Christmas music has a shaky reputation. If you’ve set foot in any shopping mall during the last two months you’re probably a victim of nonstop cheesy commercial holiday jingles. The overwrought reworking of the same crop of carols has reached cacophonous proportions. And we all deserve better. For over thirty years Joel Cohen and The Boston Camerata have made it a calling to resurrect the spirit of early music. The ensemble’s teaching, research, recording and concerts tap into an essential musical narrative, from medieval chants to Shaker spirituals.

The question, says Joel Cohen, is why the true and good roots of American music are overlooked by musicians, scholars, and the public. The Boston Camerata bucks this trend, and their repertoire is a welcome respite from the season’s typical sugar cane fare. We’re reviving the nourishing roots of an American Christmas this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Joel Cohen, director of the Boston Camerata

and members of the Boston Camerata.

It’s that time of year to use up the packet of movie tickets your Mom gave you last Christmas. For seasonal viewing, the big blockbuster is “The Grinch” and if you’re nostalgic for the 70s, you can go see “Charlie’s Angels.” How about the movie with no musical score, no voiceover, no co-stars and practically no dialogue – “Cast Away” with Tom Hanks as a modern day Robinson Caruso. The movie with buzz is Steven Soderbergh’s “Traffic;” the movie that broke up Meg Ryan and Dennis Quaid’s marriage is “Proof of Life;” and, the movie to put you to sleep is Robert Redford’s “The Legend of Bagger Vance.”

Then there are the usual movies adapted from books; this year it’s Edith Wharton’s “House of Mirth” and Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses.” And, of course, the inevitable sequels – “Nutty Professor II,” “Blair Witch 2,” and “102 Dalmations.” The season’s movies, this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Garen Daly, Director of the Dedham Community Playhouse

Critic David Sterritt from the Christian Science Monitor

The laws of heaven and earth in conflict with the human heart and the bonds of blood. Sins of fathers, duties of sisters, conflict of brothers. These are the elements of the timeless Greek play, “Antigone” from the moment Creon, king of Thebes, proclaims: “Gentlemen, the ship of state is safe.” Safe at last from the ravages of civil war, in which the two sons of Oedipus had destroyed each other in combat. King Creon went on to say that one son, Etoclus, died defending the state and would get a hero’s burial. The other, Polynices, died a traitor and would be left for the vultures. And woe unto anyone, Creon warned, who went and buried Polynices in defiance of his law.

But Antigone, sister to the two dead brothers, was resolved to follow a higher law. It was the gods’ command that the dead be buried: so bury her brother she must, no matter threats or consequences. Family, state, man, woman, conscience, power. Sophocles’ Antigone is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Greg Nagy, Professor of Classics at Harvard

Charles Segal, Professor of Classics at Harvard

Francois Rochaix, director at the American Repertory Theatre.

If Slobodan Milosevic is to make a comeback in this weekend’s parliamentary elections, he’s got to do it against, among others, Otpor, the student group that brought him down. Otpor was the driving force, it turns out, behind the Yugoslav revolution. A group of students committed to non- violence, Otpor plastered the country with stickers saying, “He’s finished”, created a hip message, and spread resistance to the provinces, where Milosevic was strongest.

Otpor isn’t actually fielding candidates in Saturday’s elections, instead it’s organizing a massive get out the vote campaign to finish the job begun in October. Milosevic’s Socialist party still controls the parliament and many of the top jobs in Serbia.

The opposition, led by President Kostunica, hopes to consolidate their grip on power by returning a majority to parliament and kicking Milosevic into the dustbin of history. The Serbian elections and the student movement is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Roger Cohen, Berlin bureau chief of the New York Times and author of “Hearts Grown Brutal: Sagas of Sarajevo”

Paul McCarthy, an official with the National Endowment for Democracy

Milia Jovanic, founding member of Otpor

The rose is off the boom of the New Economy. Yesterday’s dot com success stories are turning into today’s dot bomb pink slips. 8,329 people were laid off from wired work in November alone, and the bloodletting may have just begun. So where do unemployed netizens go once the mouse clicks stop? The e-mail joke of the day is that b2b no longer means “business-to-business e-commerce”, but “back to banking.” The so-called irrational exuberance that helped rocket the Internet industry into stock market stardom in the 1990s is now a kind of anxious rationalism that threatens a recession in the economy as a whole.

