i was 10 or 11 and i said what part of the trip worries you the most? and i said -- she said people think it is the pacific but it isn't. it is africa. ..

>> that he would bring back because we have no assurance that this would stay the same. it is easier to let things slip and slide. at any rate, he has a royal mess with the economy. i remember the depression very clearly. it wasn't fun. i also remember marching on

washington, and they were encamped at a flat. my father and i used to go swimming there. we used to go, every weekend, we would go flying, and we always went over the across the flats. i thought they were skeletons. perpetual halloween in anacostia. they would come to town for a bonus for world war i. they were great things that roosevelt did. jimmy come his oldest son, who was in the marine corps, came back from the south pacific. and he held forth a table. he had a conversation underwear like this. you know, you have complained about how the soldiers were

thrown in this hash deep after the first world war and the civil war. is that what happened to? and this question didn't make a lot of sense. quite frankly, roosevelt was somewhat disturbed. and he said well, we are going to try not to. and then they went into the g.i. bill of rights, which he was about to sign. that changed the united states totally. we have an intelligent civilized population for the first time.

on that note, thank you very much. thank you very much to mr. gore vidal. [applause] [inaudible conversations] >> this event was part of the 2009 key west literary seminar. to find out more, visit the website tran-seven. here's a look at some books are being published this week. my story of robbing banks,

winning supreme court cases and finding redemption. john hopwood recounts his personal journey from bank robber to lawyer kurt joseph wheeler, former editor for the associated press, details the career and war tactics of philip sheridan and terrible swift sword from the likes of general philip sheridan. and independents rising from outsider movements, third parties and the struggle for a porous partisan america, a former campaign manager for the mayor of new york we beat michael bloomberg, examines the role of third-party play in american politics. and martinez investigates the united states in doesn't america, boom and bust in the new old west. and obama's shocking plans for the next four years exposed, the authors present their thoughts on the obama administration's priorities in a potential second term. his assist richard muller

examines current energy issues in the u.s. and provides an outline for the future in science headlines. look for these titles and book stores this coming week and watch for the authors in the near future on booktv and on booktv.org.? >> how old was she when she: sha killed herself? >> she was 26 years old.r, >> why did she kill herself? suo >> what we know is that she left a suicide note that said that she was distraught.philanderingo that was the immediate cause. >> that was the president's grandfather, stanley dunham's mother? >> yes, she was 26. because of that dramatic event, stanley and his brother ralf moved back with the dunham

family. and his great-grandfather, a aracte character named christopher columbus clark, who had gotten the civil war. >> weirded the grandparents meet? >> they met in augusta, which i about 12 or 15 milesa away.r cou in butler county. it is on the way to wichita.itaa that is where madeleine grew upl stanley had been out of high school for several years.al and he is working inand construction, the renovation of an oil plant on that red. w >> what was their life like in kansas? >> their life before they moved or after? or >> after they moved. >> for a period of time, they didn't really like it. her father knew that they were l

dark skinned and there was ane element of racism in that. and she married her loveely theh secretly. she was a very smartig woman.lwe she had always been on the honor roll until she met stanley, whoo was slick talking and promised to get her out of kansas.and that is what she wanted. she had grown up loving bettee n davis.f here's she is stuck in a small town. stanley had our event inels he california and promised to take her backtake there.ere they were somewhat unstable. not that their marriage was necessarily unstable, but jobs b were unstable and they never knew where they were going nextr red it was a rocky road.ky >> on the kenyan side of the >> host where did the obama plan begin? >> the obama plan begin actually

in sudan several hundred yearsdt ago. t but i set the story in a small village by lake victoria to the south and east of the major cita out there. in what we call a very poor parh of kenya. it is where the tribe is cter t centered, the second and third largest tribe in africa.a that is where the obama's found themselves. >> on the president's paternal side, who are his grandparents? >> his grandfather was born inhe the late 1800s and was the firs in a wave to be westernized.ed he would be a seventh-day

adventists pick them out to kenya. he learned english in other ways he became inculcated into the british colony. he later worked as a chef and cook for british military people and folks in nairobi, kenya. n the mother was a woman who came from another village in that area.a and she did not -- it was hard for her to live with hers husband. he beat her, which is part of o the culture. when he moved, an area near where she grew up, and movedac back to another homek t state, r lake victoria, she had had younw

