't bleed into my story telling. the other is charles adams, the cartoonist. i have a big stack of old stack of cartoon collections and look at those. he's so delightful and strange and funny. there's something that it's like those two, it's just like a -- it flicks a switch in me, you know? >> i also wanted to ask, i'm doing a lot of research on my family and the history, and i'm part cherokee, the rest -- are you thinking about a book? i mean, there's so many books on you -- the -- well, i'm not going to say that because no,

there is not enough, not the way that congress is going right now, so -- >> books about the cherokee? >> uh-huh. >> oh. i will write a long essay about the trail of tears in my essay collection so i doubt i would revisit that, but there is a little bit, you know, i do revisit some of the history of that tribe in this hawaii book just because it's the same organization in the american board of commissioners for foreign missions who they are the group that sent the missionaries to hawaii. there are also the group that sent missionaries to the cherokee nation and christianized, westernized the cherokee, and, you know, that same group started this school up in connecticut for heathen youths where all these new england shapes came back with

all these kids all over the world, and some of them were put in this school, incoming the boy's whose basically the first hawaiian christian, and two of the -- two of the cherokee men they studied there as boys, and there were a couple of the ones who signed that treaty against the will of the rest of the tribes that gave the u.s. government permission sort of legally to start the trail of tears, so there is a real concrete connection, but that group of both missionaries got around. [laughter] >> here's one, i don't know. >> hi, i drove through and a half hours, but from corpus. [laughter] do you have any -- obviously libraries are important or i would assume so in your research and as a former librarian because budget cuts are awesome,

do you have any words to advocate, just, you know, telling how important libraries have been to your process? >> oh, in case texas legislatures are watching c-span at 7 a.m. in the morning? [laughter] >> i had to try. >> i'm not going to reinvent the wheel. yes, libraries have been very important to me. that's where the books are. [laughter] you know? [laughter] i mean, when i was -- i spent the first 11 years of my life in a tiny, tiny, tiny town in oklahoma with no library. at the school, there was one shelf with books on it, and you could take them home, but you went through the books quick. at 11 years old, my family moved to a college town in montana that had more than one library, you know? that first summer, my -- i mean, and the sidewalks.

they had sidewalks also. [laughter] we liked to roller skate and so that first summer we spent and moving from oklahoma to montana, it sounds like one stick to another, but it was a college top, and to us, it was like we moved to paris. [laughter] that first magical summer we had roller skates and sidewalks and went to the library every day. we thought we had moved to civilization. no offense, oklahoma. [laughter] and, you know, when i was in high school, i would skip school a lot. i would skip -- that doesn't sound good. stay in school, kids. i skipped school to go to the library. [laughter] libraries are not just for my work as a writer. obviously, in this book i was helped tremendously by archives and libraries by the institutions i mentioned in

hawaii. some of that is impossible without them. that, you know, i can't tell you what you can learn from microfilm of old newspapers and, i mean, much of it has been digitized and is available widely, so i mean, i can't even -- i can't imagine -- i mean, libraries are just so crucial and vital, and i don't know how to talk about life without them, you know? it's like oh, there's not anymore eggs. [laughter] like, what? [laughter] so i wish i had something super zippy to say about it, but they are so important. you don't know how great a library is unless you born into a town that doesn't have one. put it that way.

[applause] >> we lived in hawaii years ago, and we new the history and all that, but it's interesting how the natives are conflicted about being americans, being hawaiians, and it is a different state to live in. it is, like i said interesting how they don't always consider themselves part of the united states, but it got to be aggravating to go over and visit and hear people say, well, back in the states. [laughter] back in the u.s -- we would say, you are in the u.s.. [laughter] we'd go back to visit, and hear people say, well, now that your back in the u.s -- we said, we

are living in the u.s.. we're in hawaii. well, hawaii is not really a state, and things like that, and it's. like that since i can remember, back in 1959, and i guess you heard that -- >> well, i watched, i think those shows jack carr did in hawaii, right after statehood, and he does ask this crowd of people what do you think of the united states, and they all yelled back, you're in it, you know? [laughter] i think some of that dislocation and i think some of that is just a byproduct of what happens when, you know, one country on a continent, you know, colonizing an island thousands of miles from its shore. in some ways, yeah, in some ways it's a completely american place to me just because it's so mill tar risic --

militarized with training bases everywhere and it's religious and a lot of crummy commercial architecture which is a bit of a specialty in this country. there are so many things about it. i mean, especially and then you have all those hotels and resorts. with the hotels and the resorts and the military bases, there's a writer i like who once wrote that the two great contributions of the american civilization are annihilation and fun. [laughter] he was writing that about las vegas and a piece about, you know, all the old nuclear tests done in the nevada desert, but that applies to hawaii as well, but then, on the other hand, you know, it is still so much so often the sovereign independent country it once was.

