#1549 Welcome to Listening to America

I want to live in Mr. Jefferson's America, with, of course, some key adjustments on slavery and women and Native Americans, and so on. But I believe in Jefferson's vision of a self-governing people. A people who educate themselves, a people who are up to the challenge of sorting out their public business together with civility, majority rule, science and good sense. My host for the initial program was my old friend Barbara Ham Lee of WHRV. In Norfolk. She hosts a Thursday noon program called Another View, which is very popular. And she agreed to be the guest host on the first of these broadcasts and podcasts. And I couldn't have been more gratified by that.

We were in the studio, there was a live audience of, I suppose, 60 or 70 people. I've had a long and interesting history in Norfolk. My old friend, Paul Lassico, of the TCC Roper Theater, has been one of the people that worked hardest to make all my dreams come true. When I wanted to do a play, Mr.

Jefferson and Maria Causeway. My head and my heart. He agreed to produce it. In fact, that was the first thing I believe that we ever did together. I performed a range of characters on the stage of the Roper Theater. Theodore Roosevelt, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Of course, Thomas Jefferson. I've debated Hamilton.

When I wanted to do Shakespeare, sort of a one-man Shakespeare recitation program. He agreed not only to be in it and to direct it, but to appear with me after the intermission. In Maybe the Greatest scene in Hamlet Act 5, Scene 1 The Graveyard, which ends with Hamlet saying, Alas, poor Yorick, I knew him. Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy Paul, played the Gravedigger, the Clown there and we've had a wonderful time with it. In fact, we've gone to several different venues around the country and are seeking more. I love to perform the Shakespeare program. My first love was Renaissance literature back when I was a young man.

In fact, I expected, when I was 23, to be an English professor at some liberal arts college. With a tweed jacket and maybe a pipe. Although I've never smoked, that's how I saw myself writing learned manuscripts about John Donne and later Shakespeare and Milton and St. Augustine, and the Reformation and the rise of humanism. I've continued to do some of that through the course of my life. But at a certain point, my old friend, E.V. Albers of the North Dakota Humanities Council, sort of tripped me out of that traditional approach. And asked me to perform under an open-air tent. As Thomas Jefferson, I did so with great reluctance, and now I've been married to Thomas Jefferson for more than 30 years.

I spend more time thinking about Jefferson than about any other subject. I've written more about Jefferson than any other subject, with the possible exception of Lewis and Clark. I've performed in all 50 states, in the Mariana Islands, in Hawaii, in Europe, on cruise ships, in the Panama Canal in Alaska. It's been quite a run. I was making a list earlier today of all the characters that I have performed, some of them for one or two performances only because they were relatively obscure.

Say Jean-Jacques Rousseau for the Great Base in Chautauqua when we talked about the Millennium, or Jean Calvin for a Presbyterian conference in Iowa. That was a predestinarian disaster. I've performed as Steinbeck many times around the country. John Wesley Powell, J. Robert Oppenheimer. My favorite character is having a little bit of a resurgence now that the blockbuster film is coming out in the summer of 2023..

And it did not, of course, put Jefferson in a very favorable light. In the end, he asked me to defend myself as Jefferson, and my only defense was, look, what else I did? The Declaration of Independence, the Virginia Statute for Religious Liberty, the Library of Congress, et cetera, et cetera. Jefferson America's first great architect, America's first great wine connoisseur. Jefferson, one of the fathers of the library classification systems of our time.

Jefferson The paleontologist Jefferson, the man who collected Native American vocabularies, was intending to publish a list of them, a comparative list of them, during his retirement. But unfortunately, the papers were lost in a sad accident at the docks of Richmond. But that's hardly a defense, is it? It's really just saying there's so much more to Jefferson than just the fundamentally difficult issue of race and slavery. And then we took a break.

When I came back, I was out of character and I proposed a new way of thinking about all this. I've been obsessed with how to maneuver our way through this righteous moment of cancel culture. Will Jefferson be canceled? if not? How do we need to think and talk about him in the future so that we can do justice to his greatness and his genius? He's America's Da Vinci.

