Brian Lehrer Live; Kimberlee Acquaro, Glenn Reynolds and Marshall Berman

Check it out. Thank you. Welcome to Brian Larry Live, we're here live Wednesday nights at 7.30 tonight. The popular political blogger Glenn Reynolds from instepundit.com. Also the spectacle of Times Square, we chart its progress from that kiss to those sex and the city girls. But first, what happens 10 years after a genocide? What happens in Rwanda when so many men have been killed that it's mostly women who are left. That was one of five women who had been killed.

That was one of five women who were profiled in the Oscar-nominated short documentary, God Sleeps in Rwanda. The movie follows these women as they try and put their lives back together. After the 1994 genocide, the left nearly one million people dead over the course of just a hundred days. Joining me now to talk about these women's stories as well as the experience of shooting a film in Rwanda is one of the directors of the project, Kimberly Aquaro. Welcome to Brian Larry Live. Thank you for coming in. Thank you Brian. Tell me first more about that woman. What kind of situation would she be in that she would actually say something as drastic

as wishing that her eighth child was dead like the other seven? Severe to me is very, her story is very metaphorical and speaks about the women in the country. Severe lost seven children. They were all killed in front of her. She was spared only to be gang raped for more than a month and then left for dead. She survived but found herself pregnant from the rapes. And she really struggled with whether to keep the child or not, but in the end decided that the child was innocent and then named her Akimana, which means blessing from God. With the entire scope of terrible things that happened in Rwanda at that time, how did you decide to focus on these five women's stories? Well, we really felt that these women represented the different things that had happened to the women of Rwanda during the genocide. And we also wanted an arc of stories that would move sort of as the genocide and then

the recovery has done from real darkness and tragedy into more empowerment and hope. And so we tried to work with five stories that very slowly moved in that direction. Yes. And that was such a depressing down as bad as things could get kind of emotional state that we saw in that woman and we're going to see as we play some clips, things get gradually better in some surprising ways. In fact, let's roll another clip from the film. This is our introduction to a young woman who was forced to take on a new and still terrifying role. Delphine Umatesi was 10 when her mother was taken away and killed. She watched her father butchered by Hutus in her home.

The eldest of five, Delphine was placed in an orphanage with her siblings, the youngest less than a year old. When it closed, she moved her family back into their childhood home. Before the genocide, a woman did not have the right to inherit her property or even her own children. Rwanda has since legislated a range of women's rights, including the inheritance law, allowing Delphine's family to own their home. It's a really incredible vignette and at the end, you seem to be trying to find the silver lining in her situation. Well, I think what spoke to me about the women in Rwanda is that they had created a silver lining where there was none. And in each story, the strength and determination and courage of the women is what's shown through and why, really why we decided to make this film. Some of the images in the film, ones that we're not going to show, are so disturbing. The very difficult to watch, in fact, one of the storylines in the film seems to be just

that these women are still alive against some incredible odds. Was it difficult for the women to talk about their experiences to you and outside her foreigner, little blonde-haired woman from America? I spent a lot of time in Rwanda before I started filming. I had spent about three years doing different stories for the New York Times magazine, Mother Jones, for BBC PRIs the world and working with many women. But always, I would go back to the women that I'd met and I'd bring them pictures. I'd bring them the stories and developed a trusting relationship so that we went to a film. They did feel a bit more comfortable, however. I think it's always difficult and many of them would get sick for days after talking about what had happened to them. From the act of talking? Yes. Yes. It's so traumatic to relive it and our translator, Nora Bagarina, who was one of the first women, who was the first woman I met in Rwanda, stayed with me and with us through all

of the stories, through all of the filming, and has a remarkable story herself. Her presence there, as a genocide survivor herself, as a woman working for the aid and rights of other women, really helped to break down those barriers. And I think these women wanted to know that people cared about what had happened to them. And so they were willing to tell their stories for that reason. You're just back from the Oscars. Yes. This film was nominated in its category, Best Documentary Short because, excuse me, you didn't win, but what was that experience like, especially after having made a movie like this, having gone through the process of reporting from Rwanda that you were just describing. And all of a sudden, there you are with the glitz and the glamour and the movie stars and the red carpet and the whole deal did it seem weird and incongruous. It was very surreal, but it was also very rewarding, because we set out to make a movie

that would move people as much as these women's stories moved us. And so this said, yes, this film, these stories are moving the world. They moved the academy. And of course it was very exciting, it was very surreal, but I think the most wonderful part of the evening was that our translator, from Rwanda, was able to come and be on the red carpet with us. And who did you hang out? Is there like a documentarian's ghetto or did you make a sneak into the time of J or what? Well, you're sat with other members of your category. So we sat with the other four short documentary filmmakers, which was wonderful, and we'd met at other openings, but the other films were so powerful in their own right. And it was actually a very collegial and supportive environment to sit there together with our hearts pounding. One of the first things you mentioned in the movie is that women now make up nearly 70% of the population of Rwanda, because so many men were killed in the genocide, they're just

30% of the population. Let's watch another clip. This one's showing some of the ways in which these women are picking up the slack in jobs and even building the country's infrastructure. Josily and Mujaw Maria was a teenager when her family was killed in the massacres. Now a mother of three, with only a primary school education. She is her town's top development official, one of thousands of women who were taking charge of rebuild in Rwanda. So Kimberly are the women being able to participate in the country's political life and economic life in these ways now, only because there aren't any men around or as many men.

