Trillbilly Worker's Party - Episode 288: Crazy White Boy University (w/ special guest John Lingan)

Episode Date: April 28, 2023

This week we're discussing John Brown, as seen through the eyes of the late novelist, Russell Banks, in his novel Cloudsplitter. DISCLAIMER: Please be aware that Russell Banks's novel is a work of fiction, and is not meant to be read as a literal interpretation of history--and thus neither is our episode. To help us work through it, we've enlisted the help of writer John Lingan, whose great book on Creedence Clearwater Revival is out now: https://www.amazon.com/Song-Everyone-Creedence-Clearwater-Revival/dp/0306846713 And please support us on Patreon: www.patreon.com/trillbillyworkersparty

Hello, Trillbilly family. This week we have a very special episode about the book Cloud Splitter by the late novelist Russell Banks. This episode is about John Brown, sort of. The reason I'm recording a preamble or caveats is that in this discussion, the line between fact and fiction often gets blurred, as it does in the book we will be discussing. You don't have to have read the book to follow along. The good thing about doing a story like this is that the spoilers are basically already out, but I do think it would make for a more enriching experience if you did read the book. But listen to this first and then maybe go read it. Because I think that this kind of gives you an introduction to some of the themes that Russell Banks is working with.

And will kind of put your head in the right direction as you're trying to tackle this. It's an 800-page book, so you might need a little bit of spark notes or assistance. I also just wanted to say that in this discussion, we are talking about the legacy of John Brown, speculating on his state of mind, blah, blah, blah. I just want to say that if you take any issue with any of it or disagree with any of it, please before you enter my DMs or the comments and tell me how wrong I am, I guarantee you I have probably already thought about those things myself. This is an episode that we go deep into reflection on violence, identity, conviction, these very heavy themes, human nature.

And we're using John Brown to explore it. So it's very ambitious, just like the book we are discussing is very ambitious. So, like I said, a lot of the events we discussed here you can just find them on Wikipedia there's some great books out there about John Brown one specifically is The Legend of John Brown by Richard O. Boyer and also Oswald Garrison Villiard I think that's how you pronounce his last name he was the great grandson of William Lloyd Garrison. He actually sort of appears in this book. He also wrote a pretty good book about John Brown. So, if you want to dial in more into the factual elements of his life, rather than maybe some of

the psychological ones or political economic ones, which we are also discussing in this episode, go read those books. So anyways, without further ado, please enjoy our episode about Russell Banks, Cloud Splitter, John Brown, his son Owen Brown, and give a warm welcome to our guest, John Lingen, who has a book out about Credence Clearwater. If you're anything like me, you really like CCR, please go check out his book. So anyways, thank you all for listening this week. Hope you enjoy the show. Thank you. All right, gang.

Welcome to the Trillbillies this week, April 27th. That's the day we're recording anyways. We have a very special guest for you all. We're joined by writer John Lingen. John, am I to understand, you got to meet Pretty Purdy recently, right? Oh, yeah. It was not recently, but in my illustrious freelance music writing career. a memoir like an autobiography that is very strange to read because it's entirely written from another person's voice so it's billed as an autobiography but it's written entirely in

the third person and then pretty purdy did this and then pretty pretty did that and here's what like the miseducation of uh what was it john adams what is his son his grandson the education of uh henry adams yeah exactly yeah that was written in the third person yeah there was yeah this is a very similar uh you know uh story of proximity to american regal power of course um so that was basically an excuse because he lives in like i think jersey and he grew up in maryland which is where i'm from so he was like you know pretty reachable as you might imagine you know and so yeah i just sort of like used that as a as a peg to kind of hang out with him for a couple days at a couple different shows. Bernard Purdy was, or I mean

he's still alive, but like I had some of his LPs, man. dude, that's you want to talk about like someone who's in the pocket. He's like drummers who are in the pocket. Never left it. Never left it. You teased him, John.

He probably thought he was getting the call up to be in the John Lingen bluegrass experience on the skins. When he. I tell you what, he would have played on it because one of his. One of he's famous for having like this just simply outrageous list of credits as a as a solo like sort of um studio drummer something like 4 000 records or whatever and even with that he still insists on claiming that he played drums on an untold number of other art like uncredited including the beatles he claims that he was

now like i want to make it clear like he's very funny and it's like he's a very funny character but like this man like is a genuine musical hero in our country it's like one of the greatest to ever do it behind the drums but he his like the way that he broke into the music industry was that he was um what was then known as a like a what was it called like a shiner or something like that i'll remember the term in a minute um but basically he would sit in a recording studio behind the drum kit and they would bring in new recordings from like you know a sweetener is what he was so they bring in recordings and they would say like this band recorded this song drum tracks a little you know could use a little you could use a little more pop

