Switched on Pop - BONUS: Bhi Bhiman's 'Peace of Mind' Episode 1

Episode Date: April 8, 2019

Switched on Pop is pleased to present Episode 1 of Peace of Mind -- the new album (released as a podcast) by singer/songwriter Bhi Bhiman. In this episode Bhi digs into the fear and madness that characterizes so much of this crazy time in America. Guests include author Dave Eggers, Snap Judgement's Glynn Washington and renowned social psychologist, Lee Ross. The song for this episode is “Brother Can You Spare Some Peace of Mind?” Subscribe to Peace of Mind here: https://fanlink.to/PeaceofMind Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, it's Charlie. I'm really excited to share with you this little bonus episode drop with B. Beaman, who we hosted on our show last week, and he's this amazing singer-songwriter who embeds politically engaged lyric into really fun music. And he's actually released his latest album, Peace of Mind, which is both an album and a podcast. And we wanted to share episode one of Peace of Mind. In this episode, B digs into the fear and madness that characterizes so much of this crazy time in America. The guests include author, Dave Eggers, Snap Judgments, Glenn Washington, and renowned social psychologist Lee Ross. The song on the episode is called Brother, Can You Spare Some Peace of Mind? And I really love it. I think you will as well. If you like the show, you should subscribe to Peace of Mind, and here's B.

The world is all messed up. The nation is sick. trouble is in the land confusion all around but I know somehow that only when it is dark enough can you see the star from critical frequency I'm B-B-Beyman and this is peace of mind I'm a singer-songwriter and producer

I'm a dad and I'm an American peace of mind is an experiment it's my new album but I'm releasing it as a podcast What the hell does that mean? Well, each episode will revolve around a different song and its political theme, like immigration, voter suppression, Russia, et cetera. I've invited some incredible guests to dig into these issues, and in some cases, take me to school.

Everyone asked me if B-B-B-B-B-M-N is my real name. Yes, it's my given name. It's spelled B-H-I-B-M-A-N. My parents are Tamils from Sri Lanka But I was born and raised in St. Louis, Missouri The Birthplace of Ragtime and Chuck Berry. I grew up liking all kinds of music And if it had cool guitar in it, I was all over it.

But I vividly remember listening to Bob Dylan And being struck by his political voice. An artists like the staple singers Curtis Mayfield and peace of mind is sort of a soundtrack to this crazy time in America today's song is called Brother Can You Spare Some Peace of Mind? Our guests are author Dave Eggers from Snap Judgment, Glenn Washington, and social psychologist Lee Ross.

The theme of this episode is fear and madness. Fear is powerful. It's divisive. And it can make us do crazy things. This is something our first guest knows all. too well. Glenn Washington is an incredible storyteller and the host of Snap Judgment on WNYC. I wanted to talk to Glenn because of his unique upbringing, which was definitely defined by fear and madness. I always say I learned storytelling the old-fashioned way. I grew up in an

apocalyptic, end-of-days white supremacist Jesus cult. And it was called the worldwide Church of God. I was founded by a guy named Herbert W. Armstrong in the 30s and 40s. And he was an ad man who realized that if you start telling prophecies about the Bible, when people start listening. And my parents joined this organization in the 70s. I have black parents in a lot of the kind of racist policies and racist sort of theology. It was kidding.

I've got to dig deep into a little bit. But the basic theology is that we're living in the end times. The world's about to be tormented in a fiery cataclysm and only those with the chosen knowledge will be spared and taken to a place of safety. And I believed. I was definitely a true believer who thought that the end of the world was nine,

and I would never grow up before the return of Jesus Christ. Turns out, that was incorrect. What happened? Jesus didn't show up. Jesus didn't show up. And when you say that the return, turn of Jesus is imminent. And Jesus doesn't come.

