The Thomas Jefferson Hour; Public Radio

Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson. Thomas Jefferson is portrayed by Humanity Scholar Clay Chinkinson. The Thomas Jefferson Hour is brought to you by High Plains Public Radio and New Enlightenment Radio Network, a non-profit organization dedicated to the search for truth in the tradition of Thomas Jefferson. Please join our host Bill Crystal as he speaks with our third president, Thomas Jefferson. Welcome to the Thomas Jefferson Hour, your weekly conversation with the third president of the United States today. Our theme is a special one, a near and dear one to Mr. Jefferson. We're going to talk about public radio as the most Jefferson of all institutions and you do need your public radio station. It's the station on what you're listening to this program and in fact, because of you, they are able to stay in business. That is a Jeffersonian institution, isn't it, sir? Well, I believe in dissemination. We talked about national dialogues and conversations and garnering public opinion and disseminating wisdom and

science and the truth and we were using very weak systems of dissemination, broad sides, pamphlets, sermons, sometimes secular sermons in our churches, newspapers, but there weren't that many newspapers and they were quite expensive to produce and difficult to distribute. You have systems of dissemination in your world, including public radio, that would have seemed like an ideal solution to the problem of a republic to anybody living in my time. Of course, the beauty of public radio is that it depends upon its listeners for its support. It's not owned by Hamiltonian organization. It has a certain unusual status in American culture as I understand it. Of course, nothing of this sort existed in my time. The idea of radio did not exist in my time. No one had even in science fiction conceived that there could be radio. The whole notion of talking across vast distances is a shocking business and when I sent Mary

Weather Lewis out on his famous trip up the Missouri River in 184, I didn't expect to hear from him for a couple of years. There would be no way for him to get information or even the news that he was alive back to me in any timely fashion. So the fact that radio exists is a shock to anyone of my era, but a delight. And I understand that your funding mechanism is a very intelligent one that you do not tax the American people for this. A very small portion of their tax dollars supports public radio and public television. But for the most part, public radio is funded by volunteerism that people willingly put their hands in their pockets, take money out of their pockets and make it available to the station of their choice. If they don't wish to support it, nobody will ever try to force them to do so. It's a voluntary tax and that's ideal in a free society. Volunteary taxation that certainly sounds Jeffersonian. I don't know if it truly was. Were there voluntary taxes in your

time, Mr. Jefferson? Well, in one sense, if you pay your preacher, that's a voluntary tax. If a group of people, as I was involved in it, it sort of crossed between volunteerism and the early corporation, but I was involved in several in my lifetime, one to develop the Potomac River, along with George Washington, and we took up a subscription of people who wanted this done. And we did it more or less as a public service. I suppose partly as an investment, but we did it because we knew that it needed to be done and we would never have thought of turning to government to do it. Early on in my life, I helped to clear the revanna of obstructions. The revanna is the small tributary of the of the James River, which flows more or less past my homes in Auburnmouth County. And I wanted to be able to get wheat and other commodities down to the warves in the lower James. And the river was obstructed with rocks and shoals and rapids and

bank slides and so on. And so I took up a subscription of fellow-minded Virginians. And we cleared by voluntary cooperation, the revanna of the obstructions that prevented it from being a commercial artery. So this is the same sort of thing. And in some cases, one would have looked to government to provide a license for a monopoly so that the investors would not be unnecessarily competing with another canal or another group that was trying to do much the same thing. And government might even in some instances provide a small amount of seed money for such projects. So it's quite similar. We had nothing of this sort. Another way perhaps a more closer analogy from my time would be gentlemen's libraries. You know, there are public libraries and everyone listening is familiar with them. There are also gentlemen's libraries. A gentleman's library would be a group of say a hundred men in Philadelphia who would agree to pool some funds, to acquire a collection of books and a reading