en3 lake victoria, she had had enough. she rane away. so she left the family with barack obama, the president's father, who was also barack hussein obama. oy >> david maraniss, the d grandparents died in 1996. the president obama ever meet him? >> no, he did not. after his he left in the 1980s after his grandfather died. i heard he made a good father, outside from the very early days of his birth.e but he didn't get back to kenya until both of his grandparents were gone. and he lived with his wife for a period of time. there is a dramatic distance atr that point in time.s did yo >> for the book "barack obama: the story", how many interviews did you do? >> i would say almost 400 interviews.al and i had a wonderful assistant,

gabriel banks, who helped with e some of the later interviews ane specific parts of the story. bu i traveled all around the world. d find in every part of the life every part of the life ofs president obama.rand >> barack obama senior was born born in 1936. what was his childlike? >> from a fairly early age, he a was dealing with western culture and thecu british.henairobi an he was lucky in the sense that he was smart enough to get into a really good school, the only t good school and noth area.

although he never totally tot finished, he was a very smart student. you have that sort of clash of old and new that almost everyone of his generation had to deal with. for all of his youth and adolescence, he was living in a colonial country in a very poor part of kenya. you know, he lived in mud huts and was dealing with goats and cows and no television. almost a century behind in some ways.ways and yet, kenya was starting to emerge. the push for independence was for i beginning. and westernization was taking nr hold in so many different ways. he was part of that. so he straddled two very different worlds. you

>> david maraniss, how long were you in kenya, and what did you see there and what was it like to be there?he >> kenya was one of the great experiences of my life. it was so vivid. everyday was unforgettable. we were there for about two weeks. it felt like a year. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. in an event hosted by c-span2, julianne malveaux will take your e-mails and tweaks for three hours beginning at noon eastern. on "after words." >> when i tried to do is take a look at this and try to see how did we get where we are today. what were the main causes. is there any trends and themes that run through our relationship? and what the ultimate goal of trying to write an objective account of what happened on both

sides. author david crist on his book, "the twilight war." particle tv this weekend on c-span2. simon johnson and james smith talk about their book as well. >> thank you, i am glad to be back in washington dc. as i mentioned, i did my theological studies in this wonderful town. i try never to stay too long when i'm here, because i am afraid you can get something that you can't get rid of. power does tend to corrupt, and absolute power does corrupt in many ways. yet, i am so happy to be here,

especially here at the catholic information center, which is the hub of all kinds of good things and it is an honor to be here. i am going to speak to you in a way, perhaps, a lot of people in washington dc do not speak. i'm going to speak in moral terms. you can ask me about policy issues and if i happen to have read about it or thought about it, i will be happy to offer you an answer. what i am trying to do in defending the free market is precisely what the subtitle says. to offer a moral case for the free economy. in order to offer a moral case for the free economy, i need to tell it to you through the lens of my own experience. this is what i tend to do in the book. i go back and forth from antidotes and stories and things that impress me and lessons that i learned. in the first thing, most of my new acquaintances get to know about me, even if they can't recognize it in my accent come is that i was born in brooklyn, new york. that is very much an indelible

part of my own consciousness because it was such a vivid place to grow up. i grew up in brooklyn. i am seeing the world from a whole new angle. many different angles. the smells and sounds and accents. those that i heard when i was growing up for mind expanding. if you walked out my front door at, a little apartment that was half the size of this room, you are thrown into a multiethnic experiment before that phrase ever came into fashion. i'm going to my friends house, and his family ran a chinese laundry. on one corner, there was a kosher pizza parlor. i don't even know if you have a

kosher pizza parlor here in washington dc, or the polish plumber down the street who kept her pipes flowing. it was the longest time but i didn't realize that i wasn't jewish. growing up. i knew there was something different about us because our kitchen smell differently. but i can still keep the coach or -- coach or kitchen i had a little closet or bedroom in my parents had better not overlooked coney island. this was nowhere near the beach. i had a crib, there was no door on my parents bedroom. i later had a. my sister slept on the couch. and we had this little living room, and then this tiny

kitchen. the kitchen looked directly into an identical apartment across the air shoot that -- think about honeymooners. this was the atmosphere of the place. you can hear people. this apartment, and i tell this story in the book, i have kind of confused all the names because i don't know what still exists in all of that. there was this real couple, mr. and mrs. schneider. i was watching her wanted from my apartment window from the windowsill, and i was looking over the windowsill. i was about five years old. i could've been much five or older, this is a spring day, she has a beautiful flower dress, short sleeves, and she was rolling some dough. and i was watching her roll the dough and she would take some of

