Mount Diablo Thrust Fault

Transcription

[applause] Alison Smith: Thank you. It's great to be here. Well, if as a Canadian like me, you are an avid follower of US politics, then David Frum is like an old friend. For more than two decades now, it's so hard to imagine, he's been like the most engaging dinner guest; thoughtful, provocative, gentlemanly. With the intelligence and wit, he uses his elegant prose and commentary to illuminate the arcane and dramatic and powerful world of American politics. And from his vantage point in Washington, he also makes us think about politics here too. AS: At one time, an insider in the Bush White House, he's now, I think it's fair to say, an outsider. Others probably call him a heretic, but he is most certainly a conservative and, yes, a republican who's truly an independent thinker. Arianna Huffington calls him fearless. He's a contributing editor for The Daily Beast and Newsweek, and you probably see him on CNN as well. He's also a prolific tweeter, if that's the correct word, or a twitterer. And from those tweets, I also know he's a devoted husband and father that his wife and, at least, one of his daughters know how to land a good punch, and recently had a fast lesson in how to care for baby squirrels. But I digress. AS: David has written six books of nonfiction that essentially chronicle the history of modern conservatism in the US, but more importantly, challenge conservatives and Republicans to examine their beliefs and how they practise politics. This novel, Patriots, is described as a scorching, intimate explanation of why the US political system has so badly failed the American people over the years just past. In it, Republicans are called constitutionalists. Democrats are nationalists. Briefly, the plot line, a constitutionalist president, a military war hero in a wheelchair has just defeated a black president. The US is involved in a war with drug lords in Mexico and the economy, not surprisingly, is in the tank. The central character, Walter Schotzke, is the young heir to a mustard fortune, a mustard fortune, [laughter] who finds himself working in a senate office in Washington. AS: In this story, as in much of David's work, it's a call for thoughtful and considerable change. And just in case you thought it might be all about tax cuts and health care reform, I just wanna read you from the first page a little bit. "Hey," I said sleepily, "It's 6 AM." "Don't you like it?" Valerie murmured from beneath the covers. "Do you want me to stop?" "I like it," I admitted, "but I'd like it better at nine." Her tousled brown hair and big matching eyes emerged from from below the sheets. "We have to be on the road by nine. It's your grandmother's birthday. We're expected for lunch." [laughter] That's how it starts. This is a rollicking, sexy, juicy, funny story that proves there's truth in fiction. Please welcome, David Frum. [applause] David Frum: Thank you. Where do you wanna sit? AS: You go there. I'll go here. So to begin, I'll put you right to work. The first most obvious question, why a novel? DF: PJ O'Rourke, who's a great American humorist, had a line that struck me many years ago. "Just as many things were too strange for fiction, so other things are too true for journalism." And what happens when you live in Washington, is you amass all kinds of stories and anecdotes that you, for one reason or another, can't use. Either you're not 100% certain that they're true or they occur to people who are very good... You are certain that they're true, but they involve people who are good friends of yours and it would be embarrassing to repeat them. Or their full significance only strikes you long after everyone else has lost interest in the story. You collect these things over time. DF: And then in the crisis that has hit the United States over the past three years, where I found myself in one of those everybody's-out-of-step-but-my-Johnny situations where everyone else is marching in one way and I'm marching in the other way and we all think the other is nuts, that I found myself dealing with people who I thought had lost a sense of reality, who also thought then that I had lost a sense of reality. And I became very interested in this question of, why do I think so differently from all of you? And that was something that, if you sort of sit down and work it out for yourself, it turns into autobiography. It becomes self-regarding. Whereas if you could tell a story and make it amusing, it can be other regarding. AS: Alright. So talk about developing this kind of plot line, I wanna ask you a little bit about the process because the books you've written before have been based on your research and your thinking. This obviously is too, but this is a plot line with twists and turns and vivid descriptions. Where did Walter Schotzke come from? DF: I've been living with Walter Schotzke in my head for a long time. And the first line of the novel, I've had probably in mind for almost a decade, but that was it. [chuckle] And then during the Tea Party storm, I became... I had various sort of stories that I was watching, and so what happens with Walter. The first line of the novel is that, "I didn't get my girlfriend through... " I'm sorry, "I didn't get the job through merit, my girlfriend had pointed out, but then I didn't get my girlfriend through merit either." And Walter is... He's not a fool, but he is not