Initially the women came together and began doing these things because they had to. They did them to give their children opportunities in a better life to put food on the table. However, the government in Rwanda is working at building a democracy and they of course have recognized that you can't afford to ignore what was 70% and now is more than the contribution of more than half of your population and so they have begun legislating. Women's rights and roles in the new constitution, there were quotas in place for women in government and that I think is making a big difference because in most war-torn countries when the men come back into the society and the population equalizes, as it almost has in Rwanda now, the women fall back into their traditional roles and yet in Rwanda more than a decade later women make up 49% of the parliament which is the highest in the world.

Previously they were 5% of the government and so the progress continues which is remarkable. Other journalists and filmmakers have approached the subject of Rwanda and the genocide differently. There was the movie Hotel Rwanda, there was Philip Gray, which is a remarkable book. How did you choose the approach that you took to this story? I was given a few fellowship and the fellowship was to cover under reported subjects and Rwanda is something that I had been interested in because the world had so abandoned the country during the genocide and I began hearing about the country being left 70% female which was remarkable to me. As the tenure anniversary approached I wanted to do a film and when I began exploring stories in Rwanda and found the story of the women I just felt that it wasn't just a Rwandan story, it was a story with global relevance but it was so inspirational and

set in the political context of all of the changes for women there were these amazing personal stories like that of Severe, raising this child of rape and naming her blessing from God and I was so moved by the women's stories as was my co-director Stacey Sherman that we wanted the world to hear their voices. And the five women who you do profile are shown is amazingly strong, amazingly stable. Is that the only side you saw of them or was that an editorial decision? They are amazingly strong and stable and yet there are still countless obstacles not only to women but to citizens of Rwanda. And specifically have had to deal with attitudes. The First Lady said very eloquently legislation is easier to change than attitudes and not just men's attitudes but their own.

The women have had to learn that it's not a privilege but it's their right and their responsibility to have a voice in these processes that govern their lives and they're also dealing with illiteracy, with AIDS, with poverty, with a history of patriarchal governance, a history of undemocratic governance and of division. And I think the biggest burden they're facing is reconciliation. It isn't a rosy picture and yet the level of tolerance and understanding is extraordinary. Is there an act of reconciliation process? Many of us know after apartheid in South Africa there was very famously in that country the Truth and Reconciliation Commission that Desmond Tutu and many others participated in. Is there something like that now between the Hutus and the Hutusis? Yes there is. There are unity and reconciliation. There's something called Gachacha and this means on the grass and they revived a very

old village court in which all of the people will come sit on the grass and judge the convicted person. So they will bring the people who are imprisoned for genocide on a local level, not the architects of the genocide who are going through United Nations tribunals. They will bring them out in with the help of the international community that local people of Rwanda have been trained as judges both Hutu and Tutsi male and female and people will stand up and witness for and against the accused. And if a person admits to having looted or killed, they will be generally, they'll be allowed out on time served or their sentence will be commuted in some way. I think it's helpful because somebody would say yes, I killed your family, I killed your brother and yet someone else will stand up and say, for example, he tried to save your

brother. He paid the money to let your brother go. But when your brother got down the road and found out that so-and-so had said in free they brought him back and made this person kill him. So there's some level of understanding that this was forced upon them by the powers that be. And at the same time, it's very difficult to live next to the woman who used to be the godmother for your child but whose brother killed your three-year-old. Certainly. And they can't write it all off as the work of the authorities ordering them to do it. And I know there was a lot of organized incitement and Rwanda through radio broadcasts and other memes but nevertheless, individuals caught up in that frenzy made those choices. And one of the prisoners said to ask, now I know about human rights. Now I know about rights, I would never do this, I would die before, I would kill again.

