So Dick Cheney undertook a national search for George W. Bush’s running mate, and he found himself. Talk about self-fulfilling prophecies: Cheney is the perfect staff-guy who went out and tapped the perfectly safe, senior, smart, bland but experienced foil for the junior and provincial Republican all-but nominee. In the Gulf War when Generals Schwarzkopf and Powell got the heroic face time, Dick Cheney was their good gray civilian boss, modestly in charge of the whole Pentagon.

George W. has found, in effect, his father’s Oldsmobile: he’s comfy, familiar, not a movement conservative but as conservative as they are. He dropped out of Yale in his teens, and jumped other tracks as well. He might have been a Ph.D. government professor; he seemed destined once to be House Speaker. He became instead a utility man in the eternal government: an over-achiever who’s still a bit underwhelming.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Roger Porter, Director of the Center for Business and Government at the Kennedy School, Harvard

David Frum, reporter for The Weekly Standard and author of Dead Right

Arianna Huffington, nationally syndicated columnist and author of How to Overthrow the Government

and David Brooks, senior editor at The Weekly Standard and author of Bobos in Paradise.

The new Boston adaptation of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutte could be called Mozart meets Sex in the City, or opera for the twenty-something set. Cosi fan Tutte — the title means “all women are like that” — was written as the story of two young Italian military officers who disguise themselves and woo each other’s fiancee’s to test the fidelity of their women.

In the Boston version, Despina the maidservant is Despina the Brooklyn barmaid, an 18th century Neopolitan setting is now a swanky Connecticut tennis club, and corsets and pantaloons are replaced with the latest in Tommy Hilfiger and Gap wear.

Don’t blame the Boston producers for grating on the nerves of traditionalists. Ten years ago director Peter Sellars set Cosi Fan Tutte in a modern seaside diner with Albanian hippies, and there’s a long tradition before that of adapting classic operas.

(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Craig Smith, conductor of the new adaptation

Drew Minter, the show’s producer.

Everybody recognizes Anna Deavere Smith as a performance genius — the most compelling individual on the American stage, it’s been said — and still nobody knows a simple way to describe what she does.

It starts with her own reporting and listening to the country: for her theatre pieces on the Brooklyn and Los Angeles race rumbles of the early 90s, Anna Deavere Smith went out and heard stories by the hundreds, from cops, shopkeepers and kids of all colors. Always she edits and cuts and reweaves the threads of the tapestry; and then she inhabits the many parts herself.

Her own acting in these creations turns out to be crucial: for her White House tableau of the Clinton years, titled “House Arrest,” she first hired a posse of actors and actresses to play all the parts: everyone said it was a better show when she took all the roles herself.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith.

The wreck of the whale ship Essex is one of the great American sea stories. In the summer of The Perfect Storm and the Shackleton exhibit, not to mention the rerelease of Jaws on DVD, the story of incredible hardship and danger on the unforgiving sea has once again captured the American imagination.

Herman Melville, it turns out, based Moby Dick on the true story of the doomed Nantucket whale ship Essex, which was destroyed in 1820 by an enraged sperm whale thousands of miles from land. The harrowing account by the Essex First Mate Owen Chase helped Melville flesh out the details of whaling and the psychology of Queequeg, Starbuck, and Ishmael.

But Melville’s tale ends where the true trials of the Nantucket men just begin.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Nathaniel Philbrick, author of In the Heart of the Sea

Tim Severin, author of In Search of Moby Dick.

William F. Buckley Jr. was the conservative movement in America before Ronald Reagan brought it to power — before George W. Bush added “compassionate” as a prefix to the ism, which Buckley would have scorned as pandering.

He was the scourge of the public sector who became a household presence through public television: the sesquipedalian reactionary with a common touch nonetheless and a personal charm that seemed to melt all his political enemies except perhaps Gore Vidal.

A successful political revolutionary in semi-retirement has lots to do for an encore: Buckley has had spy novels and religious confessions to write, issues to rethink around the Cold War and McCarthyism — in which he was a zealous player.

Is it too late, you wonder, for William F. Buckley to give some direction and style, even ideas perhaps, to his Republican heirs in the 2000 campaign?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

William F. Buckley, Jr.