one of the world's smartest people, unlike his girlfriend who is one of the world's smartest people. And he is put into a situation where he... He's thrust into the middle of Washington and becomes our observer. And he also... I was interested in him because he does inherit a lot of privilege and he represents the incredible out of touch-ness of the American economic elite through the cataclysm that that society has lived through. And one of the things that happens to Walter is he becomes more aware of how... He's got problems in his life and how flimsy they are, and how he has to be more other regarding himself. AS: You've often said that yourself about politics and the meaning of politics, that we need to be aware of what we have. DF: Well, one of the... I think it's in the first paragraph of the Great Gatsby. The narrator quotes something his father says to him which is, "Whenever you're tempted to criticize anybody, be aware that not everybody in life has had the advantages that you have had." And my mother quoted that line to me probably 5,000 times before I understood where it came from. And as I watch what has happened in Washington over the past five... I think they should put it in the Pledge of Allegiance. [laughter] AS: They don't. DF: They don't. They don't. And one of the things that is very strange about American politics right now is that... If you live in Washington, if you live in certain areas of New York, the country has never felt richer. The damage from the recession is entirely repaired. In this way it's not like the Great Depression. It's been very, very... The recovery for those who have done well has been very rapid and dramatic and better than ever. But for 80% of the country, the situation is somewhere between bad, grim, horrible. And yet in the situation, if you watch the debate, certainly on the Republican side, that the mood of persecution is so extreme. DF: Senator Hazen, who's sort of the conscience of the book, he's this... The last of the moderate New England constitutionalists in the book, and who is from the business world and who does sympathize broadly with the interests of the business world, does say that his... At one point, he's talking... He's complaining about fundraising and Walter says to him, "At least fundraising keeps you in touch with the people." And he says, "I'm in very close touch with the people who own private aircraft," [laughter] which is a line actually once said to me by a former US senator talking about his fundraising. And then Walter complains, "Well, you sound like a radical." He says, "I'm no radical. I'm not. I'm someone who believes in business. I just wish that the rich didn't spend all their time feeling so sorry for themselves." [laughter] AS: So how much of the book is based on experience but imagined, and how much of it is real experience here? DF: Well, the book is not in any way autobiographical. I am not Walter Schotzke, at least I hope not. AS: And there's no mustard in your family. [laughter] DF: But a lot of the stories are true. They're re-combined. And a lot of the characters are based on real-life personalities. And that is more true of the minor characters than of the major characters. And a lot of the dialogue... One of the things I warn people about in the book is you will come across passages that seem impossible that any human being... How could I write such a thing? How could anybody say anything so stagy, so corny, so histrionic, so strident? That's taken from a Fox News transcript. [laughter] AS: So do you wanna read... Did you bring the... I know you've got a couple of examples in the book here that were particularly good. DF: I had a few little things here. I need my reading glasses unfortunately. Walter and... There's some comic... Some comic... A couple of things, and a comic thing, and then maybe a serious thing. Here's a comic thing. Walter and Valerie go to the inaugural ball of the incoming President, General Pulaski. And this is the hero you mentioned. And probably if you've read about them, you'll imagine an inaugural ball and you imagine something tremendously glamorous, the women in beautiful dresses, something Viennese, and... Anyway, so this is more what it's like. As they walk in... Speaking in Walter's voice... "I surveyed the crowd." And then he says to Valerie, "Do you think we might have come to the wrong place?" At that moment, we were passed by a man wearing a mullet haircut and a bright red tie studded with little lights that switched on and off at two-second intervals. "Looks that way," said Valerie. Somehow I imagined an inaugural ball would be less gross. Maybe it would be better in the VIP room? DF: I glanced down at the secondary ticket atop by general admission pass. "Maybe," said Valerie, not very hopefully. And they go into the VIP room which turns out to be... The VIP room turns out to be an exhibition space that opened off the museum's main hall, the placard was illus... And as they're standing in line, they're crashed into by a man on his way to the canapes. And Walter looks around in despair and says, "God, this is grizzly," I said to Valerie. "Do you think it was like this when the Romans inaugurated a new emperor?" [laughter] But there's a... AS: Tell me the... Just before we came in, you told me the story about going with your wife to that. DF: Well, this is actually based on... This is set in the Air and Space