Another one said, if the president came to me right now and told me to kill you, that I was the enemy, I would do it because I'm a soldier. And so I think there's still not a complete grasp by anyone about how much this happened. Let's watch another clip from the film. This is women talking about their new social and political freedoms. They said to me because they were powerless. So do you think most Rwandan women feel that way, the way they were just talking about,

somewhat empowered, despite the circumstances of their empowerment, and kind of optimistic about the future? I think they do feel more of a sense of empowerment than they had before the genocide. And yet the burden of the grief and the loss and the devastation of the genocide is very heavy. Can you compare the advancement of women in Rwanda to other neighboring African nations? Were they behind other countries in the region before the genocide, and this is catching them up in a sense, or is this, ironically, putting them in a uniquely advanced position in the region? Well, they are in a uniquely advanced position, and I don't have statistics for the other countries, but I can tell you that before the genocide, boys outnumbered girls in secondary

school by nine to one, and today they're in school and equal numbers, which is significant. Women were only 6% of college graduates, and today they're 50% of the students on Rwanda and college campuses, and then 49% of the parliament, which is the highest in the world. But this is at a time when men are only 30% of the overall population, so do you expect this to last into another generation, or once the next generation of boys and girls grow up presumably in equal numbers, that this is going to die on the vine? Well, what's happened is the population that has almost equalized, Rwanda is now approximately 56% female, and it was just after the genocide that it was 70, 30, 30, 30. It stayed 70 for a while, and slowly, gradually, began to equalize. The world population, these aren't exact numbers, but it is about 52% female in Rwanda is still a bit higher percent at a higher female, but I think that's what's remarkable about the story, is in spite of that, more than a decade later, women still continue to progress,

and just from three years ago, their numbers in government has gone from 30% to 49% of the parliament. And so I do think that young women and girls are learning about their rights, things that women of this generation of Rwanda didn't know, didn't have, weren't afforded the opportunity to become, so they have different role models, and I think that there's a lot of hope that the future will be different. Real, Rwandan women's experience, as you've so beautifully documented, become a model for other countries in the region, or are they too insulated? No, they weren't insulated, I think that it is an important model to look at, not just for other countries in the region, but for other countries in the Middle East, and places where dictatorships are falling and women are able to kind of come out of the shadows in life, I think that what the women of Rwanda have done politically and also personally

is very important because you can't underestimate the power of that personal act of reconciliation, which has national consequences. You're here just three days after you were at the Oscar Awards ceremonies because your film was nominated in its category, I'm sorry it didn't win, it's such a powerful film. I didn't see the one that did win, but I'm sorry yours didn't. And you're here because just five days after the Oscar ceremonies, your film will be playing in New York on Friday night, tell us where. We'll be screening at the Museum of Modern Art at 6pm on Friday in their documentary Fortnite show, and we're just as honored by that as we were by receiving the nomination, even though we didn't bring home the Oscar, we do feel like winners. But I understand that your film is being used as a fundraiser, so tell us a little bit about that.

We've used the film to raise funds for the women of Rwanda. Through benefit screenings, we're also starting an income generating project with the women. They'll be making teddy bears out of the beautiful Rwandan cloth that you see them wearing on their backs and their heads and selling them through U.S. retailers. And so once you get an Oscar nomination, even in this serious category, does money start to flow your way through the next project? Yes, I think with the visibility of the film, the visibility it's brought to the issue, we'll definitely get the next one funded. This one all came out of our own pockets. So thanks a lot for a really great piece of journalism. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Still to come the popular political blogger, Glenn Reynolds, from instepunded.com and Time Square, a hundred years of spectacle in the center of the universe. This is probably in their life. This is CUNY TV, the City University of New York.

Women and professors, outstanding students, illustrious alumni, all on the Emmy-nominated magazine show about CUNY. Hi, I'm Villanara Vinca, join us this Monday when we'll bring you the stories about people and programs that make CUNY a place where you study with the best. World famous art star, what art is it for people like to make art?

There's something like it. And I'm a photographer, a life of an artist or something like it. I say, watch out or something like it. This is Brian Lara Live, we're here live Wednesday nights at 7.30, now like most of the media we spend some of our time interviewing pundits. Well, my next guest is what you might call a citizen pundit. He is Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee and the writer of the web blog, instepundit.com. He was inspired to put his libertarian opinions on the web after brewing his own homemade beer. He writes about this kind of individual empowerment in a brand new book called, An Army of David's, How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government and other Goliaths published by Nelson Current. Glenn, welcome to the program, thanks a lot to be here on.

You are a die hard do it yourself for your book, begins with the time 15 years ago that you started brewing your own beer. Was that a way to rebel against Anheiser Bush? Not to rebel, but beer, well, it was crappy back then. They had taken a pretty broad independent brewing business with lots of small breweries and they gradually been sort of consolidated and corporatized and the product had been moved to the least common denominator, the whole series of little salami slicing, cost cutting measures that were imperceptible individually but left you with beer that went very good. And about the same time I did a lot of people sort of decided they wanted more variety, they wanted something different, they started brewing their own beer. And when you did that, you got beer that was often better and always your own and that was really nice. And the interesting thing is the brewing companies noticed. They actually realized that this was going on and tried to improve their product and the result is that not only are there lots of microbreweries and home brewers and brew pubs that they didn't used to be, but in fact, even the big corporate beer is better than