The days of venture capitalists handing millions of dollars to brazen 25-year olds with shaky business plans are over. The question is, are the real innovations of Internet entrepreneurs the essential ingredient to America’s economic prowess? The World Wide Wipeout is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

William Sahlman, Professor of Entrepreneurship at the Harvard Business School, and Marc Sason, an Online & Print Writer/Editor/Researcher

It’s been said now that Al Gore showed the world the real secret of America’s greatness. It’s not the Intel chip, it’s not the stealth bomber. It’s Al Gore’s concession speech. Americans choose country over party. We get over it and we get back to work. George W. Bush in his speech the same night quoted Thomas Jefferson, who said after his own close election fight:, “the steady character of our countrymen is a rock to which we may safely moor.”

Jefferson was one of the architects of American bipartistanship, one of the brotherhood of founding brothers, as the historian Joseph Ellis calls them, who set the model for political opponents to get along. With the future of the new republic at stake, the Founding Brothers clashed and compromised on states rights, on slavery, on foreign policy. Long before Rodney King, they asked “Can’t we all just get along?” A Blueprint for Bipartisanship for George W. Bush is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Joseph Ellis, author of “Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation”

“America First” is the slogan implied by the first key appointments to George W. Bush’s foreign policy team. The world they’ll be dealing with isn’t automatically thrilled at the prospect. In London, the liberal Guardian editorializes that Colin Powell, the next Secretary of State, is the patriotic face on a threatening, go-it-alone, anti-internationalist way of thinking. Condoleezza Rice got her job as national security adviser by making Mr. Bush comfortable with foreign policy issues he doesn’t much like. But Powell is already the name of a doctrine.

General Powell is a Vietnam-era soldier who believes in military intervention as a last resort and then, famously, in overwhelming force. His line on winning the Gulf war but staying out of the Balkans was: we do deserts, we don’t do mountains. Meaning still: we won’t tolerate American casualties, and we expect Europe to police its neighborhood. Bush II and the world are this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Barry Posen, MIT military analyst

and Former Ambassador to the Soviet Union under Presidents Reagan and Bush, Jack Matlock, now at Princeton.

How much of the global economy is a washing machine for the dirty money of international crime? The filthy lucre of sophisticated groups like the Russian Mafia, La Cosa Nostra, and Colombian drug cartels approach $1.5 trillion per year. Last weekend’s U.N. Crime Summit in Sicily put human slavery as the second biggest cash cow for organized crime, after drug trafficking. And a new Clinton administration report cites alien smuggling, copyright piracy and even auto-theft as new threats to national security. Dictators and despots are getting in on the game, looting their own countries and polluting the stream of world capital.

The problem isn’t limited to underworld figures or rogue leaders. The Justice Department recently rapped the knuckles of Fortune 500 companies for their involvement in the black-market peso exchange. How many dollars in your wallet do you suppose have been washed? Globalized money laundering is this hour on The Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Timothy O’Brien, former Moscow Bureau Chief of the NY Times and now with TALK magazine

Jonathan Weiner, former chief advisor on international crime for Clinton

Charles Intriago, former Federal prosecutor and currently President of Money Laundering Alert

Children of the new millennium inhabit a digital reality. Even now, toys on the shelves this Christmas are interactive, web-enabled, and packed with the kind of computing power the Pentagon would have envied 15 years ago. Consider My Real Baby – described by its makers as an “artificially-intelligent, emotionally-expressive, robotic baby doll, complete with state-of-the-art sensors and sophisticated, sensitive software”. Or how about the hottest item this year, Sony’s Playstation 2 – which offers dozens of three-dimensional multi-player games with graphics as absorbing as Hollywood action films.

The virtual reality pioneer Mark Pesce says this playful world expands human imagination and encourages creativity. As kids conquer the converging worlds of artificial intelligence, nano-technology, and wireless communication we may start to wonder who’s conquering whom? Growing up virtual is this hour on the Connection.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Mark Pesce, Chair of the Interactive Media Program at University of Southern California and author of “The Playful World: How Technology Is Transforming Our Imagination.”

Ralph Nader said from the start that if the price for his candidacy was electing George W Bush, it would be worth it. In hindsight we know that the Nader voters made the difference, not just in Florida but in New Hampshire too. Nader has been joking in Washington that Al Gore cost him the election, but the club of centrist democrats in Washington isn’t laughing now and neither are many progressives and environmentalists. If George W Bush opens the Arctic Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for oil drilling or clearcutting there are democrats who are prepared to name the tree stumps Ralph Nader National Forest….

To Ralph Nader’s claim that he established a vigorous new grassroots third party in America, Tom Friedman of the New York Times says Mr. Nader midwifed a president from the oil biz, a vice president from the drilling industry, and a chief of staff from the auto lobby. The Nader effect is this hour the Connection
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

John Nichols, editorial page editor for The Capital Times, Madison Wisconsin

Henrik Hertzberg, editor and writer for The New Yorker

Ralph Nader, presidential candidate and head of Public Citizen.