Illustrated Daily; 6002; John Nichols: Magical Realist, Part 2

So there's indeed just slippy, as I was hoping to bring the national blessing, the people are making the journey. Well, my life to be beautiful my own life. Nothing in my own life just depends upon myself is an individual, right? I am connected to every circuit on the planet just I get my food you know there are Mexican nationals in the Messia Valley that are picking my food leading really lousy lives right while I get fat on what what they produce I think I have an obligation if I'm enjoying the food to enter struggles which will try to get them you know just outhouses the illustrated daylight managing editor how roads hello last night we began and tonight we

continue a rare television interview with the lively and celebrated American novelist John Nichols of Taos Nichols has just recently completed an important new piece of nonfiction it is called on the mesa it is a philosophical work at times poetical in character it is also a piece with substantial and potentially controversial political content I for one in a lot of people that admired John in his work admire the fact that he's a politically committed writer and he lets you know there's no secret to it most people that I have talked to that have read for example the milagrobine field war don't see a problem with the politics in fact admire him for taking a stance in regard to the political situation in New Mexico I think one of the things that people admire about John is the fact that he is for the little guy he is for the people of

Northern New Mexico who don't have political clout who don't have the political machine on their side he very quickly got to work and is still working with the farmers and people in the area to help defend their water rights I admire someone like that well clearly for John Nichols politics has become an overriding concern and the young man whose literary career began with the sterile cuckoo is hard to recognize and the sometimes provocative political ideas embraced in his recent writings at times on this deserted mace I can convince myself that I'm capable of hearing anything thus I make myself very still my eyes glaze over all my muscles except those in my ears relax and I listen to this savage beautiful world in El Salvador bullet is entering the brain of a young man with his thumbs tied behind his back in the dying Florida Everglades erosion spoon bill is

chomping on a small crustacean not far from where an alligator is sunning itself in the Brazilian jungle three frightened Indians are crouch beside a cassava plant listening to the growl of a distant bulldozer crickets feson scrocking owls actors and little theaters volcano sizzling old faithful erupting white rivers water smashing against boulders spiders weaving trees falling in Borneo gorillas thumping their chest lions roaring elephants trumpeting windows closing neon signs and tuna lamps fizzing sales flapping fog horns train whistles fish mongers chattering the anguish cries of torture victims newspaper presses slamming out tomorrow's additions tonight soccer balls rico shaying fans cheering at hockey and high ally contest snowmobiles in Siberia bogeys voice feedels speaking machetes cutting sugar cane shy pandas tiptoeing through their diminishing universe what else is there to say about it the world in a grain of sand infinity in the palm of my hand thanks to the mesa i am determined again that my life be dedicated

to the idea that all possibilities for joy must survive for myself and for everyone john why on the mesa i spent a lot of time out on the mesa the west there were west mesa west of tals i love it a lot because there's nobody out there there's just hundreds of square miles of sagebrush basically and they're planning to do certain things to the mesa out there they're going to drill oil and gas wells are they're doing seismic testing they're also planning to put all those you know there's electronic giants they're going to run them right up to the mesa that kind of thing there's various depredations that are being planned to rub out this area because a nobody lives out there and all anybody sees when they go out there sagebrush and who likes sagebrush right there's no water there's just a bunch of rattlesnakes horn toads things like that now for years i've used the mesa as a real kind of relief from the hectic part of my life in the whole talsine that kind of thing i love to go out and just wander in that stillness and

that wideness that that kind of vastness so i thought what i would do is use the mesa as a kind of metaphor and write a book which had a lot of just naturalist writing lyricism um leading into a lot of echo dunes day writing about what we're doing to the planet i mean you can take any little spot of earth that's threatened and the entire planet is threatened right and use it as a metaphor for the overall view then i wanted to add a radical politics to it because i think a lot of the conservationists and echo gorillas in this country stop short of really saying what needs to happen to save you know our land are the natural part of our country and the planet anybody who has studied you know american economy or you know how capitalism functions any economic philosopher will agree that planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption are a

major tenance of how we run our lives here in america nobody can argue with that look at all the garbage we create look at the waste in packaging you buy a chapstick 79 cent to the chapstick right it comes in a piece of cardboard with all kinds of printing on it and a big piece of plastic over right i mean that's a lot of conspicuous consumption and waste but to get back to on the mace right oh i have you here it's no the fact of the matter is okay that we live in a country based on that kind of system which means that we have to can planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption are based on the idea that resources are infinite that we can continue to destroy resources out infinite them all right the fact of the matter is we all know we can't resources are finite and having an economic system based on planned obsolescence and conspicuous consumption is a formula for planetary suicide at abbey one said you know to have a system based on growth

