The reputation of the mid-century Pope Pius XII is curiously suspended: Was he an Angelic Shepherd or the Black Sheep of the Roman Catholic Church? Since the 1960s the Church has been fighting an indictment for official silence during the holocaust in Nazi Germany. Last year the charge was compounded by John Cornwell’s accusation that the wartime Pope Pius XII had given Hitler a critical hand-up in his rise to power in Germany in 1933. None of which has stopped a movement in the Vatican to make a saint of the ascetic Eugenio Pacelli.

At stake in the dispute are competing visions of history and of the present day Church. John Cornwell is on the side of those who want a Church of Collegial Bishops and empowered believers; he argues that the Vatican compromised itself with Hitler because it was determined to centralise its own power against dissidence and change in the modern world. Arguing Pius XII this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Cornwell, Author of Hitler’s Pope.

Do you know more now or possibly less about the two candidates running for president since the start of the final campaign on Labor Day? The tedium is the message now in an event the media seems determined to cover like a pennant race or a TV sitcom. In fact, the whole civic exercise might be dumbed down just in time for a war in the Middle East and a tanking NASDAQ to spoil the party. Would it take terrorism and maybe a reality check on America’s giddy economic fortunes to sober up the media on its job of covering Campaign 2000?

Will we respect the American TV, print and radio news establishment in the morning after the Oprah phase of the campaign and the Latenight phase and the Great Debate phase? And with 30?? days left and one televised debate until election day, does anyone want to hold these two candidates to a real presidential standard.? The media debrief on the Gore-Bush race is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Jay Rosen, New York University

John Nichols, editorial page editor for the Capital Times

Bob Thompson, Professor of TV and Film, Syracuse University

Alex Jones, Director of the Shorenstein Center.

The Nobel Prize winning scientist Arno Penzias wonders if physics has anything left to offer after the Big Bang theory. Dr. Penzias is famous for his discovery in 1965 of the Cosmic Microwave Background, the only real evidence that this ancient explosion ever happened. It’s a kind of “faint echo” heard in every corner of the cosmos and has helped the Big Bang theory become the most widely accepted, most credible explanation of the origin of the universe.

The theory gives us effect but scientists are still looking for the cause with ideas like Dark Matter, String Theory, Quantum Gravity, They’re looking inside billion-dollar particle accelerators for the creation artist formerly known as god. The Big Bang model is indeed a triumph of modern science that perhaps asks more questions than it answers, but Arno Penzias think maybe modern cosmology is over-analyzing the evidence. The birth of the universe and the end of physics is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Arno Penzias, Astronomer, Astrophysicist and winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in Physics

It might just make you sick to follow the money trails behind the Gore and Bush healthcare proposals in this presidential campaign. If the plans themselves don’t make you dizzy enough, understanding who’s buying whom, to say what, will leave your head spinning. The United States spends vastly more on healthcare than any other country, and still our healthcare system ranks 15th in the world behind France, Canada, and the UK for overall effectiveness.

If all the money isn’t helping patients, who *does* it benefit? It turns out that those drug companies, HMOs, and doctors doing well in American medicine are all bringing their influence to bear on this partisan debate. The top 15 pharmaceutical companies alone spent 60 million dollars last year on lobbying, advertising, studies, and non-profit fronts that advance their views. We’re decoding the healthcare debate in Campaign 2000 this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Laurie Garrett, science writer for “Newsday” and author of “Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health” and Ted Marmor, professor of public policy at the Yale School of Management and author of “The Politics of Medicare”

The story of our super-visual ocularcentric world, says the religious and cultural historian Leigh Eric Schmidt, is a story of hearing loss: our culture is hearing impaired. It’s not just that we don’t listen anymore for the voices of angels, or talk to Jesus, as enthusiastic Christians always have. It’s that we’ve accepted the Enlightenment idea (which is also the television premise) that what we see with our eyes trumps what we hear with our ears-when maybe that isn’t so at all.