And yet hold him accountable for those parts of his career, his writings, his life. That are not just cringeworthy now, but appalling for us to think about. Although I don't like presentism, which is judging the past by our standards. Even in his own lifetime, Jefferson knew that slavery was an abomination and a fundamental hypocrisy. His closest friends were abolitionists. There's no way that we can say that he was a man of his times. Because, first of all, he always wanted to be ahead of his times and usually was. And secondly, the closest friends he had in the world were all principled antagonists of the future of slavery.

And so Jefferson reflected a sort of complacent attitude of the planter class of his times. But it was by no means representative of all Virginians, all Americans, or all of the members of the Enlightenment scattered around the world. So I tried to make sense of this. I called it the asterisk project. I'm going to change that to something else because it could be seen as a sort of footnoting system.

It's marginalizing, rather than what I intend for it. Which is to make sure that we never talk about Jefferson again, about any part of his great achievement. Again, without factoring in race and slavery. So it was a stunning week. I did four different things before, four different audiences. I can't thank the people at WHRV enough. Barbara Hamley, of course, Bert Schmidt, my old friend, Tom, Heather, Katie, etc.

I came back a little tired, of course, a little bruised by some of the criticism of Mr. Jefferson and the Jefferson performer, but it was glorious. And now here we go, listening to America with Clay Jenkins. We're underway. There will be voices from the road.

There will be some of the voices you've always been hearing. Jefferson will, of course, make appearances. There will be book reviews, there will be essays, there will be ambient sound.

From my travels, I couldn't be more excited from the time I was 17 years old. I have wanted to do this, to wander the country in an RV of some sort, or a trailer or truck camper, you name it, and to see the country for myself. To go to all the national Parks and all the national Forests, and all the national Wildlife Refuges and all the national Monuments and all the battlefields. And to the homes of presidents, and to the homes of Elvis and John Steinbeck, and Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson and Zora Neale Hurston, et cetera. But most of all, just to go out, slow down, park in the open air, meet people, some that I seek to meet and some who are perfect strangers. And listen, listen, listen, listen to, try to get the beat of America on the eve of our 250th birthday. So I know some people are going to miss the Jefferson Hour, but, believe me, not much will really change.

Some people are cautiously interested in all this and want to know how it will really be accomplished. There will be a few growing pains, I'm sure, so I just ask you to stay with us, keep listening, and, if you like it, to tell your friends. But go to ltamerica..org, sign up for my weekly newsletter, contribute to the success of this program in any way you can. We need, of course, a budget.

But most of all, provide comments and suggestions, tell me people. We should meet around the country, places we should go, themes that we should pursue, interviews, we should conduct books and articles to read magical places that are not on anyone's map.

What is this country as we approach 250?

Are we a single nation anymore? Unclear. I'll have lots more to say about this from every zip code, I hope in this country, certainly the great bulk of them.

And I really mean it that I'm going out to learn not to speak, you know, you can't learn when you're talking. I've had a lifetime to fill my mind with whatever's in it and all the perspectives that I have developed. But I'm just one person, and indeed a male, a white male, senior citizen, white male and a very privileged American. You know, I got to study at Oxford.

I got to study at the University of Minnesota, I've had a chance to travel the world, I've had extraordinary experiences. Addressed 24 25 state legislatures, all the judicial conferences in the country. I've met presidents, a couple of them, and performed for the White House on Jefferson's 250th birthday. And thanks to the Chautauqua work I've done, I've been in a number of Ken Burns films, another one just about to be released, The Buffalo.

I couldn't ask for much more than I have received in the course of my lifetime. I write for Governing..org and now, of course, I'll be writing SCADs. I think that's a technical term for listening to America, that's LtAmerica..org.

So let's go to the first program with great thanks to Barbara Ham Lee and Bert Schmidt at WHRB. Thanks for listening.