the language, even, you know, english speakers who say they don't speak hawaiian, they are peppered into normal talk. if you were going to ask directions from swop, they would tell you to go malca or maki. malca is towards the mountains and maki is towards the ocean. it's such a singular place and still has so many vees tajes of its culture that's it's still lost in a way. maybe that's why "lost" was filmed there. [laughter] i have a friend who is a teacher, and i was speaking to him and some of his colleagues telling him about some king, and i was butchering his name, and the pronunciation, and i made some, i just said i hate saying hawaii words in front of hawaiians. he said, it's funny you call us

hawaiians, baa i don't think myself as hawaiian. i said what are you talking about? you live here and were born here. he said, i know, but my family, his ancestors came from japan and germany, and he's just, i don't know -- compared to -- it's like that in new york where i live, like it's this very desperate place with all these people from all over the world and the different food, but everyone whose been there awhile considers themselves new yorkers. it doesn't matter where you are from or the color of your skin or whatever. it's a big jumble and fairly happily so, so there is something -- there is this kind of lost quality about hawaii and the identity of the place and the people and that i think is, you know, a result of this kind of, i guess it's sort of kind of

americanization and what happened when the missionary offspring overthrew the hawaiian queen in 1893. it was kind of a severing from the hawaiian past. you know, one of the other things she did when she was locked up in her cell was she translated the creation myth, which is a genealogy that tells the story from the beginning of time from the slime that created the earth up to her own ancestors, and i think one reason she did that after her overthrow is she's thinking about that and that long, long ions of hawaiian past that had just been severed, and i think there's still, you know, it's like what is that called when you have something is amputated? it is lost limb syndrome?

>> [inaudible] >> thank you. i think there's always going to be that there. i mean, it makes it a very fascinating place for that reason, you know? >> back on the consumption of book ideas, where did you come up with the idea of -- [inaudible] >> where i came up with my book of the presidential assassinations? i don't know. i don't remember. >> okay. >> i think i was writing a lot about president lincoln, and it must have just o cored to me in some of my lincoln research. i don't have a snappy story. [laughter] >> i find your style really dry and funny, so i was wondering if

you ever intertape the idea of branching into fiction? you mentioned that -- >> no. [laughter] that question which comes up a lot is such an insult to nonfiction. [laughter] just because something is true, no, no, i'm not a liar. [laughter] there's tons of other liars whose books you're welcome to buy here. [laughter] i mean, the thing i love about nonfiction is it does not have to seem plausible, you know? like nonfiction is about things that -- like that can't be true, but it is, you know? [laughter] fiction you have to write these stories that seem like they could have happened to people who might exist. [laughter] you don't have to do that with you write about a weirdo like abraham lincoln. in this story, what happens as

the first missionaries leave boston harbor, well, they are en route to come and spread christianity, and while they are on the way, on the water, the new hawaiian king decides to abolish the old religion. you put that in a fiction-type stories, it's just going to seem like, you know, like, no, that's too easy, but then the missionaries show up, and they get the news. guess what? the old religion has been, you know, banned and outlawed, and there's nothing to replace it, and here we just sailed into a spiritual vacuum to, you know, sell our christian ways, and to them, it seemed like god was on their side, and it's a gift from god, but if you put that in a made up story, i mean, that just doesn't, that just wouldn't work because it's just unbelievable. [laughter] or like, you know, about that

story of how john adams and thomas jefferson died on the same day on the 50th anniversary of the declaration of independence, july 4, 1826. you put that in a nosm, that would be so laughable. [laughter] you know, it's fact, and therefore, it can be as implausible as possible anyway. fiction? [laughter] >> i know i'm a groupy and preorder everything you write as soon as i hear it's coming out. >> thank you very much. >> however -- >> oh, where's that's going? [laughter] >> this one when it came out, the title, "unfamiliar fishes" i had no idea what you were going to be writing about, and it's like -- >> that's because i hate subtitles. go on.

