HOUR ONE
Based on Thomas Frank’s best-seller, the new documentary film What’s the Matter with Kansas? shows how the state transformed from an outpost of progessive politics to a bastion of hard-core conservatism. Bob talks with Frank and the film’s co-director Joe Winston.
In 2006, Bob visited the Santa Fe, New Mexico home of former Interior Secretary Stewart Udall for a long and wide-ranging discussion. Udall was a staunch conservationist and is responsible for helping to preserve much of this country’s public lands and national parks. We’ll re-run some of their conversation to mark Stewart Udall’s passing. He died last Saturday at the age of 90.
In this week’s installment of our ongoing series This I Believe, Bob talks with curator Dan Gediman about the essay of Alexander Forbes, a pioneering doctor in the field of neurophysiology. He graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1910 and devoted himself to research on the human nervous system. Forbes served as professor emeritus of physiology at Harvard for many years.
HOUR TWO
David Kessler is one of the most driven and successful doctors of his generation. He fearlessly took on the tobacco industry as head of the FDA, was dean of a premier medical school in California and has done path breaking research in pediatrics. But there is one part of his life where he has always struggled: his weight. In his book The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite, Kessler analyzes why more American every year are losing the battle to control their waistlines and how that affects the overall health of the country.
The day before his senior year in college began, singer-songwriter Joe Pug packed up his belongings and headed for Chicago. Working as a carpenter by day, Pug’s friend snuck him into a studio to record his songs. That was the beginning of the 25-year-old’s music career which now includes a well-received EP and a new full-length CD called Messenger.
Dr Kessler comes straight up against a pseudo-paradox: we must have individual responsibility for society to work, but the large institutions—corporate and governmental—which run our society deal with people in the aggregate, and often do so very well.
When a tobacco executive hires marketers and advertisers, he (it usually is an ‘he’) is never guarantied that Joe Schmitts of 133 Crescent Way, Lima, OH, will smoke more..and .there is no need to do that. What he is sold is the proposition that if he spend N dollars smoking will increase M percent. And either our tobacco executives were all idiots and their organisations stupid not to replace them, as they very seldom did—admittedly a possibility when you’re selling drugs, which largely seell themselves—or these men got roughly the results they desired.
This is both a question of personal responsibility on the executives’, marketers’, and advertisers’ part—is it reprehensible to push a button for $1 million in exchange for not a life, but millions of lives shortened and worsened—but also of the very notion of personal responsibility for consumption.
I think the problem is one of domain: one should be willing to (gently) invoke personal responsibility when dealing with an addict, a criminal, or (worst yet) a tobacco executive, but when one is speaking of large numbers of people, the reality that large-scale pressures will achieve large-scale results must be addressed—that any given person might not alter their behaviour is in this domain not relevant except to the extent that people actually will do so.