Then you've got some real, real spleen into, right? And they were masters that had me coming and going. So you grew up in what you called a cult. And in this world of Trump, I see Trump as a cult unto himself. And I was wondering if you have thoughts on that. Yeah, it's really interesting, you know, making that comparison between Trumpsters and cultism, the definition that I use is a working definition for cults. There's

an organization where you have a single almost unquestioned leader where they actually try to get you to withdraw yourself from the rest of the world and you oftentimes then as well you have a

apocalypse that's on the horizon and if you mix those together then you have a cult essentially and when you look at what's happening today I think that it does start to look like you have the trappings of what we would have classically considered to be a cult. And this polarization, it's not just on cable news and in Washington. It has happened in our homes and at our dinner tables.

It does look like we're dealing with a situation where the rules of discourse have changed completely. And this is very personal to me right now because my mother and I can't have a political conversation because we can't even agree upon basic facts. We can't agree what racism is. We can't agree that the climate of the planet is rising. And it becomes so difficult to do anything if before you can do it, you have to first have an argument about terminology.

It seems like we're going backwards very, very quickly. Is your mother in favor of Trump? some way. The mother's a huge Trump supporter. I have a family member who's not a Trump supporter, but certainly an apologist in some way. And whenever you engage with them, the what aboutisms pop up. Yeah.

What about this? What about that? And I'm like, well, why don't you answer the question I just asked first? And then maybe we could talk about the what aboutisms. But it's the deflection thing. And in my experience, it happened in 2016. And I think it must have been like the disinformation psychological warfare operation that Russia waged and it melted this family member's brain, in my opinion. That definitely

resonates with me what you're saying. It seems like that whole campaign to ruin our elders' brains, though, has been going on for some time. I think that there have been certain news outlets that have been nothing but propaganda for a long time. Let's pause for a second, because Glenn's right. And we actually know when and how this started. In the late 80s, conservatives mobilized to get rid of an old FCC policy known as the Fairness Doctrine. And the Fairness Doctrine had required holders of broadcast licenses to not only cover issues of public importance, but to do it in a manner that was balanced. Not fair in balance, just balanced.

Conservatives argued that it limited free speech, and when they successfully got the FCC to drop it, there was a huge boom in conservative talk radio. This led to Rush Limbaugh and later TV news outlets like Fox News. Now back to Glenn. and it's been sad. And it makes me almost think, how could this be? You know, whenever I hear something that's an obvious talking point from a political operative coming from the lips of my mother,

it's so strange because I know that she didn't come up with that. But I wonder about the breakdown. What has had to break down so that you park yourself in front of a, television, spitting lies, and that you see your community, not outside the window, not with your family, not even necessarily with your church, but you see your community being defined by the vitriol that some ass clown is telling you on a TV, and it makes me wonder how much of it's my fault. Essentially, am I calling my mom? mother enough? Is she getting the social support that she needs for me enough to be a vaccine

against this lunacy? Because it's just so crazy. And I don't think that my mother was always prone to this type of crazy. I grew up in a household that had a lot of insane things going on. There's no question about it. But there was a base sort of rules for discourse. You could talk about things. that are in the world without suspecting that someone that you were having a discussion with was being fed their lines. Now, we were being fed our lines,

all of us were, by this religious organization that we're growing up in. And maybe that's it. Maybe there was such a tight band of agreement that that kind of set the stage for what's going on right now. But it does. It saddens me deeply to not be able to agree with my mother.

Or reach your mother. Or reach my mother and say, Mom, it's hotter outside than I was before. And a lot of these people on TV that you're talking like these, Tucker Carlson and some of these people, some of these people scare me because, like, they're good at it, they're really good at it.

And you might hate them and discount them, but they're really good at it. They're really good at changing people's minds and making them think that they're your friend. Like, people love them. Like, really love them and feel like they know them. Storytelling is possible. powerful stuff.