Museum and this is based on our experience going to the George Bush Inaugural in 1988. And this line which I quote, in which a man approach... "As they're standing there, they're looking lost. They're standing beside a display of moon rocks reconnoitring the situation, a drunken party-goer came stumbling up to Valerie, an older guy, heavy, wearing $5,000 worth of ugly, over-sized wristwatch. "Are you a waft?" He couldn't get his tongue working properly. The word emerged as waft. "Or are you a prostitute?" You will never know what's going to upset Valerie and what will make her laugh. This time she laughed. "Why can't I be both?" [laughter] Actually a man approached my wife at the 1988 Inaugural and said just that, and that was Danielle's answer. [laughter] [applause] AS: One of the young men who worked with you on your blog, Noah Kristula-Green, wrote about you as he was leaving, and he said this. He said that, "You are a deeply cynical man, and I mean this in the most flattering and positive way. [laughter] David always assumes a political actor is motivated by the desire for power, sex or money." And I was gonna say, "And I thought you were an idealist." DF: Well, yeah. Actually, the one thing in Noah's very generous statement I didn't think was quite right, but Noah's a very idealistic person and so I may sometime shock and... For me, it's what the lawyers would call a rebuttable presumption. AS: Okay. But clearly in this book, they're all motivated by power, sex or money. DF: Well, power, yes. But my two biggest villains in the book, one is an idealist. One of the two main villains, one is a total cynic. And he is somebody who deliberately sets out to inflame public opinion, utterly indifferent to the truth of what he's saying and despite ever mounting evidence that what he's saying is not true, it's just not interesting to him. But the other is a genuine believer. And the genuine believer ends up doing even worse things than the the truly cynical person. And the question you're asked to confront is, maybe genuine believers... AS: Are worst. DF: Are worst. And these are both base on... They are containers of two types. But both of them, I think, if you were in Washington would be fairly recognizable personalities. AS: That's certitude. That sort of genuine believer, there's no way but my way, exemplifies the Tea Party in many ways. DF: Right. But the Tea Party... One of the things that made me do this book is, you have to have tremendous sympathy for the people who go to the rallies and do the work and constitute the rank and file of the Tea Party. And they're living through a social calamity. Human beings need explanations. They want to know, "Why did this happen? Assure me that it wasn't my fault." And they are frightened that if you are somebody in the United States on the verge of retirement, you're confronting a situation where you're... Even if you have handled your stock market portfolio well, that is if you didn't panic and sell it when the market drops which a lot of people do, it's worth no more today than it was in the year 2000. Your house is worth less. DF: Clearly, if you are on the verge of retirement in your early 60s, the deal that the state provides you in your retirement years will not be as good when you are in your 80s as it is for the people who are currently in their 80s. And your children face a bleak future. And so you are ready to be led or you're ready to be misled. And one of the themes of the book is, how does it happen? How does it happen that these people who have real anxieties and real fears, and I hope I'm sympathetic to them, get abused in the way that they do? And one of the forces in the book and that's the mode about the book is the question... The plot of the book is how a small number of people set in motion these fears. AS: I was gonna say, do you think it's fear that sustains the extreme of the conservative movement in the United States? DF: Yes. I think its tremendous fear. Both fear for themselves and fear for what's going to happen to people like them that will... Will their country have room for them? If you are 60, you grew up in a United States that was a very middle class country, that was defined by the middle class, it was defined by manufacturing. And where the rich people were... The richest man in the country in the year 1960 was J. Paul Getty, a man whose... He's estimated that in present money, his fortune would be a billion dollars, which is a lot of money, but it's $1 billion. And J. Paul Getty was not very active in politics. He didn't give to politicians, he didn't own political parties, he didn't pick presidents. DF: And when elections happened, yeah, people who had money mattered, but so did the unions and so did the Knights of Columbus and so did the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church mattered a lot. And the idea of politics as a competitive struggle of enormously powerful private people is their particular interests, who might choose... Who may choose to be public spirited but may choose not to be. But if they don't choose to be, there's nothing really much to make them. That's a new country and the country's changing ethnically as well. And that's an unsettling group of people. AS: So what changed it to make it this cutthroat, blood sport, do you think? Because it's only worsened, it's deepened even since I was there in 2005, 2009. It's much more