the mixture she had made, walnuts and raisins and brown sugar in all of this and put it onto a piece of the dough and roll it into a little precedent. i put that on a cookie sheet. and then she would slip it into a green, wedgwood oven. she would leave that and go back to making more of these things. it is an eastern european pastry. they are magnificent. i am watching these undulating movements of becoming more and more mesmerized by mrs. shiner and then, of course, wafting across from her kitchen window was the aroma of these goodies being baked. mrs. schneider did not look at me once during this whole period of time as i watched her. until she pulled out the last tray of her cookies. she placed it on the windowsill and she looked up at me and she

said, eucom, and i will give you this to eat. so i got up and i ran across to her. and i held out my greedy little hands. and she put in a napkin on my hand and began to put a cookie in my hands. it was at that point that i saw a series of blue tattooed numbers. quite simply, i was more interested in the cookies. i went back into my apartment and painter. went back into my apartment come in the first thing i did was hide my cookies from my siblings because they did not raise some children. [laughter] my mom came in, we were poor, but we didn't know we were poor. it was not a class consciousness thing in the 1950s.

but my mom came in and said why does mrs. schneider have tattoos on her arm? and that was my first lesson in moral philosophy. that is why i say that those formative years were really four-minute. because embedded deep into who i am, deep into my consciousness, was this moral lesson. here is how my mother, who never graduated from high school were finished sixth grade, i don't think, here is how she told it to me. she said you know when you watch the westerns on television on saturday morning, and i said yes, and she said you know when the cowboys lasso the calais, what do they do after they try to tap? and i said that they stamp it. they stamp it with brand and she said yes.

and she said why do they do that? and i said that shows who owns the cattle. and she said that is what happened to mr. and mrs. schneider. that is why you have to be very nice to them. mr. shiner was a little off. she said you have to be very good and very nice to them because they had a hard time. they are refugees. this was another lesson. because i had always heard the term refugee used in the sense and sentence that said that there are more fools who have moved into the neighborhood, more chinese who have moved into the neighborhood, more puerto ricans moved into the neighborhood. more refugees in the neighborhood. and i thought that it was another nationality. it came from refuge. but no, they came to refuge. that also caused me to think

that this is a place where people come for safety. and this became a kind of lens through which i saw all of the different things that were happening as i was growing up. whether it was the images from the south of kids being kids and had dogs sit on them. or whether i heard about what was going on in cuba or in red china. all of these things, i was reading them through and understanding them through this one's of what was that? at the time i could not have told you. it is in anthropology. a certain assumed anthropology of two human beings are and how they ought to be treated. the sense of justice, the sense of melody.

it wasn't the formal academic exercise. it was a personal understanding of human dignity. there are little details. i will tell you that i left my faith at about 13 years old and did not come back to my faith until i was about 26 or 27 years old. so in 13 years i was away. and i wandered far and wide. a lot of things were a lot of fun and a lot of things were terribly embarrassing and i have to say very simple. in the course of all of that, i mentioned that i was an acquaintance of jane fonda and tom hayden. and i was involved with a campaign for economic democracy. i was involved with the

beginnings of the feminist movement. i boycotted galo greaves on behalf of the workers. all those kinds of things. i still don't drink gallo wine. but not because there is a boycott. i say this, and someone told me that one of the executives of gallo wine was in the audience. there was a fence and the quest of justice in my heart. when i would talk about it seriously, i would talk about it in terms of people who were neglected or people who are abandoned or people who were in one way or another marginalized and disregarded. at the end of this whole lot to see, i had come to the point of being agnostic. and i remember once i was speaking to a friend of mine, who gave me some books to read.

he said you are delightfully dumb, and i will have to educate you. so he gave me a whole other books. a lot of those books are listed in my own book. the ends of each chapter, i tried to keep the book very accessible so that people could understand the economic arguments and i'm using. but i take this time to give you an outline of the anthropological basis. because i think this is what is distinct about what i am trying to do here. but if we don't understand two human beings are. and we don't understand the purpose of freedom. we get very confused about what freedom means. much less free enterprise and economics. that is a lot of the confusion and dialogue of the arguments that people are having today. in reading those books that were

given to me. i had two conversions that took place. one ovary. max of six months and the next over a longer period time. i came to understand that private property was not that were fundamentally the right to own a particular piece of object -- the material object. what i came to understand is that fundamentally with private property, what it is, is the right human being to a relationship with the material world. and that human beings created, i would come to understand later, have this physical reality that is part of who they are. they also have this transcendent capacity. they transcend material. they do that with private property as well. when they draw out from nature resources and they are creating those resources, they transform resources from inert objects