That belief is a powerful thing. And I think now about how criminal it is to have that belief manipulated by charlatans. And that's what happened to me as a child. And I think what you're arguing is that's what's going on right now. To hear more of my conversation with Glenn, go to peace of mindpod.com. and be sure to check out Snap Judgment on your local NPR station or wherever you get your podcasts. It really does feel like we're farther apart than we've ever been.

And that came up again in my conversation with author and activist Dave Eggers. He's been traveling the country, interviewing people on both sides of the aisle. And he seems to agree, things have changed. And before this, even with George W., I really thought I could totally talk all day with any Republican voter,

and we could just find 92% of the common ground about basic bedrock values, like, you know, honor and decency and family and all these other things. But now I can't find any common ground. I can't figure it out, because if you remove decency, honor values,

all of these things from it, I don't know what's left. The only thing that unites so much of, all of his behavior is fear. Like America has always had this fearful current, right? Settlers came and they wanted to get rid of the Native Americans. They were fearful of them. And on down the line, now it's Latin Americans and Middle Easterners.

Yeah. You know, I've had a lot of really interesting discussions with Trump supporters. Mm-hmm. Is this 2016 or more recently? Well, more recently, like, I went to a rally, which I was down in southeastern Alabama. And afterward, I had a hour and a half talk with the pastor of the church, and one of the church leaders, just really can't talk about

how they can support this person that lives by not one word of the Bible. You know what I mean? Nothing he does is in keeping with anything that they would ever preach to their flock. But they sort of acknowledge like we cannot endorse what he says, but he is voting

for or pushing the policies that we support. That's basically it. It's hard to argue with the results of the conservative agenda. And sometimes it feels like those of us on the left can be our own worst enemies. I had so many conversations with so many young voters, especially,

that said, ah, Hillary, I don't know. Feminists were saying, I don't know, I can't get behind her, can't vote for her. And instead, they split their votes, or they gave it to Jill Stein or whoever else, and we looked like morons. You got to look at the end goal. I mean, the end goal, there's actually,

there's a German word. I can't remember what it is. The non-ethic. You know, the Germans have these words for everything, these long, complicated words, but one is like idealism divorce from pragmatism, a sort of irrational, puritanical version of whatever ideology that they're espousing that actually ends up causing world-ending calamity

because they can't marry that idealism to pragmatism. You see that on Twitter a bit. Like, if you're not all the way pure in this ideology, I'm going to destroy you. And it's like, that's not the world I live in. In the world I live in, you have to compromise sometimes to get what you want. Yeah. There would not be a constitution without compromise. There would not be anything that we see in front of us without compromise.

Even the health care law, affordable health care, that was compromised after compromise. But look at the result, you know. Tens of millions of people that are insured that were not or could not have been before. It's like that is legislating. That's governing. It's all about compromise and inching your way toward progress. Talking with Dave and Glenn got me thinking. Why is it so hard to overcome our differences?

One of the foremost authorities on this subject is Stanford psychologist Lee Ross. He studies the barriers to conflict resolution and has applied his research to peace negotiations across the world. I wanted to know more about the us and them mentality that seems so strong right now. What's unique about humans is that they developed elaborate rational systems. There's a concept that social science, and evolutionary biologists alike use, and it's called fictiff kin. Ficteth as if it's a fiction that they're kin.

So normally in animal troops, the members of a troop are in fact related to each other by kinship. And so by promoting the well-being, or at least cooperating with the other baboons in the troop, they're furthering their own genes. Well, human beings create whole classes of people who they treat as if their kin and non-kin. So first, people who are neighbors who've moved in beside them, people who go to the same church, people who root for the same baseball team become kind of fictive kin.

And we extend the notion of us and them. And it's not an accident that the markers of us and us, and them often relate to appearance, just as they do for other animals. Do they share our mannerisms? Do they look like us? It's pie in the sky to say we have the same obligations to everyone.

That's just not how human beings, how any species were. But it is reasonable to say that even people who are not members of our group, we have some obligations to, Even enemies, we have some obligations to. And the main obligation is to recognize their humanity, to not objectified, to treat them as people.

