The Communist Party account of the Tiananmen Square massacre that’s been smuggled out of China and published in America this month has been called the Chinese Pentagon Papers. Hundreds of documents and transcripts are a record of the government’s cover-up and deception over the deaths of student protestors, but they show a divided Chinese leadership and even suggest an alternate end to the story.

The Politburo was split two to two over whether to use force to end the demonstrations. Had Deng Xiaoping and other powerful retired party elders not broken the deadlock, moderates might have prevailed and inspired political reform. An anonymous Chinese Communist Party official says he gave the documents to American scholars to stimulate a reassessment inside China on Tiananmen where it’s still called a criminal uprising.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Perry Link, Professor of East Asian Stuies at Princeton and editor of the Tiananmen Papers

Jonathon Spence, Professor of Chinese History at Yale

Eric Eckholm, Bureau Chief for the New York Times in Bejing

Li Lu, a student protestor from Tiananmen

Dai Ching, Freelance Journalist, Writer and Dissident from Bejing

and Ross Terrill, Professor at the University of Texas, Austin

Faith-based delivery of Federal social services could take government deeper into church, and church into government, than they’ve ever been before. The faith-based initiative is President Bush’s delivery on a campaign promise to put healing public money into hands, as he said yesterday, that “have proven their power to save and change lives.”

It’s not funding religion, he said, though he’s explicitly asking church contractors to minister, not to change their churchly mission when they bid for government work. There are other descriptions of this idea: the New York Times said the ceremony at the White House yesterday looked like reinventing government with a religious cast, and turned around collars. A lot of big churches, religious thinkers and constitutional sticklers who weren’t at the White House are calling it an unholy marriage of piety and politics that will be bad for God and Caesar, both.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

The Rev. Anthony Campbell, Preacher-in-Residence and Professor of Homiletics at Boston University

Wendy Kaminer, author of “The Rise of Irrationalism and the Perils of Piety”

Ray Hammond, pastor of AME Bethel Church in Jamaica Plain, MA

and Reverend Eugene Rivers.

The old joke about Minimalist Music goes: “Knock knock. Who’s there? Knock knock. Who’s there? Knock knock. Who’s there? Philip Glass.” As an innovator and promoter of minimalism, Philip Glass brought that uneasy listening experience of repetition and static melody to a concert-going audience. Now minimal music is leaving academic concert halls for dance clubs and raves where ambient electronica and looped beats rule.

The essential elements are the same: minimalism is meant to be simple, repetitious, melody-averse and pattern heavy. It leans on physics and mathematics as much as rhythm and harmony. It studiously avoids self-reference to the canon of Western composition, and demands a high level of concentration from its listeners. From Terry Riley to Stereolab, Arnold Dreyblat to Tortoise, the less-is-more music of minimalism is more or less getting maximum exposure.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Arnold Dreyblatt, composer and performer of minimalistic music

Evan Ziporyn, Professor at MIT

and Jeff Lieberman, guitarist, recent graduate of MIT.

When you encounter a group of white Americans, Scott Malcolmson observes, you’re encountering the legacy of slavery. He says: it’s much the way European conquest of North America, which invented the race of Indians, also defined whites. “Conquest and slavery formed white people every bit as much as they formed black and Indian Americans,” he writes, “and form them still.” Scott Malcomson wrote “One Drop of Blood: the American Misadventure of Race” as history and also an introspection on his own experience as a kid growing up in multiracial Oakland, California in the 1970s.

There was a time in childhood, he writes, when skin color meant little, then a lot; when we learned “to think with our skins, so to speak, and to act in them,” a painful process prepared for us by the American past to be reenacted in the future, a process that disminishes each of us. Join Scott Malcomson’s on the path through the cultivated thicket of race.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Scott Malcomson, author of “One Drop of Blood: The American Misadventure of Race.”

Douglas Coupland is a sculptor, a furniture-maker, a student of Japanese business, a futurist, and the author, most famously, of Generation X. Written in 1991 Generation X became gospel for rootless youth and an easy ride for mass media, despite Coupland’s own studied indifference to its success.

With a perverse taste that only a Canadian could have for American pop culture, Douglas Coupland has made a literary project out of capturing a certain brand of middle-class ennui and ersatz emotion. His book titles alone betray his preoccupations: Shampoo Planet, Life After God, Microserfs, Polaroids From The Dead, and Girfriend in a Coma. His new novel is Miss Wyoming, about an ex-beauty queen turned second-tier sitcom star and her star-crossed soul mate, Hollywood producer John Johnson. Has Gen X managed to prolong its adolescence?
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Douglas Coupland

You can’t call it fuzzy math when the Federal Reserve chief endorses your economic policy. After Alan Greenspan gave his blessing to the idea of a broad tax cut last week, you could practically see the smirking in the Oval Office. The Washington Post said you could almost hear the sound of ice cracking across the capital.