for the sake of growth which is also the way our economic system works growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell okay i wanted to take the taos mason and what is plan for its destruction okay and use it as a metaphor as any kind of ecological or political writer does right for the destruction of the planet right john mure 1 said on fact this quote appears prominently in the book john mure 1 said that when we try to pick out anything by itself we find it connected to everything else in the universe right we talk last evening about the young john nickels solid middle class background preps schools hamilton college how how came you to the the political views i mean those are not necessarily the views that someone with your background would embrace today i suspect most of those who graduated from hamilton college with you

and become lawyers and doctors and stockbrokers and yeah i don't know i suppose like i mentioned before talking about vietnam going to a kind of culture shock i started reading about the united states in vietnam and protesting to vietnam war that led me to read all about us history it led me to get involved in the history of the world at a whole different kind of level my my understanding of the history of the united states was george washington and the cherry tree and abraham link in the great emancipator you know the civil war was fought to free the slaves that kind of stuff i never heard a genocide i grew up not even realizing for example i mean i never thought of you know the first puritan's land at plimuth rock you know my understanding of that history after a great american education is jeez i all sat down together in eight turkeys it thanks giving right and the fact of the matter is the first pure puritan's land and on primith rock and started slaughtering native americans right first spaniards came into mexico and moved up into new mexico right and started slaughtering native american people so that you know you begin

in the sixteen hundreds with a million and a half native americans in this country by eighteen eighty two when you got the wounded knee massacre there's only eighty thousand left right that's genocide you know and i grew up the only time i ever heard genocide was you know judgements at nuremberg where the united states sat there and accused all the nazis right of killing six million jews and eight million poles or whatever and i was just real smug and vietnam just really blasted that out of me because i went back it was just a connective uh it just was connected to all the rest of us history okay but that was a major impact on a lot of us yeah and of those upon whom it had that impact even there though the i mean there's a lot of roads of part 80 percent of them just went back to college when it was all over one of the tragedies of the protest of the vietnam war is that for eighty percent of the people who got into it they saw it as they took it just

as a a separate kind of historical aberration right they didn't see it connected to anything else right i mean we get people in this country they look at for example the united states entry into world war two against the japanese they say pearl harbour right it's because of pearl harbour that the united states went to war with japan the way i see it right is a hundred and thirty five years ago hundred and forty five years ago admiral parry sailed into tokyo harbour in eighteen fifty with a bunch of gun boats right from america and told the japanese if you people don't open your doors to favorable trade policy with the united states will level your city right from that moment on the united states as an imperial power was locked into a collision course with japan as an imperial power in the pacific right the war of eighteen ninety eight we up the any we go to war with spain we take you we take port aurica we do all that we also go into the philippines we take the

philippines right if somebody does that conversely in this area in our sphere of influence the united states goes absolutely crazy well the japanese went crazy because they had they wanted their empire to spread all through the pacific into china uh... in that area right you're talking people don't understand history like that i was going to say you don't understand the connection you're talking about a level in and and style of historical analysis alien to most people it's alien because people don't think about it but it's true history is not accidental history is like a science it's a new history indeed is determined absolutely and what do you see what do you say it's going where do you see it's going where we headed hell on a handcart if we continue doing what we're doing you would when when your political views began to get established get focused for them you mentioned last night that you tried to do something that you you said originally didn't feel you had the skill that an anti-communist like

kester could do something with darkness at noon that you admired although you didn't like it i wanted to learn how to write that kind of a political book do you do you think you have that you found that skill now can you write that yeah i think some of the stuff i've done i mean the the milagro beanfield war is a real heavy political book you know the milagro beanfield war is basically about class struggle i don't think there's any such thing as a political human being or a political art anyway right so why not be up front about it right you mentioned that on the mason's metaphor in a way it's metaphor it's milagro beanfield war metaphor yeah but it's just a book about class struggle when i and the magic journey for example when i sat down to write the magic journey i just wanted to write a book that described in detail how capitalism works that's your favorite book yeah oh yeah because there's a lot of the trilogy it's a three milagro magic journey it's the one my impression at least is the fewest people seem to respond to the magic journey i think that's because it's the toughest book i think it's

