“Yosemite Valley, to me, is always a sunrise, a glitter of green and golden wonder in a vast edifice of stone and space.” The Yosemite Ansel Adams spoke of and captured on film, looking up at the sheer granite face of El Capitan or the rainbow-reflecting sprays of Bridal Veil Falls is still there. But lower the camera to ground level, and instead of space, you see throngs of tourists, trash cans, crowded roads. 4 million people visit the park each year, and these days, gas fumes, road rage and long lines are often a bigger part of their experience than moments of pure slack-jawed splendor.

Guests:

Don Barry, Assistant Director, The Wilderness Society and former assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife with Clinton Administration

Chip Jenkins, deputy supervisor, Yosemite National Park

and Mark Thornton, Tuolomne County Board of Supervisors.

Secretary of State Colin Powell still remembers what went through his mind the first time he put on his R.O.T.C. uniform and looked in the mirror. “I liked what I saw,” he says. “The uniform gave me a sense of belonging.” But for everyone who likes putting on a uniform, there’s someone else who hates having to wear it, day after day. Americans don’t think of themselves as a conforming culture. We’re slipping into the multiple meanings of uniforms this hour, from FedEx blue and UPS brown, through doormen’s braids and soldiers’fatigues, to the habits of nuns. The uniform giveth prestige and power. And the uniform taketh away one’s sense of individuality. From fashion to function and fascination, we look at what’s different and what’s uniform.

Guests:

Nancy Rexford, guest curator, “All for One & One for All! Uniforms in Fact and Fantasy,” The American Textile History Museum

Stan Herman, uniform designer, president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America

Vietnam. Just say the word, and you shake the great long clanking chain of guilt, anger and retribution forged in the 1960’s and 70’s. It changed so much, from military strategy to combat journalism, but more, it changed the way an entire generation of Americans related to society, how they understood world events and history. Some fought. Some did not; and the tortured dialogue that’s wound around the word Vietnam, has more to do even today with the identity of this nation rather than the small country along western side of the South China Sea.
John Laurence spent five years for CBS in the jungle, struggling to explain Vietnam to Americans. Thirty years later, he may have found a better way to make sense of it, for us, and for himself.

Guests:

John Laurence, author of The Cat from Hue

The latest news in America’s “War on Terror” is coming out of Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, where it’s feared that networks of Islamic extremists are still at work. In what some see as a first response, American special forces are setting up camp in the Philippines. There, at the southernmost tip of the nation, a small but particularly nasty band of kidnappers, Islamic extremists called Abu Sayyaf, are fighting the government, and holding a couple of Kansas missionaries hostage. But the presence of American “advisors” in the former colony is raising questions, in the Philippines and elsewhere in Asia, where GI’s would be even less welcome, and also here in the United States. Just what is next?

Guests:

W. Scott Thompson, Professor of International Politics at Tufts University Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy

Marites Danguilan-Vitug, Editor-in-Chief of Manila’s “Newsbreak” Magazine, and author of Under the Crescent Moon: Rebellion in Mindanao

and Stanley Karnow, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and author of In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines.

Free school, free shelter and food. In a developing nation with a pitiful system of public education, who would turn down such an offer? Over the past couple of decades, the poor boys of Pakistan have thronged to the religious schools. Originally, madrasas, like seminaries and yeshivas, were meant to train religious leaders. But in Pakistan, many madrasas evolved into anti-Soviet, then anti-American training grounds for holy warriors: first the mujahadeen, later the Taliban. Pakistan’s General Musharaff, under pressure from America and India, now says it’s time to re-write the rules for the schools, to drop arms training and extremism. But redefining an Islamic education means fighting religious elements in the military, and on the street.

