How many murders, massacres, tortures and famines does it take to rival the loathsome evil of Nazism? The Black Book of Communism, a methodical, scandalous inventory by French scholars, builds the case that 20th century Communism caused 85-100 million deaths worldwide, dwarfing the numbers if not the cruelty of 25 million deaths attributed to Fascism. The toll defies imagining. 1.7 million dead in Cambodia. 25 million in the Soviet Union. 65 million in China.

Part of the authors’ argument is that the sympathetic left in the West, and notably in France, has romanticized Communist ideology and whitewashed the multitudinous crimes in its name. But these were not excesses in pursuit of some greater good, the Black Book documents. It also raises questions about the judgment of evil. Is “class genocide” essentially different from race genocide?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Mark Kramer, Director of the Harvard Project on Cold War Studies

Paul Hollander, Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Big Brother’s 28 cameras and 60 microphones are focused on 10 virtual prisoners in a TV set house in Los Angeles and millions of American couch potatoes are watching. In the era of Reality television and now Voyeur TV, the season’s biggest stars aren’t Kelsey Grammer, Jennifer Aniston or Noah Wiley but a retired Navy Seal named Rudy, a truck driver named Sue and an anorexic bible reading dairy farmer named Dirk.

“Survivor,” “Big Brother,” and “Making the Band” are the biggest thing in TV since Seinfeld and the most compelling media mutation since the webcam. Real life in prime time these days is preening, fighting, complaining, flirting, back stabbing. To be famous first you give up your privacy, your humility, and your dignity and you might even win a million bucks.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Thompson, Head of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University.

Vicente Fox used to sell cowboy boots and Coca-Cola in the backwaters of Mexico. Last week he crafted his sales pitch to the Mexican people and won the Presidency. It was the first democratic transfer of power in Mexico’s history.

Fox’s victory is historic, and expectations are high. After 71 years of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party, Mexicans sought, and finally got, a change.

The vote for Vicente Fox was more like a vote against the party of power. In addition to forming a new administration, Fox faces a host of broader challenges: there are few functioning democratic institutions; corruption is endemic; the economy is in slow motion; the drug trade is ceaseless; and U.S. immigration policy is a front-burner issue. Latin America and its northern neighbors are looking to Mexico for evidence that healthy democracy can take root and thrive.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Coatsworth, Head of the Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University

Richard Chacon, The Boston Globe’s Latin American Correspondent.

A diagnosis of the dreaded and still incurable Lou Gehrig’s Disease, or ALS, comes for most patients as a death sentence. For Stephen Heywood, still in his 20s when he got the bad news, and for his brother James, it was a call to battle.

It was a call to search past the Internet and the best specialists they could find, a call to meet and interview the underfunded researchers in the field, a call to form a foundation and their own fund-raising network. It was a call to plumb the genomic depths of the illness and the chance of a gene treatment to cure it.

In The New Yorker magazine and on “60 Minutes-2″ the Heywood family’s stand against ALS strikes inspirational tones that are disquieting, too: is it for lay pioneers, guerrilla scientists, to set the direction of medical research? Is every patient to be his own NIH? Is gene therapy a rational choice? And whose job is it not to keep false hope alive?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Stephen Heywood, ALS patient

James Heywood, his brother

“Love inspires even a mediocre person toward excellence, so that he is similar to the best in nature,” according to one ancient Greek Philosopher.

The playwright Sophocles warned of Love “unconquered in battle,” Love who sleeps on maidens’ cheeks and roams in savage places, whom neither man nor immortals can flee, who introduces madness and forcibly turns the minds of just men to injustice and their own disgrace. The ancient philosopher Empedocles thought that Love and Strife were the forces that moved the universe. Freud talked of Eros and Thanatos, Love and Death, as the basic human instincts.

Nowadays love is more talked about on the psychiatrist’s couch than in the philosopher’s seminar, but still it’s an essential human question. What’s love got to do with it?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Martha Nussbaum, Professor of Law, Philosophy, and Classics at the University of Chicago

It’s been a great 500 years, but it’s over for Western Civilization as we know it says Jacques Barzun, and he should know. He wanted to write a history of the West when he was fresh out of school, but his advisor asked him to wait until he was eighty. Barzun waited until he was 92 and perhaps the greatest living historian of the West, to produce “From Dawn to Decadence,” a cultural history of Western Civilization from 1500 to the present.

