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Behind the scenes with Christopher Lydon and Mary McGrath, creators of The Whole Wide World
Interview conducted by Johanna Zorn
> What inspired you to create a radio series about globalism?
Christopher Lydon: I'd been experimenting for a year with global internet radio
from the Caribbean, West Africa and Southeast Asia. And I was full of ideas
about alternative ways to talk about globalization. The run-up to war with Iraq
made it more urgent to expand the conversation about war, health, food,
culture, empire and refugees (among other things) in a global age. So we went
to work on seven slices of the subject.
Mary McGrath: The main theme of the series is the contradictions of globalism
and the question—is the dominant economic system in the world bringing us
closer together or is it tearing us apart? Six billion people are inextricably
bound together in many dimensions: We watch many of the same TV shows, wear the
same sneakers and eat the same burgers; but at the same time, the tensions of
unequal wealth and power, not to mention terror, war, disease, pollution and
culture, conspire to keep the world separate.
> Why did you choose to include artists'/authors' perspectives on what
many might consider to be a finance, trade, political story?
MM: Stories and plays and music are often a better way to penetrate our
consciousness than an endless stream of news stories and commentary. Peter
Sellars revived a 2,500-year-old Greek play about refugees to reset a
contemporary problem in a classic frame. He uses theater, or what he calls "the
technology of the sacred," to get us to think anew about democracy, media and
morality. Yo Yo Ma has spent most of his professional life making musical
pilgrimages all over the world to explore the roots of human nature. His
vocabulary is music and culture, of course, but the metaphor is powerful.
CL: It is a fundamental doctrine (or conceit) in our thinking that the
novelists and artists get there first, and all the interviewing on this series
confirmed our prejudice. In almost any circumstance or any country, it's my
instinct now more than ever to go to the artists—musicians, poets, story
tellers—and let them tell you what is really going on.
> How did the stories of refugees—which we hear in this particular
episode—effect you?
CL: The refugee stories persuaded me that nobody but refugees should be allowed
to tell their stories. They are carrying the main freight of the hidden history
of our times—in the Balkans, in Cambodia, in Latin America, in China, in
Eastern Europe. The world has created a new nation of roughly 30 million
displaced people that we very rarely talk about, and even then in stereotypical
terms. Refugees are the wallpaper of TV news—helpless folk who never get to
speak. But in fact they know everything about surviving in this rough world,
and are waiting to be asked.
> What role does the interactive website world.law.harvard.edu play in
the project?
MM: Interestingly, the web site wasn't very successful. It's hard to develop
and sustain an interactive community over just seven weeks. At the time we were
working on the series, Chris met Dave Winer, arguably the king of webloggers,
who was also a fellow at the Berkman Center at Harvard. He encouraged Chris to
start a blog and it turned out that Chris and Dave and other bloggers spread
the word about the series much more efficiently around the blogosphere.
> As host, Chris brings a lot of energy to the series and the music also
infuses the program with a sense of urgency … how did you arrive at the "sound"
of the series?
CL: Mary and I both counted on independent producer Jay Allison to hold us to a
high standard of sound-rich production. And what better allies could we have
had than Yo-Yo Ma and the Central Asian chanter in Peter Sellars' production of
The Children of Herakles? I would love to think there is energy—some curiosity
and intensity—in my voice, but it's just my voice. I talk the way I have always
talked.
MM: The musical sound was inspired by a band of Argentinian musicians living in
exile in Paris called the Gotan Project. Jake Shapiro (Executive Director of
PRX) discovered their first album La Revancha Del Tango and we immediately
loved the funky fusion of world music with electronic and trippy dance music.
Neo-tango, if you will.
> Do you feel that The Whole Wide World is a hybrid of the talk show and
documentary forms? If so, what are the benefits of fusing these styles
together?
CL: It felt to me a lot more like documentary than talk-show. Or maybe as you
suggest it might be a hybrid "conversational documentary." A lot of the best
elements had the tone of serious thinking aloud—as opposed to testimony. But
the series was also meticulously edited and in that sense "constructed." Truth
is: I missed the freewheeling and sometimes reckless speed and surprise of the
live conversation of a talk show, and equally I missed the opportunity to hear
from callers we never met or expected to meet.
> What can you tell us about your next radio series, which kicks off
this Sunday January 25th, 2004 with a live call-in program called The Blogging
of the President: 2004?
CL: The program will open a national conversation on the Internet's
transformation of politics and the new rules about making the president. "Blog"
is a key word in the 2004 lexicon. The chronicler Teddy White and the old "boys
on the bus" never heard it. Yet blog fundraising and blog energy have driven
the surprising rise of Howard Dean. A million or more bloggers are the
influential new chatterers building new communities on the web. So it's past
time to look beyond the tip of the iceberg that's moving fast across American
politics and culture. The Blogging of the President: 2004 is a program for
anybody interested in rebuilding a democracy of American voices that is free,
democratic and instantly global.
(Editors Note: To hear an archived version of The Blogging of the President:
2004, visit the series' web site.)
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