rancorous. I mean it doesn't get it much worse than it gets in here. DF: Yeah. Many things, let me point to three as especially notable. The first is, I mentioned, the effect of economic pressure. That one of the things that a democracy likes to be able to do is to say to everybody, "Okay, you keep what you have, and I'll keep what I have. And what we'll argue about is there's going to be an increment of economic growth and what we're going to argue about is who gets how much of the new money." Well, people are much more relaxed about the allocation of new money than they are about the reallocation of old money. But when you are in a situation as you are now where the United States is going to disappoint people, that the tax rate is not... If the health care benefits for retirees are to stay as they are, then the tax rates can't stay as they are. If the tax rates are to stay as they are, then the health care benefits for retirees can't stay as they are. And so everybody is going to have the experience of losing, of having something taken away from them. So that's the first thing. DF: The second thing is, because of the huge emigration into United States, 40 million people since 1970, economic redistribution inevitably becomes ethnic redistribution and that is always more bitter. And that's one of the sub-themes of the book. And the last thing is the change in the media where you have a... And that's one of the major themes of the book, and that's maybe something to read in a moment, if we like, that you have a new, more partisan media that exists to generate audience exactly by inflaming these kinds of fears and that's... And we see there's a sinister cable news network called "Patriot News" that we see through this novel doing just that and very... And then the people in it... But I do it both consciously. But it's also quite tragic because they put things on the air that they know to be false and then they watch and they believe them. AS: Yes, oh, well we've all watched that happen. Do you wanna read the little section you were talking about? DF: Yes. Let me give you an example of this. "So Walter, in his feckless way, has inadvertently stumbled into having... Into cheating on his girlfriend with a woman who it turns out is the mistress of the largest and most powerful of these cable news networks and that leads Walter into a lot of trouble and... But what she gives him is kind of a... She's a very bitter person and she doesn't really like Walter that much. She's just sort of bored and unhappy and miserable, and she's about to be dumped anyway. But she... They have this conversation about how does Patriot News work, so... And she really hates it and Walter watches it sometime. So Walter says to her, "I watch Patriot news," I said, "It's kinda sensational and maybe it's not the most accurate news in the world, but I don't see what's so indecent about it. Why do you think people watch Patriot News? Because the info babes are so hot?" "Yes, that helps. Maybe on the way home we can make a betting pool on which one O'Grady, that's the head of the network, will choose to replace me." DF: "But our primetime lineup is full of ugly old men and they do even better." "I'd take you over any of the info babes any day," I said, not very truthfully, "But go ahead, tell me why." And she says, "You must have seen that ad we run for carbon monoxide detectors." She imitated an announcer's gravely voice. "There's an invisible killer lurking inside your home." She giggled at her audacity. For a second, her humour seemed good natured then the bitterness returned. "That's what we tell them every moment of the day in every story and every commercial. They are surrounded by danger. The enemy is everywhere, cunning, ruthless, merciless. The authorities? At best pitiful and incompetent, but more often corrupt and duplicitous. Now we are testing a new plot line." DF: This... And then she just summarizes. "This goes into the events of the story, but the point of the plot lies, the viewers could trust nobody and nothing, except Patriot News of course." And Walter tries a little joke and they... And Sylvia becomes impatient with him. And she says, "Our audience is so old, they remember when there was this thing called the news." She dropped into an imitation of a grave announcer's voice. "And that's the way it is." She took a long sip of the Armagnac. But Michael O'Grady doesn't believe in, "That's the way it is." He doesn't believe it's his job to report reality. He believes it's his job to make reality. You're saying that most CEOs think they are God, but Michael O'Grady actually is God. Walter, you are really quite a good looking boy. You don't have to try to be funny too. It doesn't work for you. [laughter] AS: You also don't suggest in that book that the Democrats are anymore virtuous than the Republicans? DF: No. Well, this is set inside the Republican world, but one of the Democratic characters we meet is a super lobbyist whose name is David Maurice, born David Moritz. And he's one of the most corrupt people in the whole book, but he always is reminding everybody that he got his start as an anti-apartheid campaigner and now he lives... He makes his... He has a huge mansion on River Road. It's a fancy street in Washington. And he has his summer retreat on the eastern shore of Maryland where he lives at a country house which he calls Mandela Farm. [laughter]