KPFA Radio 94.1FM presents:
Wednesday, November 8, 2017 – 7:30 PM
First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley, 2407 Dana Street, Berkeley
Advance tickets: $15 : brownpapertickets.com :: T: 800-838-3006
or Books Inc/Berkeley, Pegasus (3 sites), Moe’s, Walden Pond Bookstore, Diesel a Bookstore, Mrs. Dalloway’s
wheelchair access
“Without doubt our greatest satirist—elegant, honorable, learned and fair. I love reading him.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
In twenty-five years of imperial adventure, America has laid waste to its principles of democracy. The self-glorifying march of folly steps off at the end of the Cold War, in an era when delusions of omnipotence allowed the market to climb to virtual heights, while society was divided between the selfish and frightened rich and the increasingly debt-ridden and angry poor. The new millenium saw the democratic election of an American president nullified by the Supreme Court, and the pretender launching a wasteful, vainglorious and never-ending war on terror, doomed to end in defeat and the loss of America’s prestige abroad.
All this culminates in the sunset swamp of the 2016 election—a farce dominated by Donald Trump, a self-glorifying photo-op bursting star-spangled bombast in air. This spectacle would be familiar to Aristotle, who likened the coming to power of a government to the rise of a “prosperous fool”— an individual so besotted with money as to “imagine there is nothing it cannot buy.”
Lewis Lapham is the founding Editor of Lapham’s Quarterly and the Editor Emeritus of Harper’s Magazine. His column received the National Magazine Award in 1995 for exhibiting “an exhilarating point of view in an age of conformity,” and, in 2002, the Thomas Paine Journalism Award. He was Inducted into the American Society of Magazine Editors’ Hall of Fame in 2007. His other books include: Money and Class in America, Fortune’s Child, Imperial Masquerade, The Wish for Kings, Hotel America, Waiting for the Barbarians, Theater of War, The Agony of Mammon, Gag Rule, and Pretensions to Empire.
Mitch Jeserich, Executive Producer and Host of KPFA’s popular show Letters and Politics, was recently honored by The Nation magazine for Most Valuable Radio Show. They said, “This is talk radio that makes you smarter.”