Guests:

Vali Nasr, associate professor of political science, University of San Diego

Najeeb Jan, doctoral candidate in history, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Kathy Gannon, Associated Press bureau chief in Pakistan, based in Islamabad

and Shamshad Ahman, Ambassador of Pakistan to the United Nations

It looks good in a headline. “Colombia(n) Peace Talks to Consider a Ceasefire.” At least it’s not war. But even a hopeful step in the right direction means little to the millions of Colombians living in the countryside, where competing demands from leftist rebels and rightwing paramilitaries have created a ‘damned if you do, dead if you don’t’ way of life. Feed the rebels and end up on the paramilitary’s hit list. Reject them and face the sudden disappearance of your child. Perpetual uncertainty and fear after decades of unchecked violence have chipped away at the Colombian psyche, displaced millions, reduced hope to the hardscrabble fight for existence. Fragile peace. Fragile people. Why good news is no news to a people under fire.

Guests:

Herbert Tico Braun, Associate Professor of History at the University of Virginia and Maria Cristina Caballero, Colombian journalist and Mason Fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Wouldn’t it be great to have your doctor’s cell phone number, to be able to sit in her office and have a thoughtful, leisurely discussion about health, to have your physician accompany you to the specialist? Well now you can, for a price. Call it “the country club clinic” or “the platinum practice.” A new kind of medical plan is here, and it’s prompting ethical questions and legal inquiries. Critics say “concierge” care contravenes insurance rules and exploits Medicare, that they create an elitist tier of medical care, and more, that participating doctors are turning their backs on the working class and middle America. Not so, say its practitioners. “This is medicine the way medicine was meant to be – personal, accessible, engaged.”

Guests:

Dr. Steven Flier, Personal Physicians Health Care

Dr. John Goodson, Primary Care Physician at Mass General Hospital and professor at Harvard Medical School

Paul Ginsberg, Director of the Center for Studying Health System Change

and Darin Engelhardt, Chief Financial Officer of MDVIP .

Treason. It’s a unique kind of capitol offense, as much thought crime as physical threat, and since the days of Benedict Arnold, Americans have held a special hatred for turncoats. So what’s with this kid from California? John Walker joined the Taliban. He knew that suicide bombers were in the United States, and he did nothing. He carried a gun in battle against American soldiers. Sounds like a textbook case, all the more so because the levers of United States law enforcement are in the hands of John Ashcroft, who’s made it clear he’s got no sympathy for Walker. Yet for some strategic, legal, or perhaps philosophical reasons, the government is charging the young man from Marin County with conspiracy instead of tagging him with treason.

Guests:

George Fletcher, Cardozo Professor of Jurisprudence at the Columbia Law School

Katrina Vanden Heuvel, editor of The Nation

and Buckner Melton, Constitutional Historian and professor of law at the UNC School of Law.

It was a happening. In New York City, the mid-1960’s, and Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable had a new band. The Velvet Underground got a bewildered review from a New York paper: “a savage series of atonal thrusts and electronic feedback; a sound that seems to be the product of a secret marriage between Bob Dylan and the Marquis de Sade.” Okay, so not everyone quite “got” the Velvets, but few bands from the 60’s have had such far reaching influence. Thirty years after their breakup, there’s a new project to collect and reproduce the best bootlegs of the band, from small, half-filled clubs of the late 60’s, for the countless devotees today who’ve found the Velvets, and fallen in love. The ultimate road trip with the Velvet Underground.

Guests:

Velvet Underground members Moe Tucker and Doug Yule

Rolling Stone senior editor David Fricke

Vanity Fair contributing editor Lisa Robinson.

Ground Zero is America’s open wound. The headlines may have raced on, globetrotting with the war on terrorism, but the reality of the pit pulls us back. It used to be a metaphor. The 16 acre site that a post-September 11 world knows as Ground Zero, once the sprawling complex that enveloped the World Trade Center, used to represent capitalist achievement. The triumph of commerce. The hum and buzz of a robust economy. Then came the planes, and Lower Manhattan, so long the domain of pinstriped strivers, made way for hard hats and broken spirits. Every day now, men and women steel themselves for another 12 hour shift in the ruins. Every day, men and women line up to bear witness to it all. Revisiting the graveyard, remembering Ground Zero.

Guests:

Charlie LeDuff, New York Times reporter, and Michael Kavanagh, NPR field producer, in New York.