Philosopher John Dewey observed that vision makes us spectators, but hearing makes us participants. Martin Luther thought his ears were the organs of his spirituality. So in his own way did Thoreau, who heard messages from crickets, brooks, bells, whippoorwills and especially the ringing of the telegraph wire which Thoreau called “my redeemer. It stings my ear with everlasting truth.” Listen up, we’re “hearing things,” this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Religious and Cultural Historian, Leigh Eric Schmidt

Behind every modern American president is a strong mother, says longtime Washington journalist Bonnie Angelo. Sara Roosevelt, Martha Truman, Rose Kennedy, Ida Johnson, Nelle Reagan and Virginia Kelly all fit Bonnie Angelo’s profile of strong, pre-feminist American women. They were doting mothers and independent wives. They weren’t particularly feminine; most weren’t very well off. But they instilled in their sons the ambition and confidence for the top job.

Sigmund Freud said: “A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror.” Barbara Bush and Pauline Gore meet Bonnie Angelo’s test too. Mrs. Bush toughened George W up with endless teasing and spelling drills. The famous story about Al Gore’s mother is that she’s saved a space on her wall in Tennessee for the portrait of her son as 43rd president of the United States. We’re talking about First Mums this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Bonnie Angelo

The science of neuro-imaging can now make pictures that show the difference between your brain when you’re happy and your brain when you’re sad. The glucose and oxygen that fuel brain activity cell by cell light up in one pattern when your brain’s in the grip of anger, in another when your brain is seized by fear. The mapping by magnetic scanners of the circuitry of emotion makes you wonder: are we approaching a neuro-mechanical understanding of emotions? a physiology of feelings?

Antonio Damasio is a humanist at the forefront of the research in brain behavior: the trick, he says, in all the unpacking of mental processes is to put it back together in human form. It’s the difference, he says, between knowing how your brain listens to your favorite Bach or Mozart-and hearing the music. Or the difference in our appreciation of a biological mechanism and a human being. The neurologist and philosopher Antonio Damasio is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Neurologist and philosopher Antonio Damasio

The sit-down debate at Wake Forest last night came after a lame round one in Boston and a wave of major news from abroad. So the definitions of victory were going to be different: the charming boy governor from Texas had to look smarter on foreign policy. And the ponderous, self-satisfied Vice President had to seem more the regular guy. George W. Bush not only went hot-spot to hot-spot without mangling the name of a capital, he presented a bumper-sticker world view of a humbler U.S., prepared for war but wary of “nation building” and idle moralizing.

Al Gore, with his eyebrows and his sighing under tight control, said the Marshall Plan in Europe was a heroic model of our nation building. But he took his best shots at the Bush record in Texas-50th among 50 states in health insurance for families: not because Bush has a bad heart, he said, because he’s got the wrong priorities.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Liz Smith has been writing about celebrities for almost fifty years, and along the way, she’s become one herself. She’s a Living Landmark in New York, she’s soon to be immortalized in Madame Tusssaud’s Wax Museum in Times Square, and she’s now the highest-paid print journalist in the world – all because of her ear for delectable bits of private lives. She’s fine-tuned the art of gossiping: know all, but don’t tell all; don’t hound the famous in public, but strike a deal with them in private; never coddle celebrities, but it’s okay to lecture them on their shortcomings.

After all, gossip columnists, she says, are “like mothers. We can’t be stopped.” Liz Smith has chronicled the battles between Ivana Trump and The Donald, suffered the insults of Frank Sinatra, predicted the marriage of Jackie and Ari and been propositioned by Norman Mailer. Occasionally, however, she has stopped and asked herself, “Is this all there is – gossip, show biz, limitless entertainment and trivia?” We’re talking with Liz Smith this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Liz Smith

How do you keep score when the presidential candidates talk education? They always begin by saying schools are and must remain local affairs. But then they rush right on to talk about testing to national standards and increasing the leverage of Federal money. The tug of local vs. national is just the first of the coded paradoxes in the slogans and buzzwords of the schools debate: accountability, sure, but to whom? more money for just what?

When George W. Bush talks about vouchers, charters, or mandatory annual testing of elementary school kids, do you hear the voice of the Chamber of Commerce demanding a bigger bang for fewer bucks. When Al Gore talks about a funding crisis, class size and voluntary testing, are we really listening to the teachers union? The rueful historian of a golden age that never was, of a century’s school reforms and why they failed, Diane Ravitch, puts it all in context this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Diane Ravitch, author of Left Back : A Century of Failed School Reforms