that have no real value and transform them in such a way that they become a service to human beings. you see that on oil. oil was in the ground for centuries. mostly an annoyance. they placed this natural resource at human service. that drawing out from nature and imprinting the human capacity for thought and ingenuity and the risk that was involved in doing that and investing in something that was not yet seen, this is what the private property is. this is a fundamental understanding. economics is not essentially about money. it is secondarily about money and more for family about human action. the choices and values that we

make. the choices and the value that we make can be very deadly. as i began to understand all of this, i asked myself the question, why do human beings have this right, if this is something that is accessible to me by my reason and if i can understand that, and what i see in nature and what i just observed, then i have to ask a deeper question. one would call it a more physical or theological question. who is man that he is constituted in this way? that he was at this point, bumping back into god? at this point, i did come back to god. i will suffice it to say that i came to remember what annan told

us in that basement classroom at the catholic church in brooklyn. but i had forgotten for many years it is one of the reasons i believe in learning for kids because you retain things. you hear the kids singing the pledge of allegiance or the national anthem -- our father who art in heaven, hallowed be by name. later on i found myself drawing on some questions and answers that were drilled into me. it must have been a 17 or 18-year-old nun. she seemed so tall at the time. but this one young woman with a classroom of 60 kids, 60 kids in brooklyn -- she just had a little frog clicker and we were

just obedient. who is god? why did god make you? who is man? all of these questions that told me that i was designed with the purpose, that i was a composite, physicality and spirituality, that i was individual and social, all of these things that i've learned as a child began to fit in. i had a place to put all the pieces. all the pieces began to come and play. it was then that i went back confession and began going to mass again. it is a cool funny story.

i am a catholic priest. but certainly the experience of writing the book, it is not written solely from a catholic perspective. what i am attempting to do is reason with people of good will. there is a lot more questions and material that i could tell you tonight, but the conclusion i came to is this. and i know that very often people, either mischaracterize or misunderstand the point i'm trying to make. i don't even like the word capital system. it is difficult. i see the prosperity gospel as the inverse of liberation theology. it is an attempt to baptize karl marx. i am not interested in baptizing. what i am saying is that the

prosperity gospel says, it basically canonize as the rich and demonizes the poor. if you are poor, you are poor because you have done something wrong. if you are wealthy, it is because god has blessed you. liberation theology did just the opposite. they canonized the poor and demonize the rich. and i say a plague on both your houses. it is like what saint augustine says in one of his sermons. he said that the rich man, the parable, the story of the rich man and lazarus, the rich man was not in heaven because he was rich, but because he was proud. in the four-man, rich man was not in hell because he was rich, but because he was proud. and lazarus was not in heaven, not because he was poor, but because he was humble. we need to look at the question of the market.

the market is the way by which people will rise out of poverty. not charity, charity is a great thing. it is an important thing and an imperative thing. war for us to give to charity, even than those who received. the normal way that people will rise out of poverty is not through what we give them from our charity. it is because they have access to jobs. globalizing markets have enabled the court to rise from poverty in unprecedented levels in human history. in the last one or 200 years. now, that is a powerful engine. that, i think, is necessary. but i do not think it is sufficient. because if we just have this engine that can produce wealth, we can be a free society, we can be a prosperous society. but we will be a virtuous or moral society -- will we be happy people? will we be people who understand the purpose of our existence?

so in this book, what i tried to do is show some of these principles and to do it in a way that doesn't overly bogged down in heavy metaphysical work as a is a solvable work project. it is rooted in the judeo-christian tradition that i come from. i want to disclose with another metaphor and then open it up for some discussion. there is a general sense that i get out and about a lot. i have a real opportunity to speak to a wide range of professions and classes. there is a sense that something is very wrong right now. very wrong in our country and our world.

that we have somehow lost that something catastrophic could be in our future. could this be the end of freedom? >> and when i try to do here is answer that question by saying that if there is going to be an end to freedom, in our lifetime, it is going to be because we have forgotten with the end of freedom ought to be. the purpose of freedom. when we lived in a house for a while and we just moved from our community, a community i am part of, it had a big treat to stop this side of the house. it shot up above the house about three or four stories, and i was looking at the tree one day from the porch and i've noticed that

half of the tree was in full bloom and half of the tree was dead. being from brooklyn, i did not know a lot about trees. i saw one once in brooklyn. i don't know if it's there anymore. but i found a tree doctor who came to the house to examine the tree. tell me what is wrong with this. he went around and looked at the bark and roots and held some of the dead branches and leaves in his hand. he came up to the porch and he said the tree is dead. and i said how can it be done? half of it is in bloom. and he said that is an illusion. the staff is working its way through the tree, but in fact, each season there will be less and less. it is really drawing out from what already existed in the tree when it was alive. so you need to cut the tree down now because if you don't, it may fall on your house and all of