[laughter] >> what inspiredded you to use that title? >> oh, it is -- it's a quotation from a letter written by one of the first hawaiian writers. he was almost 30 years old when the first missionaries arrived on maui, the island where he lived at the time, and they taught him how to read and write. he was well schooled in the hawaiian oral tradition, but the missionaries from new england had to invent a written language for hawaii, and they taught him and some other people to read. in fact, pretty much the entirety of the hawaiian population within a generation, and within a few years, he was writing his book, hawaiian antiquities, a compendium of knowledge on the classical hawaiian culture that was dying away thanks to the coming of the westerners, and it's a very beautiful, very useful book,

but -- and he came -- he was very under the influence of these new englanders, learned to read and write, became a teacher and a minister, and being a writer, which is to say grumpy and full of misgivings -- [laughter] as he saw the years wore on and saw more and more white people kind of drowning his homeland, and not just the missionaries and maui where he lived was a stopping point for whalers. there's hundreds of whaling ships stopping in hawaiian ports at the same time, so as he saw all of these white people coming in, moving in, you know, dropping by, sailors on leave, they are probably not the ones to make the best impression. [laughter] he wrote this really sad letter to native friends. that said something like when a big wave comes in, large -- large and

unfamiliar fishes come from the dark ocean, and they see the small fishes of the shallows, and they will eat them up, and then he says the big men from the important countries come here and see that our people are small. they will devour us. it was kind of prophetic. i also like just pulling unfamiliar fishes out of that just because my book is about these americans, and the americans who came to hawaii in that time in the 19th century, they are not, they are not like regular joe americans, you know? you got your bible-something killjoys. you got your sailors on leave, and then a bunch of, you know, capitalists and con men and other dreamers. something about just pulling that out, unfamiliar fishes, kind of captured that, it's

about these kind of singular types who ended up there. >> time for one more question. >> your first book was a media study from a listener's point of view. have you thought about doing one now that's you've been on the other side with npr and television appearances? >> oh, you want to read a diary of me like going on book tours and talking to interviewers? yeah, no, that hadn't occurred to me. [laughter] i will say that year -- that was my first book, listening to the radio for a year. there was a prison sentence. [laughter] i have, you know, it's been more than a decade that i was, you know let out on parole, so no. i mean, one thing about that form -- it was, you know, i listened to the radio every day, and i don't know if you listened to the radio, but it was kind of

trying as a project, but i do think there is something in that form -- it doesn't like capture the time, you know? the year i listened was 1995, and i mean, i don't really listen to a lot of different kinds of radio so much anymore, but at the time, i can't imagine it's gotten more violent, the talk, you know? like when i turned on the radio, i think maybe on the first day. this is right before oklahoma city, before, you know, the right ring talk radio, and people started wondering, hey, maybe you shouldn't talk like that all the time. the reason i wrote 2 is because of the 1994 congressional elections, and the freshmen congressmen called themselves the ditto head caucus. radio is having a huge impact on

the country, and i was kind of unaware of that side of it, but i would hear before oklahoma city, i heard maybe on the first day a kid with a paper route calling in a talk show saying there's this other kid trying to horn in on my pawrp route, and the host said, oh, you need to get a gun. they said it in jest, but then i remember a week into it, i was visiting my parents in montana, and there was this big snowstorm, so much snow that the streets were not plowed yet, and i went cross country skiing in the middle of the night and it was wonderful, and then i came back, and turned on the radio, and there was some person saying you could solve the problem of the welfare mothers and the illegal imgrants by giving the welfare mothers jobs by posting them at the border to gun down all the illegal immigrants. like, when i say it was a prison sentence, i'm saying it's not like it was hard having to hear

slayer songs all day long. [laughter] it was very dark and violent and terrible things i had to listen to, you know, that -- so, yeah. i think we forget that or i mean, i don't know. i would like to forget it, but i can't, and then after, you know, oklahoma city, when that happened, there was something president clinton said that stuck with me when that happened. he said, you know, if there's talk of hate, stand up and talk against it, and that was something that was nice to hear after, you know, a few months of listening to violence calls to murder in between commercials. [laughter] to i don't see recreating that experience, lovely as it was. i did, you know, it was my first book, and i learned a lot by writing and publishing it and