room, and maybe to hire a librarian to maintain order in that library. And this would have nothing to do with government at all. It was just a voluntary association as Alexis de Tocqueville would later call it of interested citizens to do something in a cooperative way that would be much more difficult to do individually. Volunteerism, that's a term that one has her a great deal in this country's recent history. I'm not sure that we're hearing it all that much now, but the idea that citizens, if they really need something, should not automatically look to government in order to find that need met but should stand up themselves and ban together. I think it's a wise thing. There are some activities that are clearly government-based defense. Our war department, to defend ourselves from invasion or threats, cannot be done voluntarily. This is something that only a government could do and in my opinion, only a national government. One of the breakthroughs of our

confederation was when we gave all defense activities to the national government and the states were coordinating bodies, but New York could not have its own national defense. It could not have its own war department. It could not have its own foreign policy. So subordinating state sovereignty to the national government for the purposes of defense was a was a key breakthrough in the history of constitutional government in the United States. I think a post office needs to be a government run entity coordinated centrally with branches, co-equal branches in the subordinate states. There are a number of things which government has to do. Raise revenue, print money. We don't want voluntary printings of money. So the business of wisdom is to decide what functions are truly governmental in nature and what are private or cooperative. And I suspect your list, your list of what the government ought to do would would surprise most of our listeners today because it would be a

rather short list. Be a tiny list, a meager list. I believe as an 18th century and early 19th century man, as a figure of the enlightenment and a believer in a republican limited government, that government should do those things which government alone can do. I don't regard government, for example, as needing to supply your old age pensions. I think you ought to do that yourself. I don't think government should provide health care. That seems to me to be your business to maintain your own health and provide for medical care in emergency. I think government probably should only do those things which are enumerated in the Constitution of the United States. And I mean specifically enumerated. Or if it wants to do more, it should come back to the people and seek an amendment which will enable further activity. This does not sound as though you're endorsing the so-called implied powers doctrine. Well, the implied powers doctrine is the work of my friend and adversary. Alexander Hamilton.

Hamilton was my social friend. I suppose up to a point. I certainly did not think ill of him as a human being. But as a political figure, I regarded him as corrupt and actuated by a false concept of the Constitution. His concept of the Constitution, and I will freely admit he was one of its makers, I was not. But his reading of the Constitution is that there is elasticity in it and that the Constitution makers who met in Philadelphia in 1787 could not possibly anticipate all of the emergent needs of their government. And to have hamstrung the government with a very narrow view of its enumerated powers would destroy the country in his view. So for the country to be able to thrive in changing circumstances, with changing demographics and technologies and social structures and so on, with new emergencies coming from at home or abroad, a government that was going to survive in the long run

said Hamilton would need to have implied powers. There would need to be a grant of general powers given to the government that it could interpret carefully. But with some resourcefulness to meet emerging issues. And this is the doctrine of implied powers or broad construction. And in 1791 in the famous first great constitutional struggle of our history, Hamilton said that he saw a national bank implied in the general welfare clause and the necessary and proper clause of the Constitution of the United States. I did not. I'm a strict constructionist and so, for example, I very much wanted internal improvements, canals, bridges, clearing of rivers, etc. Postal roads, national highways, all sorts of internal improvements what you might call infrastructural improvements. At a time where the country was really a raw wilderness. But I would not have authorized those as president until there was an enabling

amendment that permitted them. Just because they're desirable doesn't make them constitutional in my view. And yet implied powers has become the way I think of of American government. No one nowadays it seems to me seriously proposes the kind of strict constructionism that you that you're describing, Mr. Jefferson. Well, it would be impossible in your time because your world has changed so dramatically from my world and you have no choice but to but to do some things in government that would not have been contemplated by the founding fathers. My preferred solution would have been a series of amendments to each time and something new came up. A series of amendments to enable it. And then from time to time a new constitution to consolidate those changes and to anticipate others. I like the idea of a series of frequently amended literally construed constitutions rather than a single elastic or as you like to put it living constitution. I will admit before anybody need ask that the Louisiana

Purchase in 183 was a stretching of that of that concept. I think you saw the implied powers and the purchase of Louisiana. No, you know, I did and I didn't. I certainly take your point but let's differentiate Mr. Hamilton's bank and my Louisiana Purchase. The bank was something that Hamilton thought would be great as an engine of our economy and a coordinating structure for economic development in the United States. And he believed that the finances of this country would be much better off with a central banking system and would probably would hurt us in the long run. Might even hurt us in the short run if we didn't have central banking of some sort. So he persuaded Congress and President Washington to sign the bank bill to first create and then sign the bank bill. There's nothing inevitable about this. This was something dreamt up by Alexander Hamilton.