and so he would play along with it and they would use his track or sort of use it to put a little oomph behind the way and so he claims even though his like actual credit list is staggering yeah he claims that he played on 21 beatles sides like early days but still uh and that you know to say nothing of many other things so like um i could believe it if you consider their personnel behind the you know they is he is that an anti-ringo comment coming from not on my watch i'm sorry pavement brought him in when like gary young their first drummer was bad they had to bring pretty party in and they were like they were like actually can you play not in the pocket like our thing is like sloppy not in the pocket can you do that and he was like yeah i got you yeah whatever you need man i would love to find out that bernard purdy pretty purdy played

the drums on um uh what was the jimmy buffett alan jackson song five o'clock somewhere i think the only thing i he was didn't he play on isn't he the brains behind uh asia steely dan he played i think he played on uh home home at last and um uh god he played on uh on deacon blues as well but asia the song was performed by ste Gadd he's the guy who did the okay yeah so you can yeah this is what happens I get yeah Terrence just jumped right in there with the drum stuff but we can you know we can hang it's like I well once I didn't know that I had like was one degree removed from this guy who was basically an idol of mine in my 20s you know what i mean like yeah

this is like because like you could put his albums on and just drum and you know what i mean like that's kind of what they're amazing some of them i mean like his solo stuff like he would have albums of just like just drumming it was the shit it's soul drums man yeah it was great yeah this is where terrence takes his nickname, Terrence Pretty Ray, from, too. In case you were wondering. Yeah. Well, you got to earn it, and he definitely did. Yeah.

Well, I'm sorry for leading us down that path. Never. Because we're here to talk about something that's entirely different there's not even a segue there's not even i can't i was searching throughout the entire one as like okay here's the closest i can find here's the closest segue i can find let's do it let's do it uh pretty pretty claims to have played on thousands of albums in addition to the you know plethora copious amount of albums he actually already has played on like accomplishments and claims to have played on another on a number of other albums so in some ways he is a ghost drummer he is there and not there he is he his uh his His person represents an archetypal hero that transcends time and space.

Yeah. He's cultivated his own mythology as well. I think that's an important component here. That's right. That's enough of a segue. It's like segues, they That's enough of a segue. Segues, they can be kind of tenuous. They don't need to be entirely strong.

But today, we are talking about... Well, we're talking about John Brown, ostensibly. That's the figure and subject of the book that we read that we wanted to talk about. But I am going to argue that this book is not about John Brown at all. John Brown is one character in this book, but I don't think that John Brown is the centerpiece of this book. I think this book is mostly about the irish slave myth that's what that's what i took away from that russell banks is really concerned about the treatment of the irish very subtle thematic signaling happening here there was um yeah so tom gave it away the books were the book we're

talking about is cloud splitter by russell banks someone gave me this book a long time ago and then i saw that russell banks had passed in january and i was like where do i know that name from oh it's on my bookshelf buried underneath you know hundreds of other books I've never read. So he's like, yeah, I'll read this. Why not? And that started me down a path of reading a bunch of other Russell Banks books. So I read several of his other books to prepare for this. I read Affliction. I read Continental Drift. The Darling.

The Sweet Hereafter. Two of his books have been made into movies one by paul schrader uh affliction there's a paul schrader thing here and in some ways a lot of the themes that russell banks works with are very much themes that schrader-esque they're schrader-esque i mean so much so there's a character in first reform who you know spoiler alert kills himself because he's so absolutely uh ridden with like guilt and anger and rage over environmental devastation uh and and so like we have to look at a character like that obviously that's a paul schrader film but you look at a character that like that you say is that person sane are they insane are they crazy you're not crazy i think that's kind of the question we're

trying to answer with this book and that russell banks was trying to answer with this book was the brown family insane were they crazy ass boys? Or were they perfectly sane? They got in on the ground floor of the CWB movement. I have to say. They truly did. Yeah, they named a wing of the headquarters after him, I believe. I would say so. I would say so.

You know that show with Henry Louis Gates? It's like the genealogy show. You know that white rapper Tom McDonald that pops up every once in a while? He's kind of like the right-wing hero. We're going to see him on that show, Henry Louis Gates, and we're going to find out that he was descended

right from the loins of JB. He's going to be like that he was descended from from the right from the loins of jb he's gonna be like no no it would render him it would completely tear his identity apart i mean brown did have you know quite a few kids uh 23 and some of yeah some of them even survived. And you got to figure that his line does extend of all i totally on board with what you're trying to say i think the insanity thing is definitely one i think it's also like the question that the narrator his son owen is trying to answer about himself that's kind of like one of the signal dramas in his own narration is like am i insane right would i be would i be more or less sane for turning away from my father and like rejecting this um but yeah to me i do think that there's that additional question there about like where morals come from in a way that like seems very shradery to me you know i do i haven't i

haven't seen the affliction movie and i haven't read it i haven't read the book i i've read uh sweet hereafter in preparation for this which was uh you know just to give the new the newbies in the audience we're talking here about you know know, affliction is about generational abuse and trauma and was adapted by Paul Schrader. The suite hereafter concerns a small town that experiences the death of 14 children at once when a school bus plunges into a frozen lake. And that is not a spoiler.