All night,
we blast our wedding horns
in force.
And two years later
quietly divorce.”

That’s the opening entry in a new collection of divorce poetry called Split Verse. The editors, who are also poets and divorcees Meg Campbell and William Duke, believe divorce — unlike marriage, birth, and death — doesn’t get nearly enough creative recognition. With so many Americans becoming ex’s, they say, it’s time to note the imagery and rituals in what happens to one of every two American marriages.

The bare ring finger. The sudden access of closet space. Sleeping on the diagonal. Holidays alone. Running into his new girlfriend and her new boyfriend. Renting the videos of your choice. Longing. Custody. And the occasional homicidal fantasy: you just happened to run over your ex, as the poet imagines, and you’re so startled you back up to see what happened… maybe only once.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Meg Campbell and William Duke, editors of Split Verse.

The philosopher Spinoza confidently declared, “Men are deceived if they think themselves free.” A lot of men have been deceived then, none more so than Samuel Johnson, who refused even to discuss “the perplexed question of fate and free will,” saying “we know our will is free, and there’s an end on’t.”

Philosophy has been trying to determine whether we are free or not, and what it means, since the time of the Greeks. Socrates reasoned that knowledge is freedom, ignorance is bondage. Christian thinkers like Augustine of Hippo worried that Man’s freedom limited God’s power. If God knows all things before they come to pass, how could we be free?

Yet without Free Will, how to deal with Evil in the world? Ethics, the philosophy of right and wrong, would seem to require Free Will. But doesn’t the new science of sociobiology argue that we are puppets on the strands of our DNA? We must somehow choose our notion of free will.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Simon Blackburn, Cambridge University

author of The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy and Think.
Susan Wolf, Chair of Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University

author of Freedom Within Reason.

“The Father of English Poetry” was a government clerk with a bawdy imagination. Geoffrey Chaucer grew up in mid-fourteenth century England, the son of a wine merchant – he hung out on the commercial piers of London, learned French and observed the ways of every class.

It was the choice to leave French behind that gave Chaucer his ticket to the canon. When, after serving two kings, the clerk started writing, he chose the vernacular Middle English of the day instead of literary French – and gave birth to a talky band of pilgrims whose journey became for many the first steps in modern English literature.

The narrators of those Canterbury Tales were as diverse as poetry had ever seen, from the shameless Wife of Bath to the fast-talking Pardoner. Chaucer gave each a voice, and let his readers judge their contest. Geoffrey Chaucer died 600 years ago this year, and still his work is behind our every word.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Derek Pearsall, retired Professor of English at Harvard University.

Journalist Sandy Tolan grew up in Milwaukee a devout Hank Aaron fan, even when the Braves moved his favorite slugger to Atlanta. Twenty-five years after Hammerin’ Hank broke Babe Ruth’s unbreakable home-run record, Tolan says Aaron is still the most underrated ball player ever. And he feels race has everything to do with it.

As Hank Aaron got closer and closer to the Babe’s magic toll of 715, he was also getting death threats and hate mail from Americans who couldn’t stomach a black man taking a white man’s record. “Don’t listen to them,” young Sandy Tolan wrote Aaron. “You’re my hero.”

How much have we all changed since then? When the Williams sisters are the queens of tennis, and Tiger Woods is the world’s greatest golfer – when John Rocker, playing for Hank Aaron’s old team, stands on the mound as a symbol of racial division and is described as a human confederate flag?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Sandy Tolan, author of Me and Hank

Jose Masso, Director of the Sports in Society Program at Northeastern University

Jon Entine, author of Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We’re Afraid to Talk About It.

The canonical black American writers Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray felt their kinship as voracious undergraduates at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in the 1930s. They knew each other by their jazz enthusiasms in Armstrong, Bessie Smith and Ellington and by their reading lists: starting with the English novelists Fielding and the Brontes, then the European and American moderns T. S. Eliot, Auden, Faulkner, Hemingway, Gide, Malraux.

For Ellison and Murray both, the lifetime project became to see 300 years’ survival in American slavery and segregation in the light of world literature — and then to write the folklore and the reality of that experience at the level of the Russian novelists, in a black American idiom. These were the dreams that produced Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Murray’s influential essays, and a memorable friendship.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Writer Albert Murray.