it used to be. They aren't really, you think, of course, light and things like that taste better than 15 years ago? No, of course light is still course light, but in fact, you know, big brewing companies are by making or marketing upscale versions of their product as well. So you can still get course light if that's what you want and, you know, I'm not a beer, it's not about drink course light, but I like it now that you have other choices. When did you start blogging? I started blogging in the summer of 2001 and I had been running a website called raverights.com before that, which was supposed to protect raverers and rave promoters from the DEA or at least support them. And I quit that because Moby gave a lot of money to a foundation that took that over and did a lot better job than I did. And I was sort of interested in doing something different on the web because I teach internet law and so I decided to try a blog. It was easy and fun. And so was it for similar reasons as you started brewing your own beer? Yeah, kind of. I mean, I had things to say that I didn't think we're getting out there very much. And I was a fairly prolific letter to the editor writer and things like that.

But I watched some of the early bloggers like Mickey Cowes at Cows files or Andrew Sullivan or Virginia Post-Trail. And I thought I could do something like that too, at least I wanted to give it a try. And I did. So the subtitle of your book is how markets and technology empower ordinary people to beat big media, big government, and other goliaths. It's kind of a goliath like subtitle, but the publisher put that on. But is there a point there that you see bigness as a problem in American society? It's not that bigness is a problem. But I think that it's more of an aberration through most of human history. Bigness was not the norm. And in fact, when you tried to do things on a big scale, it got less efficient. It was harder. It didn't work as well. When we got to the Industrial Revolution, we had the division of labor. We had things like steam power and bureaucratic organization. You were able to do things at a big scale in ways you really couldn't have a smaller scale. And that gave people the idea for a couple of centuries that bigger was always better. And then the table kind of started to turn.

There's an old Soviet joke about that. You may remember the Soviet microchip, the world's largest. And that joke actually captured a real truth, which was that bigger had been better for a long time and then it really wasn't anymore. Now, you're generally identified as a libertarian politically. And that's generally described as very pro-markets, pro-business. And I noticed in the subtitle that while you mentioned big media and big government by name, you don't mention big business. Are you a little more positive about big business than you are about big media or big government? Well, it depends. And actually, I talk about that in the book. There's what I don't want to really say, and the subtitle I guess maybe gives people that impression is that big is necessarily bad, I just don't think it's the only way anymore. And I, in fact, contrast two different ways of being big in the book. One is sort of the traditional big kind of organization, which is Walmart. It's a top-down, hierarchical organization kind of quasi-military in some ways, I guess. And the other is eBay, which is also big.

In fact, the number of people who make their living, selling things on eBay is getting to within spitting distance of the number of people who work at Walmart. You mean there are people who make their whole business, their whole living, by selling things on eBay? And shockingly large numbers, where do they get the stuff? You know, they buy it at flea market, sometimes they make it themselves, you know, there are a million ways. In fact, people were, sometimes it's a little sleazy, people were selling the advanced reading copies of my book on eBay before it was out, you know, which they're not supposed to do, but whatever. eBay empowers people to do what they want to do, and that's how it got big, which is very different from the Walmart approach. And I think that's something that we're likely to see more of in the coming century. I think that's a coming decade, at least. It's a different kind of big. What does libertarian mean to you, by the way? Well, I mean, there are one of the sad things is you can get any group of libertarians together, and they'll quickly divide into groups calling everybody else fake libertarians. I have a generally, I believe, or in small government, I'm not an anarchist.

I think, you know, you need government from any things, but I think that government is no more trustworthy than any other large organization, plus it has more guns. So I have a strong preference for letting people work out their own lives. That boils down to, you know, the usual thing, I support drug legalization. I'm pro-choice. I guess they're a pro-life libertarian, so I guess that doesn't have to be. But I am, you know, I'm in favor of gay marriage, except that honestly, I just get the state out of the marriage business entirely, and if you want to be married, make it a matter of contract. Interesting. You mentioned Walmart. You were quoted in The New York Times this week on a Walmart story, apparently. They have found some sympathetic bloggers, and they've started feeding the bloggers, press releases and lines that they hope wind up in their blogs, and sometimes do wind up in their blogs to make the Walmart's case, yeah, sometimes without alteration, in fact, for attribution, that's right. Yeah. And I think that's, well, I think actually in a way that really illustrates my point, because

how did they get found out? I think they got found out by people Googling and using Technorati and other things to compare the text. I think the text, the technology that's out there makes that sort of thing easier to do. Do I think it was wrong for Walmart to do that? They're basically doing what PR agencies usually do. Do they was wrong for bloggers, not to attribute it? Yeah. They're also doing what journalists and news organizations often do, so it's something of a tempest in a teapot, I think. And there's some kind of controversy about you being interviewed by the Times and then publishing facts about your interview after they had asked you to keep on confidential. What happened there? Well, actually, what he seems to be upset about is the fact that I linked to one of the Walmart bloggers who had published the whole account on my blog after talking to him and agreeing not to disclose the substance of our conversation, which I didn't, but then I linked to a story that somebody else had already published on the web that said that. I just didn't regard that as breaking any kind of a promise. I didn't promise to avoid the entire subject and embargo it, I just didn't write about