That is literally the concept from which... So we're talking... These are heavy-duty books and about heavy-duty things. And I do think that morality is one of them. It's like, how do you even... There's a lot of class in these books, you know, like what is morality when you're concerned about putting food on the table? What is morality when you're, um, when you're confronted with like true injustice and all the, like when, you know, just like how do people sort of create a sense of morality? Um, that's that's uh i i it's not often that i come away from

a book like really thinking those types of thoughts i don't like read fiction for those kinds of things like to ask the big questions or whatever but this was like uh just like really good and i remember really individual just sort of like visceral scenes about it. And then you later on find yourself having these bigger conversations in your head, which I thought was very impressive. How did you find his other books? Because, like I said, I'm halfway or not quite halfway into Continental Drift now, which will be my third book. Continental Drift Now, which will be my third book. I have not found the other two to be as engrossing as Cloud Splitter,

but I'm just curious what you're deeper in than I am. So, yeah. So let me say this. Tom and I mentioned this on a few episodes past. Like, Russell Banks is, in the New York Times obituaryuary for him they said a writer steeped in the working class he is definitely steeped in the working class for two reasons he writes about like outcasts and he writes about class in america like a lot of his books are about how class has lived and experienced in america and that includes a race but another part of that is that he just grew up in poverty he grew up to a single mother like his dad ran out on him i don't know

when he was like 12 and he was the oldest and you know what i mean like he he grew up in poverty he was a great student though and was apparently able to get a scholarship to a good college in the 60s he ran around with like snick you know the student non-violent coordinating committee and like the civil rights movement and uh and you know let me so a lot of his books deal with race a lot of his books deal with identity like that's a big a big um a theme that he keeps coming back to like yes where do morals come from and where do i where does identity come from how is it formed how do we you know how do we realize who we really are and uh you know it's interesting because i i was reading

his books at the same time that i was re-ing Twin Peaks. And I was like, ah, these, these things could not be further apart. Like they are so wildly different from each other, but they're really not. I mean, aesthetically. Yes. Like David Lynch is working with surrealism. Russell Banks is working with pretty much realism.

I guess you could call it that. Although there is like magical realism elements in a lot of his stuff, but like the themes, they're all, I mean, it lines up it's like identity like a lot of characters will look in mirrors and find themselves disembodied like parts of their bodies will become disembodied from themselves like extreme alienation and loneliness

a conviction right you know what i mean like where do these kind of things come from and so it's like there's a lot of similarity there community as well exactly rural community yeah that's exactly right so let me say that like of the ones i read i really liked sweet hereafter just because of how brief it is and how uh you know punchy it is it just gets its point across affliction i had a hard time with at first but like once it fucking gets rolling in the book the movie is the movie is the exact same way it unfolds like a paul schrader movie it's like by the end of it you're like holy fuck man like you know it's it's uh but when i read affliction affliction is kind of like the keystone for understanding cloud splitter in this weird way they deal with some of those same themes even though the characters are

like inverted or weird deformed versions of each other so it's like in affliction you've got a guy and his father and they have this like you said this long abusive relationship the father is an alcoholic uh and they have this very complicated interwoven relationship that they can't break apart from each other in cloud splitter it's the exact same except john brown is not an alcoholic or he's and he's not abusive but he is kind of manipulative yeah well that's an interesting thing that you guys said that i think we have put a peg in that one for later in the conversation for sure yeah it's an interesting question, right? Because it's like you ask yourself, like, who was this guy?

He did one of the seminal acts of violent direct action in American history. Arguably, none of the events of the 19th century would have happened without him. Definitely not a civil war, probably. And so, I mean mean maybe maybe so maybe there would have come along another john brown who who's to say but uh but yeah we haven't i while we're laying out themes here too uh the way you're describing affliction and we're describing like you know we have one one father who is uh fundamentally and very literally physically abusive john brown like i think certainly by like our contemporary standards it's abusive but you we

can we can argue the finer points of it right what we're talking about in both cases though is violence they're both violent men and i think all of these books are violent in a way which i think is another like schrader thing about it is it's not like they're not you know violence in the like a building exploding and somebody shooting a machine gun way but they're violence in the like you know the the paul schrader like one person killing themselves or you know one horrible tragedy or one man drinking himself to death or stabbing another person it's all like super intimately felt or concerning or worried about at all times and all and all of the contradictions all the social contradictions and pressures and anxieties and alienations becoming embodied in a single person who can no longer contain them.