it's a very like dark and, i think, kind of angry raw book, but i think that comes from what i had to listen to. maybe one more question? just to -- could it maybe be slightly more hopeful? [laughter] that's not from your question, that's me and the darkness. >> i'll have to work on hopeful i think. i was curious, do you see a parallel between the missionary effort that you write about in here and the dulles brothers who enjoyed life in the 50s? >> i don't know who the dulles brothers are. >> john foster dulles. >> oh, i've been to that airport. [laughter] >> with the overthrow -- >> oh, some of the other american regime changes? >> yeah. >> it does seem to be a habit of ours. we don't like the guy running got guatemala? i know what we can do, or, you

know, we don't like the guy running cuba? that kind of thing? i mean, the thing -- it's one thing for a government to want to hope for foreign leaders who would perhaps, if not act in our interest, at least, you know, but the thing about the united states is at our finding -- in the ceo lar ration of independence, you know, defines our belief that the theory of government should be on the consent of the governed. the fact that they would go abroad and among key with other country's rulers is a contradiction. it is, at best, hypocritical. is that what you're talking about? >> and also the religious

ferver. >> the difference with hawaii is the missionaries, the original missionaries, the ones who came in the 1820s and 30s, they were not the one to overthrow the queen, it's their children, those born in hawaii who, most of them attended the school founded by the missionaries to educate missionary chirp. that's the school our president went to. it's those children, the hawaii-born hawaiians, hawaiian subjects who overthrew the queen, and to them, religion played little role. the queen was a more devout christian than any of those guys ever were. the original missionaries were supposed to westernize and civilize hawaiians the best they could, but there was strict instructions not to mess with the government and not get involved with political affairs because political affairs of are of this earth and they were to

be concerned with getting as many in the kingdom of heaven as possible. most stuck with that, but a few quick their jobs to work in the government of the there was one ex-missionary who worked on the new framing of the constitution. there was one missionary who quit the mission to work in the judiciary because he octobered to the fact that the headquarters back in boston was taking donations from the slave states before the civil war. they stuck to the plan partly because they didn't have time to do anything else. they were burdened overloaded people who -- they wanted to make everyone kris chaps and because they are protestants, everybody has to read the bible. a, they have to invent the

written language, b, translate the bible and because they are new englanders, they translate it from greek and hebrew into hawaiian, publish that, teach everyone to read, and run this school, and preach their sermons, and, you know, because it's monarchies, they have a lot of other commands and demands that the aristocrats place on them, the missionary wives had to drop everything and sew new dresses from the queens and chiefly women. there's so much to do, and they had to build their houses and churches. they were so overworked and overburdened that they really didn't have time to, you know, do any talking, but their children, their children, you know, their children did, and religion really had very little to do with it because like the

man after the overthrow who becomes the president of the republic of hawaii, he and the queen, you know, they went to the same church, and he taught sunday school, she led the choir. she was a solid christian. in her book, her memoir, that i recommend, hawaii's story by hawaii as queen, she writes the book, it's her story, but she's publishing in 1898 to argue against annexization, and she uses two arguments against annexization, well several, but two of them being this doesn't seem christian, and she basically implies god will smite us if we do this to her little country, and the other one is that it doesn't seem in keeping with, you know, the demands of democratic-republican government, so there's that. [laughter] i would like to thank you all for coming.

thanks, austin, you're always good to me. i'll be upstairs signing books. [applause] >> to find out more, visit the author on facebook at facebook.com/sarahjanevowell. >> so, matt, here's the question. this book is written in a popular style, and it has sort of a breezy optimism to it. you write at one point, and i'm quoting here, the innovative capitalist culture will allow us to make a hudini style escape from climate changes most devastating impacts. ..

>> it's when we anticipate a challenge in our mind. in a world of seven billion, perhaps nine billion people, if enough of us o scared of the change that climate change poises, it's anticipating a problem. zuckerberg, the great minds, maybe a few. in the world that we got seven to nine million people anticipating major challenges and anticipating this will be a market.