Barzun sees the last 500 years as a distinct civilisation with 4 ages: the age of religious strife; the age of individualism and nationalism; the age of rights; and the present age of Decadence. Barzun says the West has been “the mongrel civilization par excellence” and he picks out its unifying themes connecting, for example, ’60s flower children to Rousseau’s Noble Savages, Social Security to Florence Nightingale, and the American Revolutionary to Voltaire.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jacques Barzun, author and Professor at Columbia University.

Edmund White, arguably the preeminent gay American writer, has documented the rise of gay consciousness since the 1950s. In 1976 he plucked his 16 year old heterosexual nephew from a Chicago family whose mother was in and out of hospitals for depression, and whose father’s way of handling adolescent angst was to put his son in a mental institution.

So Edmund White brought his nephew to live with him in disco-era gay New York, pre-AIDS. This may sound like a family-values nightmare, but Keith Fleming found in his uncle the first parental-figure he could trust and a happy home life he’d never had before. His uncle taught him to read Stendahl, and to dress Armani, and he paid big bucks to get his acne cleared up. Years ago, Edmund White told the story of uncle and nephew in his book The Farewell Symphony. In a new memoir, the nephew now turns the pen on his uncle.
(Hosted by Christophr Lydon)

Guests:

Keith Fleming, nephew of Edmund White and author of The Boy With the Thorn in His Side, and Edmund White.

“What we play,” Louis Armstrong said, “is life.” At the end of this century, we’re learning that Louis Armstrong was not just the world’s greatest trumpet player, not just the most original and influential voice in jazz, not just the founding father of an American music with new forms and phrasing and feeling all indeliby marked by him; what’s seen and heard in perspective is that he was an actor and artist of range and depth, who shaped classic songs of American life as Dickens and Shakespeare formed classic characters of the English language.

Novelist Ralph Ellison heard a lyric poet in Louis Armstrong: “man and mask, sophistication and taste hiding behind clowning and crude manners — the American joke,” Ellison said. Our guest Wynton Marsalis hears in Louis Armstrong’s music “an undying testimony to the human condition in the America of his time.”
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Wynton Marsalis

Hoagy Carmichael, the song-writer of “Stardust” and “Georgia,” remembered the first time he heard Louis Armstrong play, in 1921. He dropped his cigarette and gulped his drink. “Why,” he moaned, “why isn’t everybody in the world here to hear that?”
Something so unutterably stirring, he knew, had to be heard by the world. And over the next 50 years indeed it was. Louis Armstrong came out of the Colored Waifs’ Home in New Orleans and the honky-tonks of the red-light Storyville district. In Chicago in the mid-twenties his small-group recordings on the Okeh label with the so-called Hot Fives and Hot Sevens revealed an original jazz genius, full-blown.

Then and ever after Louis Armstrong’s time and phrasing, his tone and spirit made him the most influential voice in 20th century American music. We’re appreciating the man the world came to know as Satchmo. Thousands of musicians and friends called him Pops. Our guest this hour, the cornet star Ruby Braff, always called him Louis.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ruby Braff

Clay Jenkinson may be the closest thing to Thomas Jefferson since Jefferson himself.

A Rhodes scholar and writer, he impersonates Jefferson on a weekly public radio show, and he’s played Jefferson to Supreme Court justices, the Clinton’s, fifth graders, convicted felons, and Nobel laureates.

Thomas Jefferson was a reluctant president, a lover of fine wine and literature, a meticulous architect and inventor, a prolific writer, and a conflicted slave owner – he encompassed in his vision, actions, and wide-ranging interests much of what makes America American.

This, Jenkinson says, is why Thomas Jefferson is the perfect lens for dissecting contemporary society. Jefferson once wrote: “I know my principles to be pure…they are the same…I am sure, with those of the great body of the American people.”

The ultimate American, Thomas Jefferson, in the second hour of The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Clay Jenkinson, Jefferson impersonator.