And it starts exploding out. You know what I mean? Like Travis Bickle and Taxi Driver. Or you know what I mean? Definitely. Or like in Affliction, too. Like Wade Whitehouse. Or anybody that's ever played the Joker.

Or anybody that's ever played the Joker. Yeah, these books are all about men who are just about to be embraced their inner clown prince or whatever the fuck. This is the story of my older brother's strange criminal behavior and disappearance. We who loved him no longer speak of Wade. It's as if he never existed. By telling his story like this, by breaking the silence about him, I tell my own story as well. Everything of importance, that is, everything that gives rise to the telling of this story, occurred during a single deer hunting season in a small town in upstate new hampshire where wade was raised and so was i i came into this and of course john brown's one of those guys who's just like particularly if you you know you traffic in the left and he

who's like sort of legacy looms large and i came into this just kind of like my conception of him was as this guy with this like great moral courage and all this kind of stuff. And I left thinking like, or is he just kind of the inverse of like a January 6th guy? You know what I mean? It's like he just so happened to be right, but he's just as insane. That is so funny you say that because I sort of feel like John Brown and. And does it and does it matter? You know, I guess does it matter?

I think from a class perspective, that is correct, because who was John Brown? He wasn't a wage earner. He was a he was a well, he was a shepherd at first and like a tanner. But he start in the 1830s which was kind of like the 1980s of the 1800s like you had everybody trying to do get rich like everybody trying to do like get rich quick schemes and everybody thought like you could just make money everywhere it's like he had all these schemes to like get rich quick sell you know sell deer make like a lot of money out of it a few of them are in cloud splitter I mean it's definitely implied

in the narrative of that book that he let's say is more keen to embrace the like big violent action the worse his life becomes financially you know it's sort of you know like they definitely and like that's made clear like he has that episode where he goes to uh england which is just like this is what i love about like an 800 page book is there's like a hundred page section or maybe even oh yeah the people on Amazon, by the way, the Amazon reviewers hated this. They were like, I wrote a book. I wanted to read a book about John Brown. It's like, you missed the point.

Dude, I wrote a 200-page book, and people complained about a three-page scene because it was... That's what they love to do, man. It's what they love to do. I wanted to beach read about ccr god damn it so like uh he um but yeah so he they go they there's a scene where they travel by boat owen and his father alone travel by boat to england to london where they are going primarily to sell is it like uh it's uh like sheep kind of

fabric it's wool yeah there's a there's a to show how rural i am i couldn't pull that one so they're selling you know bales and bales of of wool that's the primary reason they're going and his like you know the the type of sort of yemen farmer with a billion kids that he is he's always sort of thinking up the next kind of like all right big score and then we'll be okay for a little while he's never going to have like a steady job so they go over there to sell this big thing and he's like it's great i'm gonna i'll come back with a bunch of money and instead they do a little cool sightseeing and they like visit some things and they interact with some incredible characters that you never see elsewhere in the book but then like one of his bales is like moldy and so the english guys kind of like take him for a ride and i don't want this

yeah they're like look how rough this stuff is. We'll give you it for like an eighth of the price. And he has no choice but to like, because he literally can't get back on the boat to return home unless he gets some money. So it's like and then after that, he's like. I think what we need is a great man to lead us to a violent conclusion you know a violent uh you know sort of meeting with destiny and it's like yeah it's the sun never comes out and says like that so directly but it's very heavily implied just in the narrative that it's like it's the equivalent of a dude who had to close his you

know fucking odiel's odiel's tap room because of the recession or uh yeah or you know his print shop because of covid and then was like so i guess we're doing this this january 6th thing like it's time to keep the call you know like that is so funny that you guys say that because that is literally what I was thinking, too. Like as the yeoman farmer, he is the he is America's early version of the self-made entrepreneur, a small businessman. Which means that in American society, in American class society, we have a very weird class structure right like we have millionaires and billionaires and then the proletariat and then like the middle professional class like teachers and doctors and lawyers but then we have this weird and they're in capitalist obviously they're in capitalist economies all across the world but But in America, America was founded with this foundational myth of the human small businessman, you know, class. And in that class, in the very person, the ultimate individual, the, you know, the ultimate individual who can seize the free real estate of North America and all of its many resources and turned it into profit