Hello everyone and welcome to the first edition of my new program, Listening to America with Clay Jenkinson. I had the great good fortune of recording the first of our new series in the studios of WHRB in Norfolk, Virginia, with a live studio audience. The guest host was my old friend Barbara Ham Lee, who has a very popular weekly program on Thursdays called Another View. We talked about my plans for Listening to America. How much continuity it will have with the Thomas Jefferson hour, whether Mr. Jefferson will continue to make appearances on Listening to America. And what am I trying to discover as I travel the country on the eve of the 250th birthday of the United States?

I had said that I was searching, like Steinbeck, for the soul of the country, and she rightly challenged that and said, There is no one soul of the country. And how can one person, however good his heart and his intentions, can presume to get at the soul of this extraordinary country? With so many regional dialects, so many different ethnic groups, so much multiplicity of races and vocations and identities? Maybe there are only souls of America, and maybe there isn't a single America in which to seek the soul. We talked about one of my heroes, John Steinbeck, and whether his 1960 travels with Charlie. Journey around the country could serve as a template for a country almost infinitely different from the one that he saw on the eve of the Kennedy administration. We talked about some of the projects I'm undertaking with Edward S. Curtis Water in the West, Theodore Roosevelt's conservation footprint and much more.

So let's go to the interview with Barbara Hamm Lee in the studios of WHRV in Norfolk, Virginia.

Clay Jenkinson.

So you got to put people's mind at ease. What's going to happen to the Jefferson Hour?

You can never grow tired of Thomas Jefferson, you can never really finally understand Thomas Jefferson. But I know that I want to look at some things that are sort of outside of Jefferson's purview. And so I thought this would be a good time to sort of morph the program, make a wider embrace. And you know, one of the things is that I have all of my life, since I was 17, wanted to hit the road. Sort of like Jack Kerouac or Charles Kuralt, or William Leastheat Moon, or John Steinbeck, and go what Steinbeck called it, this monster country. I thought, wouldn't it be something if I could just go out now that the technology is possible? So you're going to be in a big old bus and.

We were on several reservations, we were in a number of national parks and national monuments, we saw Marble Canyon and Lake Powell. And we really wanted to go down and figure out what's going on with water in the west. That doesn't sound quite like Thomas Jefferson, but it does sound like listening to America, so that's the idea.

I travel a lot, you know, you've got a dog is a discipline, and I'm on the road too much. I would love to take a dog, but I wouldn't take an aging French poodle. My mother was a great lover of miniature schnauzers, but that doesn't really seem romantic enough. You know, a yippy little lap dog, you need a big dog.

Yeah, you gotta have a big dog, so no, I don't think I'll do that. I might get a giant stuffed dog and put it in the passenger seat.

Utah is not Alaska, so you should get out of your mind that there's one paradigm. And as you know.

After 250 years, we're approaching the 250th birthday of the country. Race continues to be the unspoken center of American history. That we've all been made aware of. This more than probably ever before in the last few years, I think in a good way. And so we can't talk about the soul of America if we just talk about the soul of Anglo-Saxon America. But I'm going to need your help. People say, Well, you should talk to this person about this subject.

What we've found already in going to the Southwest to talk about water is that one person will say, Oh, you need to talk to George over there. And that leads to somebody else and another perspective and another voice. I don't presume that I can just wander into African-American communities with a microphone and say, Tell me what the soul of America is. I think that's probably.

On the one hand, you're going to have sort of the 1619 perspective that it's been a racist country from the beginning. And that there's an awful lot to answer for. And on the other end of the spectrum, you're going to have the hard right. Conservatives saying we're the greatest thing that ever happened to the world. And we have nothing to apologize for. And how dare you apologize for this country? I'm just afraid it's going to be nonsense and chaos, and I want to find.

But the folks in the middle, do they really have more of a sense of what America is, or what its ideal should be? Well, this is complicated again, I think most.