what we said. You did talk about the interview a little bit in your posting. I had it earlier posted, I did say that I had talked to a reporter about this general question of bloggers and press releases and I actually then just put a long excerpt from my last book where I talk about press releases and plagiarism and media reproducing press releases verbatim. But I didn't disclose any of the facts he gave me that matter, I didn't really see it as any issue. You know, after you were on my radio show this morning talking about the same issue, we got an email from somebody who said, tell this guy to stop stealing stories from the New York Times, let journalists stick to journalism and let bloggers stick to expressing their opinions, which is what bloggers do. So I don't think of that. I'm not supposed to report facts, you know Kathy Syte who writes for the LA Times actually is also a blogger had a similar run in with a different New York Times reporter who got very upset because she had blogged about a conversation they had and I agree with what she said.

It's one thing for journalists to talk about protecting their sources, when journalists think their sources ought to protect them, self-importance has reached a truly toxic level and I have to say I think that's right. I really tried not to spoil anybody's story, that wasn't my objective, I don't think I did. But you know, I don't know, I didn't feel like I'd made a promise not to link to what other people published and to give you an example, say for example that I were the Valerie Plain Leaker and somebody promised me confidentiality for that and then other newspaper started publishing stories that said I was the Valerie Plain Leaker. Would they be forbidden to mention that fact? That seems unlikely to me. Were you the Valerie Plain Leaker? Do you keep it quiet? I won't tell anybody except that tell me. Like Connie Chung, right, just between you and me. That's right. No, I was not. Do you consider yourself a journalist? Do you consider bloggers in general, journalists? I think when you're doing journalism, you're a journalist and some bloggers do a lot of journalism, there's some of the Iraqi bloggers who report on things and break pretty important stories and when they do that, they're doing journalism.

My site does a lot of things, you know, sometimes I do report facts, I do first hand reporting, I do photography, I do video from events, sometimes I do stuff that's just opinion, sometimes I post recipes, I don't know what that makes me, I guess newspapers have that too, right? Newspapers publish recipes and they're still journalism, but crossword puzzles, crossword shows. That's right. I mean, I think journalism is an activity, not a profession, so you know. Your book is about the change in society brought about by the kind of individual empowerment that we've been discussing. Are you also right about the benefits of individuals taking on even counter-terrorism? Do you think that in some cases individuals could do a better job of fighting terrorism than government? Well, I can hardly do worse. No, I mean, if you look at September 11th, for example, the only effective counter-terrorist action that day was in fact the pastures on Flight 93 and they used communications technology like cell phones and text messaging and things like that and they took action and kept the plane from crashing into the capital or the White House where it was headed.

We've seen some other examples like that. The DC sniper was actually captured by a civilian who happened to hear the leaked information about the description, see the guy blocked the car in at a rest stop and called the cops. I think that's hardly your core anti-terrorism strategy, but I think the authorities tend to want to play it too close to their vast and make people more like sheep. I think they prefer that we let the professionals take care of it because it makes them more important. Now, your blog is called instepunded.com. You live in Tennessee, but you've been in New York today doing media for your book and I was surprised to see when we checked in with your blog just before the show that you were consistently blogging throughout the day. Let's take a look at some of your posts from this very day. Oh, I would have posted something more exciting if I can learn it. I have you comment on them a little bit. The last one that I saw posted at 6.25 this evening was just a one-line quote from someone named Jim Bennett that says India is the elephant in the Anglo sphere's living room.

What does it mean and why did you put it up? I thought it was an interesting post. Jim Bennett has a blog and he is also the author of a book called The Anglos Sphere Connection and his belief is that sort of the English-speaking countries in which he emphatically includes places like India and Singapore and such have certain cultural characteristics in common that make them sort of the most important grouping of nations for the 21st century. So he's always posting on this and his position and he said several posts on it this past week is that Bush's deal with India is probably the biggest deal of Bush's presidency, but nobody's paying any attention. So this was sort of the latest installment of that from him. Another one just below quote from Harry Shearer, the comedian, generally liberal on politics, but he writes, the Democrats borrowed their new slogan from John Kerry and they're spending the early part of this election year arguing about its syntax case closed. But then he goes on, now that the Republicans are doing very well either, Ann Marie Cox said that Washington is like the special Olympics of sex.