on the backs of that person are incredible contradictions and pressures because why because it very rarely works out for any of them like a lot of them are at a moment's notice just a few paychecks away or they don't even pay they're paying their own fucking money because they're basically self-employed from complete ruin. That's why a lot of the guys at January 6th were these types of guys. They were small business owners,

but they were kind of like poor and broke small business. They were failed small business owners. That's the thing. The thing that blew my mind, not to trump this so early in the game or at all, but when I first learned early in the game or at all but like when i first learned at early into his like reign or run or whatever it was like some type of like post 2016 analysis it was like the average trump voters income is 72 grand a year and i was like i don't

think i was earning like much more than that at the time. And I was like, and I was like, man, I, you know, like I live in an expensive place. Like if I lived in a cheaper, like 72 grand is not. Or these were, these were not the hillbillies, you know what I mean? These were like, you say, as people who own a car dealership, but you know, China's not producing enough chips or whatever shit. And like, it's just like that kind of, you know, it, you know china's not producing enough chips or whatever shit and like it's just like that kind of you know it you know living in prefab houses like that is the type of person and he is like the

person one rung below that he's like trying to get to that but that's still his sort of ideal brown is i mean like he's this person who i agree he is striving like you said to be part of this like new yankee business owner like middle class business owner and um yeah cannot pull it off for reasons having to do with his own focuses being elsewhere um like yeah i do think that there's like comparisons to be made but like he did feel the slavery the freedom cause and this is also laid out in the book like very deeply from an early point on here's what i thought was like uh to me like so i thought he in my mind going into this, I thought that what I knew about John Brown was basically from Jacob Lawrence's paintings of him. This guy that just had this unshakable aversion to injustice or whatever.

And really, he's got more in common with these guys that are TV preachers that say they talk to God and stuff. And I know Banks is obviously taking liberties, but he believed he had this mandate from God to strike these people down. He was a holy warrior, for sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which I didn't get going into this. Let me just say that, so Banks did take liberties. But honestly, when it comes to John Brown and his character, he didn't take that many liberties. He did take liberties with Owen Brown and with some of the circumstances around their farm homestead in North Elba, New York.

But like everything I've read about John Brown, he sounds pretty accurate as to the John Brown portrayed in this book. And I just want to say that, like we were talking about this question of like insane and insane and all this other stuff it's like because of his position in american political economy and you do have all these sort of contradictions sort of saddled on your back and you're told to resolve them sometimes some people do manage to see that and i kind of feel like john john brown was kind of able to do that was he doing it consciously was he doing it like ahead of time instead of just like on the fly just making it up as he went along that's a question that i don't think any of us can really answer but it

definitely seems to me that at every point he was he was presented with a set of historical circumstances that were not, that could not be untied. And in the book, Owen Brown says, you can call it God's will. I just call it history. And I think that what he's saying by that is that, like, bars, which is like, yeah, it's like, you know what he's saying? Like, it's like certain human beings like Napoleon, because we are also greeted, you know, several times with the image of Napoleon because John Brown was kind of obsessed with them. More so just because he wanted to know why Napoleon lost. But we are kind of like greeted multiple times with this idea of the hero or of the person who is able to kind of reconcile some of the contradictions of history and kind of blaze a path through it and i think that like john brown for whatever reason he realized that there was no compromising with the the slavocracy i mean and his actions which we can talk about here in a minute like i don't know if there was any other

alternative like maybe there was i don't know maybe you could call them cowardly but that depends on your definition of terrorism and how you feel about political terrorism like is it is it an explainable thing or is it is it ultimately cowardice or who who is the guy do you remember the guy i guess maybe like two years ago that shot up the ice facility yeah yeah like in my mind i was thinking about this guy because i kept going back and forth is it like it was brown's conviction more along the lines of what this guy had or what or was again the crazy question you know i kept going back and forth so i don't think that guy was crazy at all.

I think it's just, I think, I think, and I mean, this gets teased out. Well, I guess we'll talk more about it on the show here, but like, you know, it deals a little bit with how like Brown would, would engage with like Harrison and Douglas and these like sort of nonviolent abolitionists and stuff like that. And how ultimately he believed, you know, that like, okay, it's good what you're doing, but it's just kind of fraught in the end. And that's just kind of mirrors like today, like the whole like left versus lives,

like can things change at the ballot box versus what has to happen in the streets. And it's like, it's like the more things change, the more they stay the same. Yeah. I think that like, the thing is, is that if you think about I mean, this is another thing that kind of plugs into this. If you think about any injustice for long enough in America, whether it's like police violence or the environment or whatever, you will go insane. You're like you will just fucking lose it. And we go like you think about like incarcerate mass incarceration or uh lack of health care if you if you dwell on it for long enough you really will start to make well america