There were other mechanisms for coordinating our finances. Some of them that were already in place. So Hamilton decided that there should be a national bank. It came out of the mind of a very ingenious human being. The Louisiana Purchase was dropped in our lap by Napoleon Bonaparte. We didn't go seeking it. I didn't invent the idea of acquiring the Louisiana territory. Frankly, I didn't even truly want the Louisiana territory at the time that it came to us. I wanted New Orleans. Under the Commerce Clause, I certainly had the authority to acquire New Orleans to keep the Mississippi River open. The river was our chief highway in the West. So you see the difference between the two. Napoleon suddenly offers us this unprecedented extraordinary gift for three cents per acre of what I called an empire for liberty. Now we have to deal with it. In Hamilton's case, there was nothing that had to be dealt with. He just decided this is what he wanted and convinced a supine congress and a somewhat uncertain president to go along with him.

I think these are fundamentally different, although I freely admit that in order to acquire Louisiana once Napoleon provided it to us, I had to stretch the Constitution. Thank you, Mr. Jefferson. You are listening to the Thomas Jefferson hour. Today, Mr. Jefferson is talking among other things about that most Jeffersonian of American institutions, public radio, and he is doing it in the hope that as your local station asks you for contributions, you will step up and make your voice heard by supporting your local public radio station. You know, I corresponded all of my life, there are at least 22,000 letters, and really the central issue of my life as a communicator was how do I stay in touch? You know, with Madison when I was in Europe, with my wife when I was in Philadelphia, writing the Declaration of Independence with my children when I was the president of the United States, with overseers at Montagello, with correspondents and informants from the

American West, with Maryweather Lewis, with Zebulin Pike, with William Dunbar. You know, communication was a very difficult business in my time, and I would send letters and not know whether they would ever be received. Because they might be lost, they might be opened, they might be thrown into the river. Any number of things could happen, there was no efficiency in our national communication system, and if you've read letters from my time, you know, that two things occur, the moment somebody begins a letter to you. The first thing that she or he says is, I received your letter of X of the 13th instant, or of the 17th ultimo, there's a whole Latin way of doing this, but basically they were saying, is I received the letter that you sent, or if you sent five, here are the three that I received. So there, there was an accounting, I got your letter, here was the date, so now you can rest assured that it reached me, and there's frequently a little discussion of the contents. So that's number one. Number two,

at the beginning of a letter of the sort, someone would say, and by the way, my mother's still alive, and my brother's still alive, but three of my children have died, and my wife is very ill, or whatever the circumstances might be, but people immediately accounted for life and death, because people would go into Kentucky to take up a farm, and maybe never be heard from again, and wouldn't know whether their relatives back home in Virginia or Pennsylvania were alive or dead. And so communication was the central issue of my life, and even with it, in your time would be seen as an exceedingly inefficient and frustrating system of communication, I managed to keep up with everybody through the course of a long life. You now have technologies, you know, public radio, public television, cable television, the telephone, the fax machine, the internet, email, cell phones, telephones per se, that have solved the problem of communication, and public radio

has a special status as one that disseminates enlightenment, not just talk. Public radio disseminates enlightenment. We're going to take a short break, your local station will now ask you to step forward and support it. Please stay tuned. We will be back in just a moment. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Mr. Jefferson, before we went to break and our local station asked its supporters to stand up and and provide for the future of public radio. You said something very interesting. You said that public radio is a means of disseminating enlightenment. What do you mean by that? Well, and we communicate with many people for many reasons. We have conversations with our friends. We chat with each other. We say socially important things that are basically