the best novel of all those three books and it also what do you mean the best novel what makes the best novel i don't know i think it's it's it's an attempt to encompass the whole it's an attempt to use the novel for as much as it can encompass it's also an attempt to wrestle with a whole lot of difficult stuff right i also think the characters the little coderia major characters in the magic journey are much more powerful than in the milagro beanfield war yeah we're talking the moment ago about to this style and in a brand of historical analysis not appreciated by most most people around the world and certain what do you mean around the world most people do not think in historical terms they make that's not true or that's most people in this country in America in the United States of North America do not think in those his kind of historical terms because we're trained not to i was recently in nigraga right and you just talk to people on the street and they are thinking in those historical terms they are very aware of their position in the

historical destiny of the world the great bulk of the population is busy trying to well you're talking about the United States population i think most people in the world are trying to put food in their mouths shoulder clothing yeah but else you got to realize this is something that people in america don't realize you know outside our borders two-thirds of the world right is either has undergone or is in the midst of undergoing revolutionary processes okay which means that even the peasants get educated to because they're involved in it so you get countries like china or even the soviet union or angola right or mozan beak or zimbabwe right let me try it this way yeah i talk to people of in the nature of my job yeah of all kinds of political views trying to be heard having those views heard from the far right or the far left through to lord knows where in between my impression is that most americans just don't want to be deeply involved in a political dialogue that is almost alien to a kind of individualist tradition

that's deeply rooted in this country that all politics is suspect no you're right about all americans we're also trained not to think in these terms one of the reasons you know we're six percent of the world's population that's all we consume 50 percent of the world's resources every year okay that means that we take a lot from other people you know if you really think about what that means it means we basically control the resources of the world and we use them up and we waste them right and we justify it we have to justify you know we justify you know capitalism is basically what it's sort of Darwinian survival of the fittest that's the way we just about if we can take it and keep it and hold it then we've got a right to it right it's also really important that we don't feel guilty about it right so we don't think in these historical terms don't you think most most americans just really would rather not get involved

to the extent they do they they they fear things that you they hear you saying almost they fear it because it it means that sooner or later our standard of living has got to go down the drain if the rest of the world just gets what they deserve right we don't say leave us alone I mean the first you know we talked about the first Puritan lands and the first Spaniard lands right we haven't left anybody else alone I mean we just start marching right I mean those first Puritans you hit Plymouth Rock you do Massachusetts do Rhode Island do Connecticut right anybody to get in your way just do them take care of the Mohawks the Iroquois the Shinnecock the you know look I say right until you hit the plains and then take care of the Kaewa and then knock off the Apaches and then you get out to the west coast right and and push everybody else into the ocean and when you get there you turn around you go to war with Spain you know you go to war with France I mean look at all the I mean we've been at war the United States I remember during the Vietnam

war Fulbright Senator Fulbright right right into the congressional record he says let me just put in here the amount of times just in the 20th century that the United States has sent troops into other countries to control their politics right and he read it and it was something like two or three times for every year since 1901 right but just what a day I mean you know I've got the president of the United States convinced obviously and apparently a large numbers of other Americans convinced that it is not in our best national interest to have for instance a communist state in Nicaragua which the Sandinistas are perceived as establishing a Castro like Cuban like communist state there that that is not in our that our security yes by the way but anyway our security is at stake basically if any country in the world tries to determine its own its own politics or government right because we are controlling you know in our hemisphere we

control just about every nation to our own benefit right if Santa if Dominican Republic has an election looks like a lefty is going to win when leftists win when socialist win they try and nationalize industry so they start getting some of their own their own resources for their own people right instead of 80 percent of it go into the United States right so in 1965 when the Dominican Republic does that President Johnson sends 25,000 Marines in there to make sure that our right-winger stays in power 1954 when Guatemala has an election right in the hour of our Benzeri where they start talking about nationalizing and doing things for their own people the CIA sends in planes over throws that thing and puts puts you know a series of dictators that are still controlling the country Nicaragua right we control Nicaragua since 1850 when William Walker went down there took over the country declared himself president right and you know rule the country for three years until they got thrown out I mean the Marines have occupied Nicaragua

since what 1910 okay to 1935 where upon we trained a national guard put the Samozes in power and control the country until 79 Chile you know democratically Alexa socialist president who decides the nationalized Kennecock copper right because 80 percent of the resources are being taken out of Chile where the profit is being made in the United States so what do we do we work to actively overthrow Salvador I ending we do this everywhere in the world you know the United States has the largest military force the most troops abroad occupying territory of any nation on earth I seem to remember in college reading textbooks by people like Henry Kissinger which implicitly seem to argue that what you have described though partisan and in and polemical it is largely true but it's true of all great power so that is historically the way the world has worked great spheres of influence the Soviet Union has a natural influence and a sphere of influence in

