It’s morning in the twilight zone where our stable old electoral system has never taken us before. Elsewhere people might look at this virtual tie, and start assembling a national unity government. In America we’ll wait for the Sunshine State to count the absentees and recount the others. We’ll try to absorb the news that a deceased Democratic governor can get elected to the Senate from Missouri–but further that we’re living in a country that comes up deeply, precisely split by any number of calculations.

A split not just between Democrats and Republicans, but city and countryside, bi-coastal culture zones against the hinterland, male impulses and female concerns, right down to foundational symbols: On the meaning of the Boy Scouts, the definition of marriage, the gun issue-as Gary Bauer, the Christian right-winger observed last night-the country comes out stumped and stalemated, around Ralph Nader’s 2-percent median strip. What happened is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Anna Greenberg, Assistant Professor of Public Policy

Kevin Phillips, author of “The Cousins’ Wars, and Arrogant Capital”

Thomas Friedman, N.Y. Times columnist and author of “The Lexus and the Olive Tree”

Andrew Sullivan, author of “Virtually Normal” and senior editor at The New Republic

Michael Kelly, Editor in Chief of The Atlantic Monthly.

The writer William Berger thinks the operas of Giuseppi Verdi could be Viagra for the American soul. He says Verdi is just the pick-me-up for a gray and boring culture starved for real romance, hampered by creativity, and diminished of any individuality. In his time, Guiseppe Verdi was like the top-40 producer of Opera: his hit tunes were wildly popular and spoke to people’s emotions and patriotism. But by the 1950s, Verdi was relegated to the unremarkable mainstream, too low-brow for the high-brow and too high-brow for the low-brow.

Now, almost one-hundred years after his death, the peasant from Roncole is enjoying a kind of renaissance. All 27 opera’s, even the ones first considered flops, are being revived today. They’ve become the backbone of opera companies all over the world; and works like Aida, La Traviata, and Rigoletto set the mood for everything from TV commercials to cartoons. Verdi with a vengeance is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

William Berger, author of “Verdi with a Vengeance.”

Taxpayers get stuck for pro stadiums and arenas. So is it too much to ask that fans en masse might get to own their beloved ball teams? For the doting devotees of the unlucky Boston Red Sox, the impossible dream these days is to do what the famous Wisconsin cheese-heads, football fans of the Green Bay Packers, did long ago: buy the team for the whole town. The Packers have several thousand shareholders in a non-profit community investment that has sustained a powerhouse contender over the years in the 71st ranking TV market in America, the smallest town in any of the big leagues.

When a snowstorm buried the field before a playoff game three years ago, it was a town where the Packers could call on volunteers to shovel them out-and they came in droves. The leagues actually prefer the Steinbrenner model of owner: egomaniacs with iron wills and deep pockets. But what if a collective of fans got a shot at a title, this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Tom Davis

Willie Davis, NFL Hall of Famer, former Green Bay packer defensive end, and current member of the Green Bay Packers board of directors

Bob Ryan, Boston Globe sports columnist.

Welcome to the wireless world. Laptops, cell phones, pagers, and PDAs are just the beginning of what tech pundits say is a coming revolution in mobile gadgetry. Beyond reading e-mail and checking stock quotes, new wireless devices will bring instant messaging, web surfing, gaming, and, or course, e-commerce into the palm of your hand. The question is, who really needs it? There are 100 million mobile users in the U.S. alone who think they do, with over a million more signing up every month.

And the U.S. is behind in the gadget game. In Finland wireless whiz-kids pay for parking meters with their cell phones and download the latest pop songs as MP3s. The Japanese have figured out a way to do karaoke on any handheld device, and can beam photos to their screens from sidewalk picture booths. But can the latest wave of digital hysteria live up its hype, or should we be wary of wireless? No strings attached: Wirelessness is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Richard Siber, partner at Andersen Consulting and wireless expert.

“Don’t Rush Me.” That’s the real slogan for Campaign 2000. This election, we’ve been told, will turn on about 10 percent of the electorate in about 10 battleground states among people who haven’t yet made up their minds how to vote tomorrow…people who can’t quite bring themselves to say either President Bush or President Gore. The undecided voter has also become a kind of parody. Every time you turn on the TV or the radio or open the newspaper there they are – the supercitizens — the dreaded average American who’s migrated from “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” into serious news time.

They’re the wafflers, the leaners, maybe ultimately the uninformed. Or are the uncommitteds the most engaged and passionate of anyone this election season? The Ralph Naderites, for example, people torn between voting for what they believe in or voting against what they fear most? The Great Swing Vote of 2000 is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Ruy Teixeira, senior fellow at the Century Foundation and co-author of “Why the White Working Class Still Matters”

Mickey Kaus, Slate columnist

John Nichols of the Capital Times in Madison Wisconsin

and Walter Dean Burnham, author and chair of the Department of Government at the Liberal Arts College at the University of Texas at Austin.