ephemeral. How are you? I hope you are well. Tell me a little bit about what's going on in your world. There's a lot of it's called fatigue communication. It's not throw away communication, but it's light. It's meant to enable social exchange without allowing too much information or intensity to get in the way. And we all are communicators. That's the nature of the human animal. And in your world, you have a wide range of technologies of communication. So wide and so amazing that any one of my era would really want to bow down and and genuinely reflect towards the systems that you have created in the internet. For example, is the greatest information, fact delivery system in the history of humankind. And it dwarfs anything that that the French encyclopedia could have produced. The French encyclopedia,

which I thought one of the great publishing projects in the history of the world, was nothing compared to what your internet provides. So you have unbelievable technologies and unbelievable amounts of exchange, communication, information. But most of it is undisciplined. It's it's not careful. It's not thoughtful. It's not deeply researched. It's not fair-minded. It's not high-minded. It just is. And you have on your on regular radio, for example, on commercial radio, AM or FM, neither one of which could have been understood in my time. You have an enormous amount of exchange and of information, but very little of it has any value. It seems to me there's a lot of opinion being exchanged on on talk radio and music and commercial advertisement and glibness and wit and sarcasm and sexual

innuendo and pattern. But very little of it by any even minimal standard of enlightenment would pass for discourse. It's something else. It's entertainment. And television is is even worse. It seems to me that that if you if you watched as much television as it took me to learn Greek, there would be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of hours. And I wonder if during that entire period you would see and hear enough to justify a hundredth of that time or a thousandth of that investment of time. So I think nobody who's listening doesn't understand that most of the media, including in your time your newspapers, is filled with nonsense or frivolity or viciousness and instability. You've used the term discourse. What do you mean by

discourse, Mr. Jefferson? Discourse is communication which is devoted to the spread and examination of ideas. If I say my wife is ill at home at Monticello and I'm deeply worried about her, that's communication but it's not discourse. But if you and I begin to talk about Montesquieu and Montesquieu's theories of a mixed government and whether those theories really are applicable to American circumstance, that's discourse. It's not a lecture that's one person talking to others. Discourse is between individuals or groups. It's ongoing. It's evolving. It's developing. And it's about important things and it's about ideas. And so that's a short working definition of discourse. You have all this media and so little of it is discourse and then suddenly

there's public radio and public radio has news that is more careful. It takes more time. It allows people to speak their minds. It investigates a little bit more deeply. It's open to nuance. It's tolerant of difference. It's respectful of cultures that are not the ones of those who are making it or funding it. There is a serious desire to exchange ideas. There's not just music being played, but there will be a commentator discussing the music, giving notes so that the music is better appreciated by the listener. There are programs that feature the art of storytelling, which I think you almost never see in on major media. There are documentaries which take the time to investigate an issue but without any need to be overtly attractive. The emphasis is on exploration

rather than entertainment. You're implying you haven't quite said it, but public radio seems willing to deal with things divorced of a Hamiltonian motive. The implication has almost been that commercial media do what they have to do in order to create listeners sell products be successful. The public radio's model is a different one. Yes, very much so. The analogy that suits best is of the subscription library. If 100 gentlemen pool their funds to create a subscription library in my time as we frequently did, we don't buy all the books that are, we buy the books that matter to us. A public library, which is a different entity, has a need to buy all the books that are, or a smattering of them. It wastes a lot of time and funds to create a collection that

a group of scientists might not be interested in. What public radio does is to pool earnest citizens' funds to do a certain sort of discourse. When they offer those funds, they are encouraging that discourse. They are implying and unwillingness to spend that money for silliness. They're not people without a sense of humor and of playfulness is certainly part of that world, but they don't want dating shows or wrestling or reality programming or salacious sexual innuendo. They're looking for something more refined, more grammatical, more thoughtful, more idea-based, more serious, and more respectful. And yet the minute you've said that, Mr. Jefferson, I think of one of public radios, most popular programs,

CAR talk, where two fellows spend a good deal of time talking about automobiles and not doing it necessarily with regard to the Queen's English. I believe that's broadcast on Saturdays. Public radio, a vehicle for discourse. What is the place of discourse in society? What role does discourse itself play, particularly in America in the 21st century? Well, if we really mean it that we want to be self-governing, and I'm not sure you do in your time, but if you meant it that you want to govern yourselves, then you need to know what the world is. How can you talk about a national health care initiative if you don't understand what's at stake? How this would be funded? How existing systems would be folded into it? How wide the access would be? What sorts of unintended problems might come from it? What other public health systems in the world have been?