And what we found like in this two-week trip through Utah and parts of Arizona and New Mexico? We talked to dozens of people. No one ever said the word Biden, no one ever said the word Trump, no one ever said the crisis at the border. In other words, people are going about their lives. And all that stuff we hear about every night is just a kind of a surface madness, I would call it.

Not that it's not important, but that's not where America is at. People are doing creative things in their garages and in their basements. There are communities that are very healthy. There are people that are enlightened in ways that they don't beat their breasts about, but they're just trying to be good citizens. I'm not Charles Caralton.

This isn't meant to be Pollyanna's America, either. We get it that this is a deeply divided, troubled country. And I think that if we don't in a very purposeful way examine our nation at 250 years old and say, who are we now? what are we now? where are we headed?

What are the unresolved issues that have been with us for a long time that need to be addressed in a meaningful and generous way? If we don't do that, the 250th birthday is going to be absolute nonsense and chaos and I'm worried about that. I want to hear the pulse of the nation and you have to be willing to wander and get lost.

You have to be willing to get off the main roads and not go to the usual suspects, you have to be willing to be surprised. And at times, I think a little uncomfortable. But I hope that I come out of this a much different person from the one that's going in. And I think the only way you can really get to the heart of this country is to listen, listen, listen. And, as you know, not a lot of that happens anymore in America.

Org. We're posting articles and photo essays and video interviews and transcripts of interviews already, so there's already a rich content there, and there'll be much more. Because here's the deal once I get my airstream, and I don't know if I mentioned that, if I mentioned that.

But once I'm out there, I think magical things are going to happen, I truly do. And because you get off the main roads and onto what William Leastheat Moon calls the Blue Highways, and you stop at a diner somewhere and you go in. And normally on a plane, I put on blinders, but I won't be doing that, I'll be trying to really listen.

And then, three hours later, he knew what America was. So, you know, do I want a dog that badly?

But you know, I've fallen in love with him, I've fallen out of love with him, sometimes I can't even stand to be in the same zip code with him. Then I find myself in costume and I'm having to say stuff that I hate or don't understand. So it's been like the central relationship of my life.

And so I think about these questions. I think that's the strength of the Jefferson Hour, my short answer to your question. I think he would be horrified, the divisiveness, he was a harmony obsessive. The loss of agriculture.

You know, we have agribusiness, but we don't have family farming really anymore, he said. If you expect to be a nation ignorant and free, you expect something that never has been and never can be in the history of the world. Well, we're testing that principle right now because our K-12 system and my mother was a teacher, my sister was a teacher. I have a lot of respect for public school teachers. But it doesn't seem to be really making young people ready for the challenges of the 21st century.

For example, the new studies show that most third graders can't read at a third grade level.

So, I mean, he would love this time and the scientific discoveries of this time. We now know that we don't live in a world, we live in cosmos upon, universe upon, cosmos upon. You know, I think he would be utterly fascinated by the scientific and technological genius of our time. And then he would say, How is it that the wealthiest nation ever doesn't require a living wage for every one of its able-bodied citizens? How can this be?

How can this make any sense? And I think he would look at our cities and the class system. Growing ignorance. But here's one thing that I think we will address again on Thursday when we talk. But I think he would say, I'm sorry to say. I kind of recognize that the racial tension, the legacy of slavery, was going to bedevil us for a very, very long time, he said. Hundreds of years.

And here we are.

And we're sort of not, as you know, in some fundamental respects. I think he would say it's going to take a long time to work all this out. And we either have to quit and just become different nations, or we have to work harder at it.

They baked the bricks, they cut the timbers, they built the thing for him, Then they turned out to be the staff. The walls were built by enslaved people.

What part of you doesn't understand that Jefferson has a fundamental race problem at the very heart of his life? And then you go to UVA and then you say, I shouldn't even be here. I'm just so appalled by the come on, you know, go to Yale.

I mean, truly, if this is your issue that Jefferson, I cannot stand to be in a building that Jefferson claimed that was built by African-Americans. If that's your issue, I'm with you.

