Episode Details

Elisa Tamarkin, an English prof of high repute (Anglophilia and Apropos of Something: A History of Irrelevance and Relevance) at UC Berkeley, joins RTB to discuss Done in a Day: Telex from the Fall of Saigon. It is an extended reflection on the last day of the Vietnam War, set against the imminent disappearance of war coverage in the nation’s city newspapers, and framed through her own stepfather's experience covering the war.

Tamarkin anatomizes curious forms of self-delusion that flourished in the American Me generation and traces the subtle trajectory that stretching from the journalistic autonomy of the mid-century to the "embedded reporters" of the US war in Iraq to today's implacable governmental hostility to truthful reportage. Back in the 1960's Hannah Arendt and others warned that bubbles of non-information and delusive self-deceit got propagated within the corridors of power and out in the larger public realm. Now cloudy misinformation is the property of a near-ubiquitous social media realm whose corrosive effect (the power to unthink) is far less circumscribed.

Mentioned

• Hannah Arendt, "Lying in Politics" (subject of an earlier RTB episode) and "Home To Roost".
• Frank Kermode Sense of an Ending (1967).
• The philosopher John Pollock published a book called Knowledge and Justification in 1975.
• Jamie Cohen-Cole The Open Mind
• Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (1973).
• Ursula Le Guin The Lathe of Heaven 1971 (Elisa also mentions John's book on Le Guin).
• R. A. Lafferty, The Fall of Rome (1971).
• Thomas Harris, I'm OK, You're OK (1967).

Recallable Books:

• Adam Phillips, On Giving Up.
• Graham Greene, The Quiet American (1955).

Read the transcript of the episode here.

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