these michigan winters. and i think the metaphor of the tree, i do not believe that the trunk of the tree of liberty is dead. i think that it has undergone some stress. and i think if we return to the roots and if we tended to those roots and reconsider who we are and what build the institutions of freedom, the institutions of care for the poor. if we understand that this is an insight about human dignity, the most sacred thing that presents itself to our senses next to the blessed sacrament of our neighbor, if we reconsider you -- not like class were social class, but if we consider the dignity and uniqueness of the

creation, that people are unique. if we consider that again, i think freedom will not be lost. in order to do that, we have to summon an army of men and women who understand who we are. and who are not afraid to confidently express what it is we believe and why the building of the free and virtuous society can be a moral adventure once again. thank you very much for your attention. [applause] >> i am happy to take questions and father, you are going to come up and referee this? >> okay. go right ahead. >> with respect to the point of human anthropology and the notion of taking something that is essentially neutral and value in re-creating something, i

don't know if it's new or different or valuable, there is nothing they said so far, i haven't read the book, that would precipitate that happening in a centralized economy, a state-run economy or a collectivist situation. can you distinguish between a free-market economy and anthropology? the second question relates to the trajectory of the united states, relative dependence on the state and american peoples lives. is there a point in american history that best matched the truth of the anthropology that you are describing, could you describe that and your answers to that. >> those are very good question. let me express what i think it is far more difficult to attain the kind of creativity and productivity under a central

command. and i can give you both the kind of theological response to that and also a kind of basic economic response to that. let me start with the basic economic response, which is really a reflection of the deeper theological. that is that the command economy , the command economy of the central planners, and this is no judgment of any particular planner or as such, i don't think they are necessarily bad people, but i think the nature of the thing is that when you essentially plan, you have a certain pretense to knowing what you don't really know. the value of things is not something that a planning board

of mother theresa's can determine accurately. what we need is a market economy in the process of free prices in the process of entrepreneurship and people who are willing to risk the rule of law, binding contracts, and a system of law that protects the right ingenuity and creativity. so that when we have this knowledge, we know when things are in short supply or relatively rare because they are higher in price. we know when things are more abundant and available because the price goes down. in the centralized economy as we have seen, this is not something that is theoretical. we have seen this and we remember the lines in the soviet union and korea and colombia to this day. that is the result of a central planned economy.

but that is a reflection, also, i think, something that goes counter to nature. and that human beings are constructed in such a way by virtue of our intellect and reason, it will rebound to the material world in ways that are distinct from animals. animals are bound to things by instinct and man is bound to things by reason and creativity. if people aren't free to express that creativity, and that is a risky thing because that created creativity needs to be performed by the formation of a moral conscience. but people are not free to do that, then you dead in the entire culture, the entire vibrancy of the society. and that you can see having been played out. i think the theological and anthropological reason is that

human beings have the right to free initiatives. and that by their nature, and that is a moral argument. i think the economic argument is that socialism cannot calculate. planned economies from one extent or another, depending on what they are manipulating and what they are controlling and what they are taxing. it will inhibit what will otherwise be more creativeness. this set of circumstances creates a whole other load of questions that are probably going through your mind at this moment. and i am predisposed to agree with you. you are giving an empirical argument this is the way things have worked out. >> that was the first argument. the second argument wasn't in purple. the second is more of an anthropological argument than a fizzle of philosophy.

>> yes, that is a hard question. this is another thing. i don't think that the free economy is going to bring the kingdom of god to earth. i think utopia is utopia because it doesn't exist. i think there were better moments in american history, the latter part of the 19th century with all the problems of industrialization and the dignity of workers that needed to be taken care of in a better way. but i think that was an enormously productive time and the time when we had a religious sensibility going into the early 20th century. certainly what he saw in the mid-19th century when he was here, it bespeaks this kind of religious vibrancy and creativity stirring. but remember, that was a time when the world was first coming out, for the first time coming

out for the standard of living and the way that people had lived for most of human history. so i think there are a lot of things that were too broad. along the way, a lot of those things got very distorted. principals were the ethical questions. yes? >> two quick questions. one is i have read the book. in the first question is, i think you mentioned the word catholic maybe a dozen times in the book. was that a marketing decision to try to appeal beyond the simple catholic perspective, there are so many catholics in america, honestly, did you try to go beyond that? >> you give me too much credit for being a capitalist. [laughter] >> i think it is true.