Okay, I think I'm going to talk about this tomorrow night at The Roper. But in short answer, these are individual situations in individual places. But there's no one-size-fits-all answer to this. It depends on when the statue was put up, by whom, for what reason. It. Also, I think the community itself should address this and every stakeholder should be at the table.

Everyone who has any interest in this should be at the table. I think there are many, many, many, many possibilities about how to address this without tearing something down or exploding something. Even if we got rid of everything that we find objectionable, we can't pretend that our history didn't occur. You know, we have serious environmental, long-term issues in America. We dispossessed the native peoples who were here for thousands of years.

We brought African-Americans, Africans against their will, across the Atlantic. We have many things we must address as a people, and there's no way we can duck that by taking out of the public square something that offends us.

I don't want to see that happen again because we are so bent on turning things around. I think the pendulum is swinging back and forth and it's on the far end right now for me.

It seems to me that we can be a little charitable about something like that. But if the statue was put up in 1963 in Selma, Alabama, that's a whole different thing, isn't it? And so I think we need to have a case-by-case basis. I will go out on a limb and say, I don't think Stone Mountain can survive in Georgia because it was created by the KKK. There have been KKK rallies there as late as the mid-teens of the 21st century.

It's pretty hard to make the case that that's okay. Of course, it's not an easy one to erase. You don't want to be using small nuclear weapons to clean up our national history. But, I mean, in other words, that's one that I find egregious. But then Borglum, who did Stone Mountain, also did Mount Rushmore. Now you're in slightly more difficult ground.

But think of it, Jefferson has a problem, several problems. Race is the chief one. Washington Not as bad, but far from exemplary. Lincoln, at one point, thought of repatriation societies for freed slaves.

Roosevelt, My man, Roosevelt, he was a crazy guy. He's the only one that was ever in South Dakota. I think that should matter, but if you're going to start erasing those guys, they're all going right. I mean, and you know what?

Remember what Hamlet says, He says Treat every man according to his desserts. And who shall scape whipping? We all have things to answer for, don't we?

But I do agree with you that this wave has sort of reached its strongest moment and it's beginning to recede a little bit. And I think Jefferson will survive, and I hope he will survive.

One of the major issues that we're looking at in America today, and that's gun violence. And you spoke with someone I believe about that.

We have three per week now.

Instead of just saying, take away your AR-15. Or, you know, whatever, the Second Amendment is absolute, we don't want to stick with those kind of easy answers. So I have been interviewing a whole series of people about this. And this is David Yamani, sociologist at Wake Forest, and his view is that, unfortunately, guns are not the right way to address this.

They are central to this, but they're not the way to get at this. But he also says that given what's going on, there's now kind of a narrative, a template that, you know, a young, alienated person now has a template. You go get your AR-15, you go to the mall and you start shooting. It's got a blueprint. Let's listen to David Yamani.

I'm at odds with my parents. I fall into a rage, take an Ar-15 into the public square somewhere and shoot. You're saying that I didn't generate this idea myself, I'm working from a well-laid-down public script.

Now, the Ar-15 is part of this story. The randomness or the targeting of this is a story. Once that happens, every 19-year-old knucklehead has a script to play if he wants to, right?

So when people are stopped from doing these things, we don't hear about it. They're also very systemic. It's not just about trying to target individuals. It's about thinking about a mental health crisis among young people that we're experiencing today. It's thinking about the systemic inequality that we live with in this society. Fosters a grievance and hatred.

It's a very complex problem and I worry that we might, in the rush to try to do something. Kind of go down alleys which aren't going to be profitable and may actually end up dividing the country more. I think the assault weapons ban is something that people of goodwill can disagree about. But I do know that every time it's moved forward, it's divisive in the country. And I don't know how many problems that will actually solve, given the small number of people in any given year who are actually killed with assault rifles.