It's starting to look like the special Olympics of politics too. Why'd you put that one up? It just sort of came to me. I thought the Harry Shearer line was good. He's quite funny, of course, as everybody knows. And I thought it really did capture something about what was going on, but I started just posted that, but then I thought, well, you know, it's not like the Republicans are doing so great. And then the Ann Marie Cox line occurred to me, and I couldn't resist that. Ann Marie Cox also known as the blogger who does Wong-Kat, you know, not anymore, but yeah, she's Wong-Kat Emeritus, I guess. I guess so. She founded it. What is that new slogan for the Democrats? I didn't realize they had a new slogan, if I can see if I can remember what it is now. It's really lame, but we don't have a program, but the Republicans are really awful. Something like that, something like that. And then your next, the politics of failure have failed. It's time to make them work. Your next post is much more detailed. Those were some, you know, starkly lines that you found and you put them up. But this began, this is a story about the Dubai port steel, but it starts with the

new commentary, you put in caps, bad move. And then comes the journalism, the House Appropriations Committee just voted to block the Dubai port steel by a whopping 62 to 2 margin. Frankly, I didn't know there were that many people I'm going to committee in the house. Well, that's what the money is. And you're right, that's right, the Appropriations Committee, so they get their pork that way, right? Absolutely. You wrote, I've come to believe that the deal isn't a threat, though I grant that reasonable people disagree with me, but I can't help but think that this vote isn't driven by reasonable concerns as much as political panic. Why do you think so? Well, I mean, the Bush administration handled the PR of it dreadfully. And it was a deal that intuitively struck a lot of people as bad. Now, this was sort of parody one of the satire blogs said, the UAE is taking over our ports, whatever. Hey, wait, the A and UAE stands for Arab, those sneaky Arabs. You know, I think in some sense that was the reaction that people saw the word Arab and the United Arab Republics that Arabs taking over our ports, and there was a false reporter

early on that they were actually taking over the port security, which wasn't true. It's more like cranes and containers is what they do. So, you know, it struck badly. And the Bush administration, I think, thought it was a reasonable deal, and they'd sort of jump through the bureaucratic hoops so they thought everything was okay. And they just, I don't know how they could miss how this played with people, but it played badly on the left, it played badly on the right. In my own state of Tennessee, Harold Ford is just beating them to death with television commercials, he's running for Senate, and, you know, it's just, they just really dropped the ball. And that there is an report within 500 miles of Tennessee. That's okay. That's okay. It's an issue. It makes the commercial, and he's jumping on it. By the way, our crack production team in the control room looked up the Democrats slogan, and it's America, together, we can do better. There you go, right? Doesn't say what, but we can do something better. How do you feel about the wireless wiretapping story? Big deal?

You know, it's hard to say. To me, it matters a lot what they're doing with the information, and indeed, whether it's really a wiretap, which last I checked wasn't quite clear. To give you a little perspective, it just recently came out, Bruce Schneider, who's a blogger and expert on computer security and stuff, just covered that AT&T has been keeping a database of 1.9 trillion phone calls, goes back many years, and it literally is a list of all the calls made by all the phones with number to number. And that's something that, to my mind, is also a privacy issue and has gotten less attention. If I worry that they're using the stuff against political opponents, I'd be very concerned. If I think they're using against suspected terrorists and throwing it out when it looks like there's not much, I'd be less, so I actually teach national security law, and one of the things my students were surprised to see when we went through this is this government. There's decades of case law, saying the president has constitutional authority to do warrantless wiretaps, so it's not subshocking new thing. It may or may not be a good thing, but it's not as if it's 1984 suddenly appeared in 2005.

You are a law professor, do you think it's legal or illegal? It is probably illegal under FISA, though, to know that for sure you'd have to know exactly what they're doing, which I don't. So it's hard to say. Correction just in on the Democrats' slogan. I said America, together we can do better. It's really, together America can do, to get together America we can do better. I can see whether we're working on the syntax, there is a syntax issue there, I think. You said you were in a focus group. You said you were a fan of Iraqi bloggers. Yeah. I've been a fan of them since actually before the invasion. There was one blogger in Iraq who was blogging before the invasion and got him salam packs, which is not his real name. Now he's a columnist for the Guardian sometimes. And his stuff was very interesting. And often of actual value in figuring out what was going on.

It was after the war there were a lot more internet access is now pretty widely available in Iraq. A couple of guys that I like, one is a dental student named Zayed, who blogs on politics and other stuff. And he actually, and that's an example of trust in the blogs, he reported on war crimes by American soldiers and I tended to trust him because he reported on a lot of stuff and it had turned out to be true. And he seemed like an honest guy from his reporting, he seemed straightforward and trustworthy. And I put a post on my blog saying, this is what Zayed says. I've inclined to believe in what other people think about this story. And various readers, lots of various readers chimed in with stuff that suggested whether it was right or not. People got satellite maps to look at the location, it was supposed to happen, and it turned out to be true. In fact, the soldiers involved on it being court marshaled. So I mean, it was a good firsthand journalism done by the Iraqi blogger. He's actually had a number of scoops since then. Last thing, going back to your days, protecting waivers and fighting them against, fighting against the DEA, I guess protecting waiver's rights to do drugs at these all night raiders.