i am a communicator and when i sat down to write, i imagined the people i spoke to. other than sunday mass, i am usually with non-catholics of various sorts. and sometimes even with nonbelievers. i accepted a speaking engagement a while back which was a lot of fun. no, it was not a marketing decision goal. i don't think it's a bad marketing choice. i hope not. because my essential argument is a natural law argument. i was trying to find common ground. and i think that is what you are seeing. >> one of the very key parts of

the book that i didn't did the full explanation of, personally, was where you talk about charity and you said you were with [inaudible name], you had just done some charity work in anacostia. and you came back and it bothered you, they realized that this soup kitchen, it was taken away from the pizza place or subway shop. >> it was a fish and chips place. you realize that the charity, you were doing something that had a positive effect on hard-working people. can you expand on that a little bit? >> let me just kind of recount the whole story so we can get everybody into the conversation. part of my formation as a seminarian and a priest is to work with the poor. we did various kinds of things, part of that was when i worked

there, this soup kitchen that was run in the basement of the baptist church, there was another who coordinated it and she was quite entrepreneurial, if you will, because what she did is that she wrote all of the women's groups in chevy chase, maryland, and all these other places, and she would give them a recipe every week and asked ask them to all make the same thing. and then they would, i imagine, sending their chauffeurs and things, but anyway we had this food and other kinds of food and we would come there and we would set up the whole thing. and we would set it all out and we would sit down and eat with them. but the linchpin of the same issues that don't ask anybody anything about their lives. and she said whosoever may come, we don't care. and i know it sounds good. it is from the book of revelations. don't count the cost. the problem was, that one day, i

don't think i put this in the book, but when they are remember that there were two women who got out of the cab and i was putting some garbage in the can and i saw these women get out of the cabin and went downstairs and they pushed their way to the front of the line and they said we have to go somewhere, i think we are going shopping or something and we need to get into the front of the line. and i thought if you have enough for a cab and you have enough to go shopping, why are you coming to a soup kitchen. we would talk to people and and stuff, and one day we went out to eat and it was a friday and the ladies from chevy chase had sent chili con carne or something, and they didn't eat meat on friday during lent and that's when we went to fish and chips place. and it dawned on me that we were the competitors.

but we didn't have to pay for the food and we didn't have to pay for insurance or rent. we didn't pay salaries or insurance. and i just thought, why don't we have some kind of policy language, you could call it a means test. when we ask people to do something? not that you have to pay this or you don't get to come of it could help if you bring some food. this is the thing about well intended charity and they don't think of the full picture. there are a lot of good things that could come from engaging people and getting to know them. it was not an interrogation. she is getting to know people. instead, we went to this fish and chips place and i saw this man and wife and daughter, i presume, and they were working hard. they were keeping this restaurant going. who knows, maybe five of those

people have the option to do that if we do not undercut him. and if we had sent them, could you contribute something, well, no, those two ladies for instance. why should we do that? we will go over and eat at the fish and chips place. good. these people are trying to work. i first thought of it is economist on. but i realized later as i was talking my friend and as i thought about it over the years, i don't know if you know this about mother teresa, but she was tough. i helped them open the aids hospice care. and i remember at one point some people came in and they wanted -- and they said these people have to have some entertainment.

they had disney movies on sundays and something like that, and mother teresa said no, you know you'd you have to treat these people with dignity. they have alternatives, we only want to serve people who only have no alternatives. it was a very pleasant environment. she said -- and this is mother teresa. she said they don't need to be distracted. we know that they are dying. there was no treatment. we know they are dying and we want them to be envelope in love. she was very tough. volunteers left because of that. >> let the microphone come to you. >> i appreciate your

presentation. my question is about justice and precisely about the way it is in political and academic discourse. you probably know social justice is not always known why. to deal with this in an academic setting, i'm just wondering about how to be talk about justice, and you mentioned that in your presentation tonight. had we talk about justice in a more free-market way, even about social justice or whether that is difficult to talk about are not. >> no, i think it is and i do deal with that to some extent in the book. the other set of words, it

should also be set as the common good. the common good or solidarity, even, these terms have been highly politicized and nuanced, you know, away from their original meaning. justice means treatment in a corporate point of view. from an economic point of view, the market is way in which people are treated according to what they deserve and how they have served. in fact, the scholastics come when they talk about the just price, it is not some abstract price. it is a market price. that is where they're just price bids. you can apply that to wages as well. that is separate from the fullness of human beings and what they do is people. by their very nature, they do

something more than that. with regard to justice, we need to remember that justice, as an important thing as it is, and don't take this out of context, it is a meager virtue. it is a base virtue. it is indispensable for society. you can't have a society or civilization if people don't treat people justly. it is the antithesis of civilization when you treat people unjustly, not according to with how they deserve to be treated. so justice needs to be seen in that context, but it is not the apex or the end goal of what we want for society. we could live in a just society that is not a good society. it is would be just.