makes people crazy that's the first of all i'm not when we talk about his sanity i'm not talking about it pejoratively or like out of hand or anything like that right i mean like you're talking about his his rationality right you know it's like your ability to just sort of like go along to get along man yeah what we all have to do the question is is whether you're whether you're willing to die for it or not that is a question that vexes a lot of people and if you say yes in the affirmative then people think you're insane i think that's right kind of the well i i you know it's um obviously to to read this now um you know it it seems not unlike the sort of the quote-unquote like culture war stuff that we have going on at our present time. And that phrase is so like magazine rack insidious for like some like deeply

meaningful and important like civil rights causes that are, you know, multiply at a flashpoint right now. And like the trans one specifically and like how those people, that community are being scapegoated and treated, like, you know, to read something like Cloud Splitter and to hear this character sort of opine about slavery on like truly moral terms, like, you know know there's a he has sort of his religious basis for it but his appeal and the sort of ultimate thing that like perhaps like makes him go crazy is the fact that it is like a a moral crusade in that way and it is saying like it is just fundamentally wrong that an entire group of people is treated this way and victimized this way and it might

and like there is no sort of like percentage of that treatment that should be considered fine at all and like right now it's like you see the lengths to which these people will go to make other communities unsafe and afraid and it makes you like you know that you know that's that's the obvious you know sort of equivalent you know equivalent that my mind drew yeah and i think that it's important to keep in mind that the course the historical context of the mid-1800s was such that by 1850, I think, you know, like the question of abolitionism and slavery, like by the 1840s and 1850s, it had started to become apparent to many people, even Frederick Douglass, that the only way this was going to end was in bloodshed. Douglas that the only way this was going to end was in bloodshed.

And, you know, one of the amazing things about America is that like a lot of us can have that thought on our mind, like we can know that, like we can see, we can, you know, sort of divine the tea leaves and know. And then at the same time, sort of backwards engineer a sort of rationalization for why you might not want to let's just say adopt a violent attitude or politically terroristic attitude towards changing that it's like let me read you this quote uh sojourner truth came to frederick douglas in 1847 she said frederick is god dead frederick answered no and because god is not dead slavery can only end in blood i mean this is 1847 you know what i mean like people even knew as early as that so my my understanding is that the you know the sort

of writing was on the wall i mean you had first had, first of all, you had the end of the slave trade decades before the end of slavery. So all that meant was that the ship stopped coming. But in a way that sort of mutated the plantations into more of like, I don't know, kind of birth farms in a way. And it really changed the, like the nature of slavery changed in those sort of 30, 40 years before the civil war. And it become, it became, you know, worse in some ways physically for the people who were, who were suffering it. And it became more cruel and it also became, you know, they sort of, with the writing on the wall, it became a thing that was defended more staunchly, you know, because they knew that it required defending now,

in a way that it did not. So I think, yeah, those years leading up to it, yeah, it's, I don't think at all that his abolitionism was odd. It was definitely the tone and his desire to lead an ultimately religious crusade as opposed to a political or social one. religious crusade as opposed to a political or social one you know this was part of his strategy you're you're absolutely right john like the slave trade had ended by them and so part of his strategy in harper's ferry was that what they would do was that they would start leading insurrections on the border states and drawing off slaves from the border states, thus increasing the price of a slave. So it's kind of like, you know, we, you know, for years, you know, me and Tom were working for, you know, environmental nonprofits and you, you try to increase, you try to make the industry internalize its costs and make them increase the price of coal so that it becomes unprofitable. That was kind of their strategy. They were trying to increase the price

of a slave until it was so unprofitable that they would have to hire white people to do plantation labor. And at that point, white Southerners would realize that they were just in the same boat as their fellow black Americans and that they would they would achieve race consciousness, basically, that they would they would themselves they would see themselves as racialized as well. white trash where she kind of talks about like some whites that ended up in the piedmont area like working on plantations and stuff along blacks and it kind of created kind of a similar cast as like like during the korean war how like uh you know they're like korean chinese and japanese workers were all treated like differently and paid differently and all that kind of stuff i don't really recall much about it but i was curious if you if you did honestly and i meant to put like caveats at the front of this

episode one of which is that like i'm not an expert on john brown and i'm not an expert on slavery or the 19th century but i do know that we all recently dug a 25 year old novel. And I think that gives us we have. Well, I was just trying to get Terrence on the record saying there were white slaves, too. So the Irish, you will not get me. I do know. I don't know. I'm sure there were probably isolated pockets of that i do know though that they had succeeded mostly through the underground railroad to increase the price of a slave and um