Well, the DEA actually took the position, there's this federal statute known colloquy as the crack house law, which has a few maintain a facility for the purpose of drug consumption Europe, federal felon. The DEA took the position that since nobody would ever go to a rave for any reason other than to consume illegal drugs, just promoting a rave made you in violation of that law. And so informed by that, what do you think of Barry Bonds? Perhaps Barry's baseball stadium should fall under that statute too. Personally, I wouldn't make steroid use illegal anyway. If I were to regulate drugs, the only one I might regulate closely would be antibiotics, because if you abuse antibiotics, you create a danger for lots of people. But there's a danger for lots of people from steroids too, isn't there? Because even Bond says that he got into it out of jealousy, according to this Sports Illustrated article, this new book. He got into it out of jealousy of Mark Magleier, who is getting all that attention for his home run hitting in 1998.

And so that can go down the chain. And because of the health risks of steroids, you then get competitive pressure on athletes, even on kid athletes, to perhaps take them to try to keep up just to keep up with their peers. Yeah, you'll think we have it now? We do. But the laws discourage it. So my sense is growing up should be able to take their own risks, as long as they're not dangerous to other people. All right. An army of David's is the name of the book by University of Tennessee Law Professor Glenn Reynolds. You can read them at instepunter.com. Thanks a lot. Thank you. And coming up next time, Square, 100 years of spectacle in the center of the universe. This is Brian Larilife. Sure my neighbors Gene and Louise, they may be superheroes with superpowers, but that doesn't make them so super at saving energy. The end money, I mean, I like them at all. But when Gene uses that power vision to cook dinner, or when Louise or start a bright, tries to save a little in the lighting bill, mom, a little light.

I may not be able to harness the power of the elements, but I save significant cash and help the environment with appliances, electronics, and windows featuring the energy star label. And I improved my home energy efficiency with insulation. My thermostat, watch this. I'm just kidding. It's programmable. I don't have to live the finger to save on AC and eating. So discover your own energy saving superpowers. Go to ASE.org slash consumers. Let's say when you're over the hill, this when you pick up speed, the simple foxes are

the greatest force out there. I mean, this guy says, that's so much to give, you know, so much to say. That's what mentoring is all about. It's one person that sees that glimmering your eye and sees the question marks in your eye. I don't think you need any special skills. You just have to be true to your wish to make a difference in this person's life. So share what you know. Be a mentor. This is Brian Larilive, we're here live Wednesday nights at 7.30. My next guest, Marshall Berman, is a lifelong resident of New York, lover of New York, and scholar of New York. He even has a cult following, I'm told, known to call him Mr. New York. It really should be Dr. New York since he is professor of political theory and urban studies at City College and the CUNY Graduate Center. His new book is a perfect blend of New York fun and New York intellectualism. And the title says it all, on the town, 100 years of spectacle in Times Square published

by Random House. Full disclosure, our wives are in a book discussion group together, though we have only met Weinstein passing. Welcome to the program. Pleasure to be here and, you know, since it's, I've been teaching here for 20 years, so it's, you know, it's my first visit to the studio, so I'm really glad about it's because we love the book. And I want to start with an image, perhaps the archetypal image in most Americans' minds of Times Square. There it is. It is the kiss. Who and what are we looking at? Well, it's a sailor and a nurse, but it's the day of the Japanese surrender in August 14, 1945, and it appeared on a cover of Life Magazine. The photographer was Alfred Eisenstadt, who was a German Jewish refugee, who would be in a photojournalist in the primary public, and at the time, time life with the biggest sponsors of photojournalism in the country.

So you can look back over here. Yeah. A photograph of the same couple appeared on a picture on the front page of the Times from about 30 degrees away, but not as good. This is much more vivid, and it has to represent Times Square so much. It's like it's the couple, but it's also the crowd behind them, and the signs enclose them. One of the biggest signs is on the right, and it says bond. It was for bond clothes, which was the biggest manufacturer of really made clothes in the country. Let's put the picture back up on the screen, and see they probably looked first at the couple. Now, let's take a look behind them. Go ahead, Marshall. There's the bond. The sign just behind them is actually for Rupert Beer, but it seems to be encouraging them to do what they're doing. And you have the chorus. You have all the other people smiling at them.

Some of them, different generations, different uniforms, civilians. So in a way, it's like it's a sense of the total society and Times Square embodying the total country. I mean, New York symbolizing America and Times Square symbolizing New York and everything coming together. And it's the magic moment, and they are the spectacle. Part of your story is personally, right about your parents going to Times Square for a night on the town, even after the kids were born, especially after. What did Times Square mean to your parents, especially after? Well, they would go to a show, and then they would go to a jazz club, like my mother taught my father theater, my father taught my mother jazz, and then if they'd been able to arrange it, well, they'd go to a hotel, but I didn't figure that out until fairly late in the game until I was a teenager.