what i am saying, maybe to put it more dramatically, when i die and stand before the judgment of god, it is not justice but i'm going to plead for. it is mercy. it is love. what we need is a society is love. a civilization of love. i agree that we need to understand just is not in this inflated way, that is used in academia, but what we need that enables people concretely to love people and show their love for others. and there are a host of restrictions that prevent people from doing that. the recent debate over the mandate it is an example of government overreaching and telling religious people and

people of consciousness, that they cannot build the kinds of cultures in the kinds of institutions that are in accord with their value systems. and so they are demanding of us what is unjust. evil we serve have a certain dignity. i mean, the particular heinous thing about this is that the church invented hospitals. the modern hospital of the christian church was the hospital. and for them to come in now is the johnny-come-lately, in saying this is the way you're going to do it. it is particularly egregious and unjust. to demand of us. and i know you have had some discussions about this, but the whole argument that they are not affecting the church because the

church itself is a cold, it will not be forced. it will not be forced to engage in this, among their own people. it is essential to we are. there is a phrase from catholic charity. we don't serve people because we are catholic. we don't serve people because they are catholic. we serve them because we are catholic. to go by this mandate, being told that we can't serve people without regard to their religion. that is unjust. and so i think that so many words have been robbed and used and redefined. we can go through an entire list of these words historically. ..

>> much-discussed document on the role of government in banking control. this document, in a way i see it as a kind of balance document on that, because i think in many respects it showed a greater sensitivity to the role of

businesses. it's rare for the church in an official body like that to put out as sophisticated a document as that on vocations. somebody in that office must have broken down and read, you know, any number of pieces of writing on the vocation of business. the fact that they call it the vocation of business is really encouraging to me, especially because it seems to metathe whole role of laity is something that has yet to be discovered. what happened after the council was with all of its emphasis on the laity, what happened practically in our churches? now i speak in a parochial, catholic context. what happened was they said, oh, the lay people are going to have more of a role in the church. so what are yo going to do? you're going to be a elector, you're going to be pinster of

the -- minister of the holy communion, and they gathered everyone around the altar. this is priest craft. if you read the documents -- i'm not saying there's anything wrong with lay people being electors and when the occasion calls for it, special min issters of the holy communion, the role of laity is to be as lev venn in the world, to be able to effect the world because you are formed as a christian, as a catholic, and you effect that area whether it's baking, whether it's politics, whether it's law, whether it's teaching literature, whether it's being this a home and changing babies' diapers, all of those phones are affected, and that is the digny of the role of laity. and to bring it all around the altar is, i think, a real, a real mistake. yes. >> is there a particular audience that is harder to

reach, and the opposite, do you find particular audience that it's easier to reach with your message of optimism about the free enterprise system? >> i think priests and nuns of a certain age are very hard to reach. bishops, until recently, have been very hard to reach. academia is probably -- and journalists. my goodness, i mean, the tone deaf nature, i won't mention any particular national networks -- [laughter] but i get up to one of them every morning. when i tell people that i listen to npr in the morning, they're just shocked. i know, this gets me out of bed, this gets me going, this reminds me -- [laughter] here's what i mean by it. there is almost this innocence that there exists any other argument, you know?

it's just this is the assumption, and, i mean, even when i hear the president speak about the gospel and he says, you know, we're called to be our brothers and sisters' keepers, and we're called to act as good samaritans. and to immediately jump from that to the welfare state or to higher taxes. and i have no reason to doubt he's not doing this innocently, that he just sees that. as the natural flow, rather than, you know, i am of the conviction that the preponderance of our communal and social responsibilities are not to be met by the state. because the state politicizes, and the state on vis skate -- on obfuscate's real needs. so i think those are the audiences that are hard. and to hear this, and i try and

write this in an engaging tone. i mean, from my background having been on the left, having -- i mean, believe me, there's hardly anything -- that's what i tell people who come to me for confession, please, sit down. you're not going to shock me. [laughter] you know, i've been around the block a few times. and i tried to write that with a sense of humor, a sense of winsomeness and a sense of common morality. i don't think much is to be gained by throwing bricks. but we'll, you know, that's not to say i don't have sharp elbows, because i'm from brooklyn. i just came with sharp el elbows, that's just the way it is. but i certainly don't mean it to disrespect anybody. one last question? >> [inaudible] >> okay. >> [inaudible] >> the act acton institute,