Eastern Europe that is one of the imperatives of a great power the United States has a great sphere of influence and an interest in that sphere of influence in this hemisphere that is a that's necessary this is what the great it seems to me geo political historians have argued about the nature of the history of international affairs that the world just gets divided up by great powers and that and to think otherwise is perhaps attractive but romanticism and unrealistic no and to think otherwise is to opt for a positive destiny for the planet to accept that garbage is to basically accept it we're all doomed so let's forget it back to matters literary you for it what I think you said thirty five thirty thirty five books over the years eight published of the whatever it is twenty twenty seven which have not been published anyone's not

anyway which ought have been published I don't think so really I think most of them are pretty bad books and there's one little book I wrote ones called number twenty five which I still like a lot it's real tricky and I don't I don't really know whether to push it or not and so I'm just kind of letting it simmer a little book that I published in nineteen seventy nine it's called a ghost in the music and that started in nineteen sixty five it was called a big diaphanus wildman and it was this real short novella about sort of based on the life of an uncle of mine it was a lobsterman and kundis harbor main and the story was just a little story dealing with him and I kept rewriting it over the years and his family disappeared from it and and I was in the novel for a while I disappeared from and then he finally kind of disappeared from it right

what I wanted to do was I wanted to write a book about creative the self-destructive nature of creative energy in America right and I chose to do it through the personality of a person finally I forgot about the book after I'd written it about ten times and then in nineteen seventy seven or seventy eight I asked my editor at hold for an advance on the nirvana blues and she said no that sounds like a dumb book I won't give you an advance on it right but I would give you a small advance on that novel a diaphanus wildman if you wanted to rewrite it you know as a novel I guess it was an novella that she's seen what could I do I didn't have an embed I said okay but I'm going to transfer it to northern New Mexico and instead of a lobsterman it'll be a sheep herder or something like that right she said okay here's the bread five g something like that I sat down to write the book I couldn't write it I wasn't interested so instead I wrote a book about a guy who was an art dealer just a real cutthroat bloodthirsty art dealer in little town

like Towsor Santa Fe right wrote this little book sent it to my editor and she read it and she said boy this is a pile a garbage terrible books he said not only that but it's not the book you said you were going to write you know and I said well I couldn't write it you know but I'm struggling to hit you know what I'm interested in is this theme of the self-destructive nature of creative creative energy in the United States and she said well I won't publish this try something else so I took it and throughout you know 90% of the book started with the first chapter which I kind of liked rerouted about a guy who was a stuntman and a director of exploitation flicks I'm location in northern New Mexico during the last week of his life who had a country in western girlfriend and the whole thing came together and worked right and that was an evolution that went from 1965 to 1978 and the one thing that stayed constant was like the personality of the central character can we go back to where it all began the sterile cuckoo I suppose for many people for

more fascinating characters never existed than those which populated the sterile cuckoo where they come from I split my own personality this sounds really funny but the two main characters I just took two aspects of my own personality made him a character they were also when I was in school in college those two characters were really fighting each other on the one hand I just real goofball and really enjoyed running off drinking myself half to death carousing at girl school all over the you know the east coast stuff like that another part of the personality was just real kind of straight you know walked the line always pulled out of things before I got too self-destructive and was very shy but in that book also I was really interested in in writing something about the surface nature of everything in America you know how terrified we all wear wonderful clothes and we do just the right music and we go to the restaurants and we court

each other with all this flashy surface stuff right and yet we're afraid to really go underneath you know afraid to really go deep afraid to really make commitments if you go through the book I think it's a really well written and book at a whole lot of level the people don't suspect they just think it's a charming little college love here is there still cookie atoms up there in a quadrant of sure yeah right there is you know except that now I'm so much older and wiser than before I finally figured out how to open up the door John your pleasure thank you so much I told you it's going to be lively thank you for joining us I'm Hal Rhodes goodnight so the mace is silent I inhale deeply we are floating without a murmur and absolute muteness through vast empty spaces between flickering stars the spell being cast by this wonderful approximation of a vacuum I welcome with open arms it must be this quiet

everywhere no turbulence confuses the issue a single word I might choose to utter could travel around the globe unobstructed my perceived world is the universe