And I always tried to stay up until they'd get home, but I never managed to do that. I guess they would get home sometime at around dawn, my grandmother would be the sitter. But and I remember saying something like hotels now, as I'm sure everybody knows, give away bottles of shampoo, but then what they gave away in the 50s, which is when all this happened was match, match books. And I said, we have, and I said, hey, it's funny. We have Woolies Hotel Match Books. Do you guys do business with hotels now? And there was a big silence at the table. All right, and we know what that silence meant. Your father died when you were still a kid, and your mother used to take you to Times Square. What was the line she used to use when you got it? A bath of light. Now we're going to take a bath of light. We would go to a show on Sunday afternoons, and then we would eat sometimes in Model A Ones, which was this big popular restaurant, really famous for Antipasto, that was how I discovered Antipasto.

And then the bath of light shaped your relationship? Yeah, and then you would go emotionally or emotionally or totally. We would go and walk around in what's called the bowtie of Times Square. We're Broadway in 7th Avenue, intersect in Forman X, and you know, it's the place really the light and the signs are most intense. We would point out the signs to each other, we would point out the people we saw. And here's another cultural reference in your book, we're going to show another clip. This would surprise me, and probably surprised a lot of people who read the book, Sex on the City, from one century's sister, Carrie, who you write about from 1900, to another. This time, Sarah Jessica Parker's Carrie Bradshaw, her character. Let's take a look. Now, tell us about this Times Square, and in a way, they're echoing on the town, which was the chorus of sailors in 1949, and they basically are barreling down there like garries and have the same kind of sexual confidence as the sailors of the 40s, and we're

supposed to feel they have the same kind of openness about sex of the same self-confidence. They can, if they want somebody, they can grab them. And so is the Times Square of 1945 more different or more the same than the Times Square of the 2000s? Well, let's see, it's going through a lot of ups and downs. Probably the most difficult time from Times Square, which the 70s, in the big open part of the square, the bow tie, between 42nd and 47th or 48th, a lot of the signs went dark. That is, the companies didn't renew the American companies that had advertised there. They didn't renew their leases, and so, and I've been teaching at the City University since the, since the 1970s. So I would, and the graduate center used to be a block from Times Square, so that I would

be there really every week for years and years, and I could get a sense of how things changed. And so all of a sudden, in the big open space, it went dark, you know, where they were enormous signs, suddenly there was nothing for about two years. And that was scary. And some of the big public, well, out of the big public rest, they were closed and became real estate. Lindy is probably the most agreeable space ever in Times Square history, became one of the most awful buildings, you know, which was basically, which was like 50 stories, but basically closed to the street. Let's go back to the 70s, because another of your cultural touchstones in the movie is the 1976 film, Taxi Drive. Let's look in a little bit. Now talk over this.

One of the themes in my book is Times Square as a symbol for display, and a place where people go to display themselves and to see other people who are displaying themselves. This is tremendously exciting, but it's also scary. It has to do, I mean, with exposure, with secular transgression, with other people's desires, but also with being open about your own desires, which can sometimes be very scary. Now, at the magic moment in 1845, there's the feeling that the city can embody the whole nation. Okay. But one of the things that happens in the post-war period, see, like, I think, started by, I mean, from about the mid-19th century to about the mid-20th century, even small cities, even big towns, have their own equivalents of Times Square. I mean, they're small, but they have lights, and they're where you go when you go downtown. So you can talk about, you could talk about downtown in El Mario, or you could talk about

downtown in Rutland, Vermont, you could talk about downtown almost anywhere there would be a place where more things would be possible. And they were almost all gone, except New York. Thanks to the federal highway system, which began in the late, in the Eisenhower administration. And basically, I mean, some people say it's the biggest work of peacetime public work since the pyramids, but one thing that it basically did all over America was destroyed downtowns. We have under a minute left near the end of the book, you inevitably deal with the new Disney-Fide Times Square, and you conclude that it turned out less bad than you feared. What did you fear, and how do you see it? Well, I feared that it would look like a theme park, and it doesn't be coerced in a theme park, the sponsors control the space, and in New York, the subways control the space. People get there on the subway, get there by mass transit. It's a workplace as much as anything else, so they can't control the crowd, and the crowd

is bigger than it's ever been, and it's more multinational than it's ever been. And the light is thanks to computer technology as we're exciting than it's ever been. So if you can see it on that light, look at the people, look at the light, the places of thrill as much as it ever was. Marshall Berman, thanks a lot. And that's it for tonight's show. We are here live on Wednesday nights at 7.30. Next week we'll go surfing for the best of online video, and join me for my daily radio show, weekday mornings at 10 on WNYC, New York Public Radio. Tomorrow morning, a spokesman for the Prime Minister of Iraq. Have a great day.