And there are problems and opportunities? Where health care seems to be headed and what kinds of opportunities and costs that represents. For any citizen who's listening to this, to be able to vote on a health care program or worse, a government that may or may not undertake a health care program, that citizen needs to know so much more than than he does. The same is true of defense. You're fighting a war in a foreign country. You need to know a tremendous amount about history, politics, the art of warfare, the history of militarism, the nature of military organizations, the psychology of young men and women, comparative religion, any one of these issues would require months and months and months of investigation for for anyone listening to be a good citizen. Not a great citizen, but a good citizen. If you add things to this like agriculture, education, higher education, environmental policy, the national infrastructure of roads and

bridges and highways, air traffic, national security, the licensing of new drugs, the maintenance of the health and the safety of our food supply, it's a bewildering array of subjects and problems that any legislature has to address. Unless you're willing just to abdicate and say, I'm voting for this guy, not that guy, and they're after they're on their own, which is essentially what American politics has become, then you need to be engaged. How are you going to be engaged? Well, it seems to me that the number one system of public engagement in our republic is public broadcasting, public television and public radio. If you listen to public radio and you watch public television, you will know a good deal about the world that's unfolding before you. And not just watch those programs that peak your interest, but you're suggesting, Mr. Jefferson, a commitment to listening to or watching

that beyond one's normal little interest. You're saying drink deeply from the whole product. You don't have to listen, you know, 24 hours per day, obviously. The productive life is much better than passive life. But the nice thing about radio is that you can you can listen while you work. It's different from other systems. When you're reading a newspaper, that's what you that's what you have to do. When you're watching television, you have to watch. But when you're listening to radio, you can be doing something else. And that's it. It seems to me very useful indeed. And let me just briefly make the case for car talk. I don't, you know, it's not my cup of tea as an 18th century man, as you might well understand a couple of yokals from the east, laughing about people's automobile problems. But it seems to me that if it helps people understand how automobiles work and give them a sense that they can go back to a car manufacturer and complain or that they can ask the right questions or that they might even under certain circumstances change their own oil or fix their own flat or paint their car or at least know

something more about cars rather than just being a buyer of services for automobiles. That's Jeffersonian. The more we take charge of our lives, the more we understand the complexities of our world and the more Jeffersonian we are. Well, I think it's safe to say that public radio has pioneered certain genre, I think, public televisions. This old house was a great program for people who who were living in older homes and didn't necessarily know how to repair or replace certain kinds of things. And thanks to Bob via way back, they were they were able to become much handier. Once again, a Jeffersonian vehicle, it seems to me. Another thing that public radio has done, which I think is remarkable is due gavel to gavel recording and broadcasting of important public affairs. A set of hearings about a controversial appointee to the Supreme Court. An investigation of the war department and investigation of the president. Commercial media almost inevitably cut short their coverage of certain

events because they have to pay their bills and and please their advertisers. Public radio and public television still have a need to to please and to keep their listenership. They can't they have to always juggle at some sort of entertaining value against pure information. But they they turn out to be infinitely more generous about coverage of important events even when they're slightly tedious than all commercial media. That it seems to me is in itself a an argument for public radio. No commercial television station will go to a 12 hour congressional hearing on the future of security in this country and come away with the most dramatic 30 seconds of tape. But though even though those 30 seconds of tape may be the most dramatic, they aren't necessarily the most characteristic

representative or useful. Discourse that is the key behind public radio which you have termed a Jeffersonian institution, an institution in which people voluntarily give money in order to provide a product that is both entertaining and thought provoking. Let me just take it to one further level. It creates a common culture. I belong to something that was loosely known as the Republic of Letters. It wasn't a form of club like the Society of the Cincinnati or Phi Beta Kappa or a Rotary Club. It was really a vague tacit organization without bylaws but people of intellect and science from around the world communicated with each other, met for events, bought the same books, read the same sorts of journals. This became what might be in quotations called the Republic of Letters. It created a common culture of discourse between like-minded people. Public radio is both the creator of a common culture and a populist version of the same. It's not just a group of