Now, obviously more than in England. I was just looking at some numbers. And the U.S.'s non-firearms homicide rate is three times England's overall homicide rate. So even if you eliminate every firearms homicide in the United States, we still have three times more than England, Japan and countries like that. So we have, as you were saying, Clay, a violence problem, which is also novel for our country. We've had a violence problem in our country.

Our country was founded in violence, some of it positive in terms of freedom from colonialism, but some of it negative in terms of colonizing the continent of America.

I think those are the more fruitful paths.

We have our incarceration problems in the country. In other words, if you really wanted to get to the soul of America, which is what a sociologist is doing, get to the soul of America. That produces this phenomenon. As opposed, say, to Denmark, or, as opposed, say, to Finland, then you're in such troubled waters. Okay, let's fix the problem of adolescent mental health care in the United States. It seems like that's intractable. Whereas if we just said, well, ban bump stocks, we can at least feel that we're doing something about it, right?

I hate that it became this right-wing culture warrior organization. But honestly, the NRA and the modern gun control movement have been in a death spiral with one another. And so now the NRA and modern gun control movements are just in this kind of never-ending battle. That doesn't help us address the actual problems, and I would say problems that get exacerbated by firearms.

I don't think of them as primarily being gun problems. Suicide is a problem that gets exacerbated by guns. Homicide is a problem that gets exacerbated by guns. Firearms are certainly a very efficient tool if you want to kill a lot of people fast.

Welcome back to this final segment of our first edition of our new series, Listening to America with Clay Jenkins. As you've heard, there will be more continuity than change. Mr. Jefferson will be making appearances as well as our frequent guests Lindsay Trevinsky, David McCandry and Dr. Joseph Ellis.

We can't even get people to take the time to sit down and listen to an hour's show. I don't have time.

And so our national debate is sort of brickbacks and shallow and crazy. But when we were on this water trip, we just sat down with people and let them talk for as long as they had things to say. And when they realized that we weren't just in to get something that we could appropriate from them and take it back to a media center, they began to relax into it. And then they start to tell stories and they become fascinating.

And so we've stopped listening to each other, and that's why we chose as our title Listening to America, and we mean it. The country is filled with really extraordinary people and I believe in this country.

And here's the thing I'm going to get very serious for a moment. Barbara. I never thought that in the last third of my life, which I'm certainly in, maybe the last seven, eight. You know, I never thought that I would feel disillusioned with my country, but don't you feel disillusioned like this isn't America?

This isn't what we're meant to be, we're meant to be striving always to be better, and we're meant to be the class act of the world. And we're meant to be, you know, centered in Jeffersonian idealism and that we're never going to be perfect.

But we keep working at it and we believe in civil rights and we believe, you know, that's how we feel. And yet there's been this terrible, terrible slippage and I want to go out and see if that's really true.

And I don't think it is. When you get out there to Ritchie Montana, or Wadena, Minnesota, or Broken Bow, Nebraska, or, you know, a small town in western Virginia. You see good and decent people doing good and decent things. And they don't really recognize the usual national debate.

And I'll show you things now. You're probably thinking this wild-eyed, you know, knucklehead just wants his trailer. But I wouldn't be doing this if I didn't believe that. The country was more interesting, more virtuous, more idealistic and more optimistic than we are led to believe. And so I would like to show you that, and I can, by bringing back interviews.

But I'd rather take you there into a small cafe in Wyoming and see what happens.

But they decided that it was the only profitable way forward. And so we live in a very deeply capitalistic country. You've been in commercial media, you know, and it likes sensationalism, and it likes revenue.

And it's not very sexy to talk about somebody in Montana who is welding some superb art. There is a kind of a sense in which the sensational has taken over, and I blame popular culture, too. If you watch an average night of television, just surf around.

They're dangerous, you know? Because that's what the pop culture in her country was showing her, because that's the way that America is perceived. And again, there should be enough of us. I would think that should be able to stand up. Even though it's not sexy, so that we can turn it around to make it sexy. That being good is sexy, you know?