and so you had this situation by the 1850s especially after 1854 1850 you had the fugitive slave act which uh you know made it illegal for any freed slave to exist in a freed state and basically deputized americans to target black americans and then in 1854 you had the uh kansas nebraska act which invalidated the missouri compromise and opened up nebraska and kansas to i mean you know we say we it opened up the slavery what it really was was that it allowed them to vote on the question of slavery and it was it was an open question it was the state's rights position it was it was the state yes it went exactly right it was the state's rights position they were wasn't and you know it was an inherently conservative quote-unquote

you know compromise or approach or whatever. It was. This was like Stephen A. Douglas. You know, Franklin Pierce was the president. You know, in Nebraska and Kansas weren't states yet. They were territories. But what they wanted to do was they wanted to set up their own legislatures. was they wanted to set up their own legislatures and so after the kansas nebraska act you have all these people rushing into kansas like from missouri kentucky whatever like pro-slavery forces and then you had the free soilers who also went and wanted to start their own legislature um you get some like back and forth right and it goes through it in the book but what led to the pottawatomie massacre which i really

wanted to talk about which like it's like to me like the raid on harper's ferry is like that's like blockbuster shit right it's like it's like heat it's like michael man like you really could make like a it's like instead of like where the fuck is the van it's like where the fuck are the slaves like you know what i mean it's like it really it's also it's also guns from long distance it's like you know trying to get a bolt open and then looking up and there's like a dude in a tree a hundred yards from you who's like re-cocking his you know musket or whatever the hell yeah michael mad actually would do it would do that a lot of justice he goes deep that's that's pretty much last of the mohicans i mean that's a little bit more like real wartime but yeah no the the pot of otomy is like

that's knife stuff and that was a wild scene and like what the the brilliant thing was like ending that scene with the other characters going like what the the brilliant thing was like ending that scene with the other characters going like what the fuck they conduct a massacre and then it's not like and then john brown laid his thing to the ground it was like one guy walks in and is like sees what they've done and is like, you know, I also want slavery to go away. But like, Jesus, what is it? And it's and that's like the exact midpoint of the book, too. So it keeps on sort of like testing the boundaries of like. Crazy or right.

And does it matter? Yeah. Yeah, it's well, and I guess where I was going with that is that, like, if you were an abolitionist, like crazy or right. And does it matter? Yeah. Yeah. It's well, and I guess where I was going with that is that like, if you were an abolitionist at this point and you had done what John Brown and his family had done, which was side with black Americans,

like that's, that's over and over. That's, that's not just reified in the text, but that's reified just from people like Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglas, that the Browns more than any other Americans, they distrusted white people, basically. They thought white people were too flaky and that the only people that could lead a revolution or an insurrection to end slavery were the black slaves themselves. And so if you have that mentality, and it's the 1850ss and there's the Fugitive Slave Act has been passed.

The Nebraska Kansas Nebraska Act has been passed. You've got compromisers in Washington and in Kansas basically threatening to turn the state over to being a slave state. In your mind, this is true. I think the history bears it out. There's a slaveocracy conspiracy. The slaveocracy has taken over the government they fucking you know what i mean like they've taken over and they're fucking ruling things how they want and so what brings them to pottawatomie is that lawrence was an

abolitionist town lawrence kansas it had been sacked by pro-slavery hucks yeah which that's another joke and i hate kansas that's another weird thing to think about that like you've got this like quasi revolution happening in kansas you know right on the grounds of kansas university um but like you know lawrence had been sacked uh the free soilers in kansas were basically like compromising and saying like, oh, it's OK. You can sack our city. That's OK. And on top of that, the way that it's presented in the book is fucking insane.

But they find out about the caning of Charles Sumner in the Senate by the coward Preston Brooks. My favorite, my favorite American historical event of all time. Right. My kids are so tired of me talking about the caning of Sunderland. I mean, dude, it's fucked up. And so to their minds, there is one quote that I think about in this book. I cannot stop thinking about it. It recurs over and over in my mind.

But I think about the scene where John Brown turns to his son owen and he says we have to become terrible that's that is that is that sums it up because what he's saying is he's saying these pro-slavery forces they're a bunch of little bitches and until they realize that we are prepared to go to extraordinary lengths and by that he means killing basically innocent civilians i mean they they were racist and they were pro-slavery but they were just poor white people who didn't have slaves um he's basically saying that they had to know that this was the kind of soul wrenching like soul dividing act we were willing to commit and that's an interesting question that is an interesting question