a hundred elites thinking of themselves as culturally superior. Public radio can be heard as I understand it by all 300 million Americans. Nobody's excluded. Nobody's radio does not include the public side of the dial. You don't even have to pay for it if you want to listen to it without voluntarily taxing yourself. Nobody can find you out as opposed to Britain where in Britain on television, on the public television system, there are spies out in neighborhood seeing whether your television has been licensed or not. In this country it really is free and so the the Republic of Letters is now available to 300 million people if they only want to participate in it. And yet if people don't step up and actually support it financially, this will not continue. Well it's always important for people who care about culture to support it. Thank you very much, Mr. Jefferson. We'll be back in just a moment to support your local public radio station. Welcome back to the Thomas Jefferson Hour. I hope you've made your

phone call to your local public radio station pledging your support. This is the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Mr. Jefferson today has suggested public radio is an institution that he would have he would have liked it deeply. Seated across from me now is no longer Mr. Jefferson McClay Jenkinson who so ably represents him. Clay, it is a Jeffersonian institution, public radio. It certainly is. I think you know what are the Jeffersonian institutions in this country, the public library? Certainly. The public school, national public radio, national public television, the Smithsonian, the National Galleries of Art, the National Museum of American Indians, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities. I mean these are our Jeffersonian institutions along with museums and organizations of that sort of public parks. He would have liked that. There's something just marvelous about the idea of public radio. I mean I'm on public radio, you and I are on public radio, but I love public

radio and here's why. It, well I grew up in North Dakota and we had, when I was growing up we had, I don't know, you know, 30 or 40 radio stations and a few television stations and you could drive across North Dakota and you would be hearing top 40 or country western or worse, you know, it's just, I mean those were both, those are the highlights if you could get that. And the talk then was very low level talk. There's a lot of talk radio today. There was Christian radio, but you could spend a lot of time looking for something to listen to while being in your car in North Dakota or being at home. And a lot of it is just, you know that kind of commercial radio style of the hyperactive, just jockey saying things that he doesn't believe to get attention and that's certainly true of talk radio and talk television even now. And suddenly here comes public radio and it's calm, it's intelligent, it's investigative, it's thoughtful, it's dignified,

it's just a breath of fresh air in a sea of nonsense. And it has been since it began. I don't like all things about public radio. I'm sure nobody does, but I like public radio in the aggregate as one of I think the most civilized things in this country. And if you just think for a moment about what America would be like without public television and public radio, it's a shocking void that would suddenly be there. And as you said at the beginning bill, this is really kind of a marvelous system because it's not tax-based more than for a minuscule amount. It really is when people say on public radio listeners like you, it's, you know, this program is supported by listeners like you. That's how it works. People decide in Norfolk or Colorado Springs, or Fresno, or throughout North Dakota, or around this country that they believe in this entity and they pay for it. And I must say back in the days when we were

live on a particular public radio station in addition to being syndicated, we did our share fundraising and it was nice when the phone would ring. The phone would ring. The people would say what they liked and didn't like. And you got a sense of connection. And you and I have done some traveling in the in the world of Thomas Jefferson to North Dakota and elsewhere. I do more than you. And I meet the people who listen to the program. And they come up to talk about the Jefferson hour. But they are also listeners to car talk and a prairie home companion and all things considered in morning edition and the world. And you know, whatever else is on in their in their local station. These are people who are our regular Americans, but who take themselves seriously, culturally in a non pretentious way. And if we were a Jeffersonian nation, there would be hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of public radio stations rather than hands full. Well, the thought of prairie home companion existing and commercial radio is beyond the pale, a man making fun of of the culture out of which he