And anytime we start referring to people as if they're animals or insects, that's a sign, that dehumanization is a sign that it's society being prepared to treat people in a horrendous fashion. I asked him about what's happening in America and what exactly Trump's rhetoric has tapped into so successfully. With regard to the divide in American society today, I would say there's some psychology involved here in that people feel negative emotions more strongly than positive ones.

If you just think about pleasure and pain, pleasure motivates you but nowhere near as much as pain, Well, by the same token, it's easier to unite people around what they're against and what they hate and what they fear and what threatens them than around what they value or cherish. I also ask Lee whether it's even possible to overcome our own bias. Well, that's an interesting topic be. It's hotly debated within psychology, how much. we can avoid particular biases. And some biases we can't avoid in terms of our gut response. We can't avoid what I call the objectivity illusion,

namely the notion that we're seeing things the way they really are, that reasonable people ought to agree with us, and to the extent that they don't agree with us, there's something wrong. They need to be enlightened. and if we can't enlighten them, they need to be restrained. That instinctive part,

I don't think we can train away. What you can learn is to curb that first instinct and to say, let me hear a little more about what they have to say. I think there is room to do that by exposing yourself not just to issues and arguments, but exposing yourself to other people's culture, to their art, to their music, even to their cooking.

Coming up, I'll break down today's song, Brother Can You Spare Some Peace of Mind? There's a famous old song from the Great Depression called Brother Can You Spare a Dime? And it was about a beggar who had served his country in the war and helped build this infrastructure and felt abandoned standing in a breadline. Bing Crosby made it famous

That song That's race against time Once I built a railroad Now it's done Brother That song is hot That could be a hit today But I really liked another song

By James Brown Off of the soundtrack to Black Caesar Called Down and Out in New York City I said, brother, can I borrow a thin, brother? You know, dimes. I started messing around with these guitar chords. This is one of my voice memos. So the first thing I started laying down was the acoustic guitar.

I got started adding some shaker and some conga. And I got this plug-in called Addictive Drums. Growing up, I'm through and through a guitar player. I only started to sing when I was 20, but I started playing guitar when I was like seven. I'm a great rhythm player. I'm a pretty good lead guitarist, and I can let it loose when I want to. I don't usually do that, but I did it on this song, and it was a lot of fun. I didn't want to just be wanking, be a wanker like in Spinal Tap.

And I'm a big Pink Floyd fan, so maybe in the back of my head, there was a little bit of another brick in the wall going on. So I did these skits. One is a news reporter reporting from the White House. Legal experts are saying that President Trump may possibly... And then it becomes kind of more psychedelic as it goes on. I had all these like Trump-Russia titles, you know, burning a hole in my pocket.

Yes, all the hits are here. Sounds like Putin on the Ritz. We shall overcoat. WWJD question mark. What would Jared do? The song is supposed to be disorienting. It's about this crazy time that we live in. The drip, drip, drip of the Russian investigation and everything else.

I had like an outro part. I was messing with these steel drums and brass sections. And I kind of wanted to have this Dr. Dre outro. So here it is. Brother, can you spare some peace of mind? Be sure to come back next week. I'll break down the second track on the album. Can't Nobody Stop Us?

And we'll talk about democracy. Places where it thrives. Places where it dies. And what happens when you realize the strongest part of your country is really so fragile? Peace of Mind is produced and distributed by critical frequency.

All music from the show is on my new album, Peace of Mind. Out now on Apple, Spotify, and Amazon. I'm performing live in New York, D.C. and Austin and April, tickets as well as vinyl and other cool stuff available at Peace of Mindpod.com. This episode was written and produced by Katie Ross and me, B. Beeman, with additional help from Jen Rice and Amy Westervelt. Sound design and mix by John Chamea and me. If you like the show, subscribe on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen

and be sure to leave us a five-star rating and review. It helps a lot. And join us next week for some peace of mind.