Darkness. Poverty. Helplessness. And loneliness. They are elements in the imagery that’s long been associated with blindness. But a new generation of blind people is steadily replacing those pictures–not least through an Outward-Bound style of rehabilitation that tries to downgrade blindness from a crippling handicap to a sort of nuisance. Scattered around the States the upstart rehab centers are run entirely by blind people. Their innovative, tough, often controversial methods have earned them the label: “boot camps for the blind”.

The opposition says their training method is unsafe; they say it works. Fred Schroeder, who was handpicked by President Clinton to run the Federal rehabilitation service, is himself blind: he’s not only an advocate of the gritty, can-do training philosophy but a product of it as well. Fred Schroeder’s mission-changing what it means to be blind–is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Fred Schroeder, Commission of Rehabilitation Services. Joanne Wilson, Director for the Louisiana Center for the Blind.

It’s easy enough to send seven Israeli and Palestinian teenagers to summer camp in Maine for a month, something else entirely to expect new friendships to last among people who’ve been at war for centuries. The plot in Mark Landesman’s documentary film “Peace of Mind” thickened when the Israeli and Arab teens returned home with video cameras to show each other what life in their respective villages looks like. What you see and learn from their video postcards back and forth over a year is how deeply isolated the kids are from each other and how frenzied daily life is in the Middle East.

You see kids watching world cup soccer and performing religious rituals. You see the righteousness of both sides of this conflict over several generations. You see self-conscious adolescents and you see resolute and responsible future leaders. Sowing the seeds of peace is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Mark Landesman, director of “Peace of Mind.” Two of the teenagers in the film, Sivan Ranon, an Israeli, and Amer Kamal, a Palestinian.

The Makah Indians last year revived their ancient whaling heritage in a media-soaked whale hunt off the coast of Washington. It was supposed to be a kind of cultural re-affirmation. The tribe had slid, over the years, into gritty poverty and rootlessness, but led by a man enrolled in “anger management” classes, they studied their own forgotten whaling traditions, updated parts of the hunt with a high-velocity rifle and a motorboat, and landed themselves a 30-ton, 30-foot female gray – their first whale in 75 years.

The event was almost upstaged and almost stopped by all the animal-rights protests and the press coverage. The Makah themselves weren’t united about it either. The most ardent hoped the hunt would revive the community, but at the end of the day they were left with a dead whale, no recipes for the meat, and no real resolution between long-lost ritual and modern-day reality. Hunting the Gray whale is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Robert Sullivan, author of “A Whale Hunt” and “The Meadowlands.”

Mary Daly’s transformation-from aspiring Catholic theologian to pagan Crone, as she thinks of herself now-began at Pope John 23rd’s Second Vatican Council. Some saw a church modernizing itself; what she saw was an ancient and spectacular contrast between colorfully gowned peacock princes of the church, the hierarchs of patriarchy, and a few humble women helping out, mostly veiled nuns walking in file like unwelcome ants at an all-boy picnic.

The scene ignited Mary Daly’s first manifesto, titled The Church and the Second Sex, and launched a career in radical feminism, including some famous fights with her Jesuit bosses to keep males out of her college classes, and wider warfare in new words like “gyn-ecology” and “gynophilia” to fight “gynocide,” by the patriarchy, of course. Outraged and outrageous, she’s still saying: wake up women, your lives and the planet are at stake. Dauntless Mary Daly is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Mary Daly, former Boston College professor of theology and philosophy, author of “Gyn/Ecology,” and “The Wickedary.”

Before he became a write, Mark Salzman had pretty well planned his life as a great cellist. But what he really wanted was to master the Chinese martial art of Kung Fu. Growing up in suburban middle-class Connecticut, he was the sort of kid who got used to practicing his Kung Fu kicks for hours on end, smashing his bare fist into the wall a few hundred times, and then practicing his cello. He got into Yale at 16 on his music, then quit his instrument and changed his major to Chinese language and philosophy, which took him eventually to Changsha in Hunan Province, to teach English and to study Chinese martial arts at their source.
Which prompted him to write about it and, in the depths of a writer’s block, to take up the cello again. This is the circuit of his perfectionist passions-music, Kung Fu, and writing-that produced his remarkable new novel about a Carmelite nun in a spiritual crisis. Mark Salzman and “Lying Awake” are this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Mark Salzman, cellist and author of “Lying Awake.”