For several years Alan Greenspan has been obsessive about the importance of debt reduction in the American economy and he gave Democrats like Bill Clinton some cover in standing against big Republican tax cuts. So that deep crunching noise in Washington is the sound of the king of the Fed changing his mind about fiscal policy in light of bigger surplus projections. It’s also the sound of Democrats warming to the idea of tax reduction and maybe the sound of Republicans with a mandate suddenly on the march.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Greg Mankiw, Professor of Economics at Harvard University

David Wessel, Washington Correspondent for The Wall Street Journal

Paul Krugman, Professor of Economics at Princeton University

and James K. Galbraith, Professor of Public Affairs and Government

Josh White could be the most famous American musician you’ve never heard of, not for a long time anyway. One of the finest, and unluckiest, as well. Josh White learned the breadth of black roots music as a child playing brilliant guitar accompaniment for blind singers in the Carolinas.

In the generation of Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Pete Seeger and Billy Holiday, Josh White became the charismatic black singer who turned folk music into a protest form. None were more fashionable than Josh White in his left-wing New York moment in the 1940s, when he sang often for Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt in the White House. None were more despised than Josh White when anti-left blacklist politics slashed through show business in the 1950s. And still there’s the music-songs like “One Meat Ball” that nobody else could touch-and a life seen whole by the biographer Elijah Wald.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Elijah Wald, blues singer

You can imagine the story conference in Hollywood pitching “Darkness at Noon”, the picture about California’s power outage. It’s like “Titanic” but there’s no water. It’s like “The Towering Inferno” but the building’s not burning and the lights are out. It’s like “You’ve Got Mail” but Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan don’t fall in love online; they spend the night stranded in an elevator and end up as evangelists for wind power.

To play Governor Gray Davis, you’d love to have Ronald Reagan but you’d take Leonardo DiCaprio. You’d show old film footage from Jimmy Carter’s energy crisis in the 70s and the Watts riots in the 60s. The story’s got everything… it’s a shocking man-made disaster in the hotbed of hi-tech, surging power politics, greedy utility executives, and irate rate payers. Here on the Connection: the high-stakes, low voltage California shocker. Batteries not included.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

William Hogan, Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University

Joel Kotkin, author of “The New Geography”

Ralph Nader, Founder of Public Citizen

James Sterngold, National Correspondent for the New York Times in Los Angeles

Put aside those headlines about girls’ eating disorders, low self-esteem and self-mutilation. The three McPhee sisters say there’s another story to tell about girls today. These McPhee’s – 30-something professionals, all married, all mothers – made their own sisterly trek across America to take their own sample, and found, so it turned around, all sorts of ordinary girls doing extraordinary things.

The girls they met were rappers, chess champions, ice hockey players, poets, award winning scientists, midshipmen, harpists, cheerleaders, fishermen, ballerinas, wrestlers, actors and pole vaulters. These girls were not intimidated by boys, were not afraid of achievement, admitted no obstacles to their ambitions. Moreover, they loved being girls! These girls, says one of the sisters Martha McPhee “believe in themselves with a confidence that is terrifically empowering.” They’re “intrepid … dynamic and invincible.” Sugar and spice 2001, here.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Laura, Martha, and Jenny McPhee

authors of “Girls.”

Could John Ashcroft pass the Ashcroft test for confirmation as the U.S. attorney general? As a Senator from Missouri he made a reputation not just for his Christian conservative thinking but for his critical probes of the minds of Clinton appointees, and then his sometimes stubbornly ideological opposition.

The Senate Judiciary Committee on which Ashcroft served has now postponed the vote on him that was scheduled for today. Democrats are waiting on an FBI report, copies of old Ashcroft speeches, and written answers to over 300 questions from the hearings last week. No one expects to find any skeletons in Ashcroft’s closet. The question is likely to be the same one that Ashcroft raised in scuttling Clinton nominees like Bill Lan Lee and Ronnie White: can a man rise above ideology? Can he enforce laws he doesn’t believe in? Is his thinking more relevant than his competency? Judging John Ashcroft is next.
(Hosted by Christopher Lydon)

Guests:

Anthony Lewis, New York Times columnist

Stuart Taylor, National Review editor

and John Fund, editor for the Wall Street Journal.