acton.org, so it's all of us who live in michigan know this whole thing about the hand? you know, the mitten. detroit is over here, and grand rapids is over here. so that's where it's based. we are, um, about 40 people on staff. we have an office, and we have several affiliates internationally. acton.org. thank you very much for your time. [applause] >> every weekend booktv offers 48 hours of programming focused on nonfiction authors and books. watch it here on c-span2. >> thank barnes & noble for hosting this so that we can get together and talk about issues that i think are very important. there seems to be some confusion in the united states. a lot of people don't realize that america failed. they think it's still going on, you know? just as i entered here, some guy

said to me, i didn't know america failed. and i said, stick around, you know? stick around. i also wanted just to locate this particular talk, um, in terms of the stuff i've been writing. this is, "why america failed" is the third in a trilogy on the american empire. the first one was "the twilight of american culture," which was published in the year 2000. the second was published in 2006, and this came out about a month ago, "why america failed." there was, however, a collection of essays that i published about a year ago so that came between book two and book three. about half the essays are about the united states, and i kind of want to encourage you to have a look at that book. it's called "a question of values." and the reason that's important

is because there's material in there that's not in any of the other books, but that deals with the kind of unconscious programming that americans have that leads them to do the things that they do, whether they're the person in the street or the president. and that sort of completes the picture. so i just want to, you know, encourage you to have a look at that book. the, um, title of this talk tonight is "the way we live today." despite great pressure to conform in the united states to celebrate the united states as the best system in the world, the nation does not lack for critics. the last two decades have seen numerous works criticizing u.s. foreign policy, u.s. domestic policy -- in particular economic policy -- the american educational system, the court system, the military, the media, corporate influence over american life and so on. most of this is very astute, and i have learned much from reading these studies. but two things in particular are

lacking, in my opinion. and have a very hard time making it into the public eye, partly because americans are not trained to think in a holistic or synthetic fashion, and partly because the sort of analysis i have in mind is too close to the bone. it's very difficult for americans to hear it, hence somebody would say, i didn't know it failed, you know? the first thing that these works lack is an integration of the various factors that have done the country in. these studies tend to be institution-specific as though the institution under examination existed in a kind of vacuum and could really be understood apart from other institutions. the second thing i find lacking is the relationship to the culture at large, to the values and behaviors that americans manifest on a daily basis. as a result, these critiques are finally superficial. they don't really go to root of the problem, and this avoidance

enables them to be optimistic which, in fact, places them in the american mainstream. the authors often conclude these studies with practical recommendations as to how the particular institutional dysfunctions they've identified can be rectified. they are, as a result, not much of a threat. it's usually mechanical analysis with a mechanical solution. if authors were to realize that these problems do not exist in a vacuum but are related to all the other problems and are finely rooted in american culture itself, in its dna so to speak, the prognosis would not be so rosy, for it would become clear that turns things around is not really an option at this point. to take just two examples, michael moore and noam chomsky. i admire them greatly. they've done a lot to raise awareness in the united states. to show that both foreign and domestic policy as currently pursued are dead ends or worse.

yet both of these men assume that the problem is coming from the top, from the pentagon and the corporations. which is partly true of course. the problem is that this rests on a theory of false consciousness, that is the belief that these institutions have pulled the wool over the eyes of the average american citizen who is ultimately rational and well intentioned. i would say to them, get out and talk to some people, you know? find out how accurate that is. so for them the solution is one of education. um, pull the wool away from the eyes, and the citizenry will spontaneously awaken and commit itself to some sort of populist or democratic social vision. is that happening now with occupy wall street? it's an important question, and i think we should talk about it afterwards in the q&a. my point is what if it turns out that the wool is the eyes? the so-called average citizen really does want, as janis

joplin famously put it, a mercedes benz, you know? and probably not much else. that he or or she is grateful to the corporations for supplying us with oceans of consumer goods and to the pentagon for protecting us from those awful arabs lurking in the middle east. if that's so, then the possibilities for fundamental change appear to be quite small. for what would be called for is a set of very different institutions in a very different type of culture. personally, i dote -- doubt there's much chance of that. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. >> here's a look at some upcoming book fairs and festivals happening around the country.

>> the history of u.s. debt and the impact it'll have on future generations. they also argu