grew, but obviously cares dearly about. I mean, what a wonderful, wonderful institution that here again, one doesn't see how that could possibly exist in any sort of Hamiltonian medium. I remember when I was a young man listening to prairie home companion when it first came on. And I want to linger on this because not all of our listener stations carry prairie home companion, but everyone knows of it. And I remember just sitting in a dorm room or in my car and listening to it and really being transported into another world, into that kind of sweet powder milk biscuit world and Barbara Ann Bunsen and the people of Lake Wavagon and their little foibles and problems and the music, the discourse, the laughter, the audience applause would kind of transport me out of whatever world I was in into some other zone for an hour. It's still extraordinary and many of us who are not Midwesterners find it's just a fascinating look at another culture, a humorous look. I'm told

it's harder to believe that people listening to our program are transported to somewhere else too. It's not clear where, but that they actually this is a, I mean, I hear this so often, Bill, it has to be true. People say that they go out in there, they can't get, they can't get the program where they live for whatever reason. So they go out in their cars, especially true in North Dakota. And they, and they drive up on some bluff. And Sunday morning or when, you know, it's Sunday in North Dakota, but wherever it is, people drive up somewhere where the reception is good. And they sit there for an hour listening. Whenever they say that, it really gives me anxiety fits because I think we better be, we better be better. We better have something to say if someone is driving to a ridge to hear me. Well, you actually had had the opportunity to, to be sitting, I guess, in a coffee shop somewhere. And, and, and to hear, to hear a voice in the background that you, that you vaguely recognized. Well, let me, before I tell this horrible story, let me just say to everyone, I really do. And I know you do too, Bill, believe in public

radio. And we love our program. We love the other programs on public radio. And we urge everyone who's listening to be serious about it and to, to give money to your local station, give generously. And to make your views known about what sort of programming you like and don't like. But I think that it really is the case that a passive listener to public radio is cheating. Because unless you want a world in which the only things that happen are commercial or government funded, if you want a world where there are entities like this that that exist by voluntary taxation, then you have to volunteer. And that's the, that's the paradox of freedom on an institutional question like that. So I'm in North Dakota. And it's a Sunday. And I want to go to Barnes and Noble because this is, this is a complex Jeffersonian problem. I'm finishing a book. And I, and I need a reference library. And there are no libraries open on Sunday morning in North Dakota. So I go to, I'm going to go to Barnes and Noble, a cheat, use, use Barnes and Noble as a little library and get eight

books on a table and do some writing. But it's closed because it's not, it doesn't open till noon. So now I've, I really, I'm fighting a deadline and it's Sunday morning in North Dakota. And I'm there visiting. I've a rental car. I've been in my hotel room, but I need books. So I, I'm going to wait for Barnes and Noble. And so I decide I'll go to a coffee shop. And I'll just wait. So I walk into this wonderful coffee shop on Main Street in, in, in Bismarck, North Dakota. And it's just like one of those lovely independent coffee shops. And you hear the hiss of the Capuchito. And I put my computer down on a table to claim the table. And then I walk up to the, walk up towards the, the counter to buy my coffee. And I hear this voice. And some, it's this guy who's talking about slavery and that Negroes may or may not be inferior. And that once we free blacks, we're probably going to need to repatriate them. And I thought, who is this idiot? What kind of bigoted ridiculous creep is on this radio station? And then I realized it was me. It was Thomas Jefferson. And I was so embarrassed. And I came

back and I said to our producer, Janie Guil, our friend and producer, Janie, we've got to ID this program a lot more than we do. Because someone's just walking in a truck driving, turning on their radio, walking into someplace. And they hear the less, the less enlightened sides of Thomas Jefferson. And it could lead to some, some confusion. So I'm, I'm there. And now I'm hearing myself. And I'm droning on. And I'm so embarrassed because I was afraid, you know, North Dakota only has 600,000 people. And, and Bismarck only has about 50,000. I'm afraid someone's going to recognize me. The last thing I wanted was to be recognized at all. But certainly in this moment. So you ordered your coffee in a stentorian voice. So I went over and the guy said, what would you like? And I said, I'd like a double cappuccino. So I got my coffee and I was really skulking in the, I'm kind of a skulker in public situations anyway. And so I'm skulking around. And I went, as soon as I got my coffee, I went back to my computer, shut it down and left.