I was just like, you just mesmerized, and then you're binge watching 250 hours of NCIs. And so, I mean, we've done this to ourselves if we wanted to save the country, which clearly we don't if we cut the plugs off of our television sets. And for one month, they went dark. People would be out in the streets saying, Hey, should we barbecue together? And I didn't know you lived here.

And I'm going to go all the way up to the top of Maine as he did. And then all the way out across the Dakotas to Seattle, and then down through Monterey and his old stomping grounds. To San Diego, and then over to Texas and then to New Orleans and back up. And I'm going to do it in five bites, not just one continuous journey. And I'm going to write every day and then I'm going to do like a subscription service, that people can join me once a week. And there'll be photo essays and interviews and so on, and so forth. And while I'm doing it, I'm going to read the complete works of Steinbeck.

From the first short story that he wrote until the last thing that he wrote, which was called America and Americans, and so this. Then this will be two books, one on. As America approaches its 250th birthday, what does it seem like now? And I know I'm not going to get to the heart and the soul of the country, but I'm going to do my best. You know, that's all I can do, Barbara.

Arikara communities, There are African American communities that are urban and rural, there is a Southern African American community and a Detroit and Chicago African American community. There are Polish Americans and Ukrainian Americans. It would be madness for me to say I'll go out there and my antenna will be up and I'll listen to all of these things.

Of course not. I'm as blind as anybody I have. One advantage is that I've had a really privileged education, so I've read a lot in a lot of directions.

But I can't possibly do this well without the help of people like you. And you have to say I listened to your program. I thought it was sort of interesting, but it seemed a little like you, you know, it seemed a little like monocultural or a little blind. And then we're expecting people to teach us how to see this country, because you can't just, I mean, how do you do this?

Let's say that I started in Chicago, what a city.

I would be, I think, really presumptuous if I thought I could just show up and say, Tell me about the woes of the south side of Chicago.

And so to say the Black Americans think of this, that would be a very silly thing to say. I'm a little better versed on Native Americans because I'm a Lewis and Clark scholar. And I've spent really a lot of my life in that world. And I've been doing some work on Edward S. Curtis, the great photographer, and he's absolutely unbelievable. And I'm going around....

That is a lakota, so that's a trade item. I'm thinking, what? And so they see things I could never, ever see.

And the interviews, we've already got four or five hours of them, which we're putting into these modules. They just change the way you see. And then I say, Do you think that Curtis was wrong to romanticize Native Americans? And they'll say yes, but they're still great photographs, and so I don't come with any preconception.

I just say, tell me about this, and so this is it. So Native Americans have been extremely generous to me. I think that the African-American community is a little bit harder for me to make sense of because I a grew up in North Dakota.

That was a cheap shot, but it's true and I want to get this right. And I've worked with humanities councils all over the country and we've had forums of African-American people and spokespeople and so on. And I've benefited greatly from it.

But it's not yet a natural comfort zone for me, and I want it to become one without ever becoming cocky or presumptuous. And so, listen, listen, listen, right?

You didn't, you were, except for the cheap shot about North Dakota, I think, and get in line on that one, honey.

And Neffla soup and borscht. Oh my, I will take you to places that will astonish you. Because I know you have some kind of moronic idea of North Dakota. That it's flat and dull and windy and stupid.

I love coming here because this is really the. This has been the flagship of the Thomas Jefferson Hour for 20 years. And a lot of people, even in this group tonight, are people that I've had on my cultural tours or on my online courses. You and I have spoken many times. It's a thrill to launch the program here. And I can't tell you how much I appreciate this community because it has really opened many doors of perception for me.

And we're just getting started here.

And we would go out and talk to people about the school and what we were doing, you know what we learned, and so forth. And when we got to one family one, when we got to Lodi, the families that we were to stay with were not available. And so they took us to a park. But we had police escorts because it was too dangerous for us to be in the park because we were Black. This was in 1977..

You know what happened? I know we have to stop here. But Laura Bush came to North Dakota.

You think that's funny?

Lt.America.

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