But I was so embarrassed to walk in on myself this way. It felt, and there were people listening in these little clusters. And I thought I wanted to go up to them and say, look, that's Thomas Jefferson. He lived 200 years ago. His views are no longer widely accepted. You need to understand that he was this and this sort of a man. And then there were other people who were like doing the crossword puzzle or flirting. And I wanted to go up to them and say, hey, listen to this. You can't be coming in here and not listening to this. This is the Thomas Jefferson hour. So I had this wide range of responses to this moment. And I got the heck out of there just as quickly as I could and went to Barnes and Noblewear. It was quiet. But what a wonderful thing. What a wonderful thing that the views of Thomas Jefferson, the third president of the United States, are being disseminated and being disseminated nationally. We need a Jeffersonian voice, I think, in our time. I haven't been able to quite locate it. But I heard on television that a new rating of presidents, a popular rating, finds George Washington number seven, number seven. And Jefferson's not at the top of the list.

And I'm wondering, my goodness, what are we going to do? We need, you know, we need the wisdom, the wisdom of these people who actually lived the Republic of Letters. Well, I do think that all Americans should know about John Adams and John Quincy Adams and Monroe and Madison and Jefferson and Washington and some others. But those that cluster, and not just them, but Hamilton and Patrick Henry and William Short and Thomas Payne, Joseph Priestley, Benjamin Rush, Abigail Adams, Mary Wollstonecraft, Mercy Otis Warren, that cluster of people who were of the 18th century, who were really wrestling with what a society can be. We need them and we're we've forgotten them. They knew they were living in extraordinary times and they realized that what one must do in extraordinary times is be prepared. And this was the best prepared generation perhaps in American history.

Wouldn't it be great if we were all better prepared? And of course, we're offering an easy fix, just listen to your public radio station, support it. You get free Jefferson once a week in perpetuity, just support public radio and for the same price, whatever you decide it's worth per year, $150, $80, $500, I don't know, but whatever you decide it's worth, think of what you get. Okay, let's leave the Jefferson hour out. People who like it really like it, but car talk, the news in a really interesting way, Nina Tottenberg, it's worth the price of public radio alone. Fresh air, I love fresh air. All things considered a prairie home companion. I mean, it's just, it's just riches in every direction and you think, what would, well, I know, you know, what would you pay to go see a program of the caliber of a prairie home companion in an auditorium? You might spend $100 for that ticket or $50 for that ticket. You know, for $100, you can hear it 52 times a year. With really one of the most, I'm going to

get a chance to interview Garrison Keeler here in a few days in Nevada. You know, Garrison Keeler is really one of the most remarkable storytellers in American history. You have to put him in the same camp with someone like Mark Twain. I don't think he has Twain's satiric genius, but he has something that's marvelous and magic and people can listen to him and it's free and it isn't. It's free because you can get it free, but it costs somebody money and it's expensive. And I hope that the people listening will do the Jeffersonian thing and support their public radio really as generously as they can. Support it and listen to it. I think that's, as you said, that's part two. We've got to listen to it in order to be be our better selves. And then we need to talk about it with our friends and we need to buy books that we that are that are mentioned on public radio and public television and engage in those conversations. And let me just mention one that's been much on your mind and mind.

I think both of us really like a new book by Chalmers Johnson called The Sorrows of Empire. It's about American Empire where we're headed in the world. Chalmers Johnson is a very distinguished Japanist. He's an expert on Japan in Asia. It's written a book called The Sorrows of Empire. His previous book was Blowback. This is a book that I think every American should read. You know, we're living in the best of times and the worst of times. And it's the best of times because we have more access to more information and more culture and more perspectives and nuances and points of view than ever before in the history of the planet. It's the worst of times because instead of that we're watching reality television and dating games and professional wrestling and and and ridiculous talk shows full of opinionation rather than information and enlightenment. We have to clean up our act. Public radio awaits. Please give generously and listen often. We'll see you next week for another more traditional form of the Thomas Jefferson Hour. Good day.

Thank you for listening and we hope you join us again next week for another entertaining historically accurate and thought-provoking commentary through the eyes of Thomas Jefferson.