it's i don't know it's interesting to think about. It's like, I mean. What do you know? You just you you. I want to double back to something else that you said first, because you said a lot and it's and it was like good stuff, like really important things to mention. One of those things was that he had this this attitude of like, I'm just on the side of black people right and that you're absolutely right that he what what made his you know crusade capital like lowercase c just like his his sort of life's work different than other people on the anti-slavery side was that attitude i mean that attitude is is uh rare now you know in the united states um where they're you know a person you know a white person who feels these these issues of racial equality really deeply um you know at this point we have this language of like

you know part of that fight for a white person is just sort of like accepting that you're not the most important person in the room that you're not there to lead you and it's like that's all new kind of information for the for our white community i think in a lot of ways. And here, this guy is like basing his entire sort of ethos on it, uh, back then. And yeah, part of that was adopting this just sort of base mistrust of white people because it's like, he too has like been, you know, it's like the stakes, stakes is high, man. Like, you know, like you can't, you can't trust the wrong person in,

you know, the wilds of Northern New York trying to get these people to, to like, this is life and death. So, um, yeah, that is like a fascinating element of, of his story. And I, and I think like what, I think like the farther he goes away from that, the like the worse his actions become. And that is, I think, sort of shown by the end, because right before Harper's Ferry, they have the longest conversation with a character who has appeared a few other times uh which is frederick douglas right so like frederick douglas there are a couple like beyond brown like naturally there are a few sort of like historical figures that have walk-ons and this is one of them this this meeting happened in a quarry too so it's interesting to think about like this, is this a real event? Amazing. Amazing. Because that would have been very different had Banks invented it.

I think it would have worked fine, but it would have been different. But at any rate, they meet, and he basically says, like, we're marching to Harper's Ferry. We need you behind us because we need to summon an army. It's like a lord of the rings moment right but like what if what if strider was just like uh i'm hearing the voice of god and everyone else just sort of went like gonna have to let you handle this because that's what douglas does douglas says like yeah this is certain death he says it's a steel trap yeah it's a steel trap he knew the place geographically he was like there's no way you're going to get out of there that place

is just filled with because it was a fort you know it's filled with weapons so you're going to try and march on a fort and take slaves from there while also fighting so and so he doesn't get the manpower that he wants and so the point being like his sort of messianism is like yeah it's that it's that um that fight between his messianism and his like that moral element to it that's sort of that earthier kind of just like fellow man element to it what were you gonna say tom i was well i don't really have a fully fleshed out thought but i think like when john's talking about this you know this sort of tug between his messianism and and the fellow man thing i think think. Actually I'm going to sit on that thought. Let me think about that for a second.

Well you're right. I think the thing is. And we have to keep this in mind. I read an interview with Russell Banks. I cheated a little bit. I read an interview with him. Because he was talking about that scene early on. In the book.

Where Owen Brown steals the watch. His grandfather's watch and john brown beats him you know spanks him or whips him or whatever and then turns around and tells him to beat him like to give him 60 lashes and and russell bank said that the reason he did that was he was trying to establish that there is such a thing that that really happened or he'd made that up he made that up that was yeah that was not it or as far as he could tell damn right yeah it's like no it's like uh he was trying to establish that there is such a thing and again you have to keep in mind that russell banks's books every single one of them i've read has violence in it and it's not gratuitous violence it's not like tarantino- violence. It is violence that has been pondered on very deeply and that probably comes from a place of having experienced it as well.

And so, like, I think that he understood this is someone speaking from the perspective of someone who has been on the receiving end of some violence, rather from police, parents, friends, neighborhood bullies, whatever. And he said that he was trying to establish that there is such a thing as principled violence and so he was trying to establish this line of continuity between him making his son beat him in the in the barn to pottawatomie and it's not for him to decide uh or you know john brown or owen brown or whatever to decide if this was right or wrong it's basically up to us as the reader you know what i'm saying to like to try to understand what this says about human nature it's like if there is such a thing as principled violence violence in service to something greater than ourselves uh i don't know what does that say about us i think

that that's you're right like he's asking these big questions, but the weird thing about Russell Banks is that, like, his books are very unpretentious. It's like, they're very accessible. It's not like you're reading Pension or anything. Like, this is, it's like, you can sit down, you can read it all on a weekend, really. It's like, but it's asking these huge questions about, like, yeah, human nature and such. Yeah, well, it's it's interesting that like this is a historical novel you know which is uh unique i think in his books definitely up to like that time

like in taking like that degree of sort of um i don't think he'd ever said a book in the 1800s before and so you know whenever a writer does that it's interesting to see their decisions about like how they're going to uh sort of make that uh familiar sort of world build a little bit and there's very little of that like in this book it's not like it's not like written in a sort of florid mock 19th century right it doesn't have like a like a special kind of uh because he's actually like in the in the narrative of this in the world of this book he's actually writing it the character is writing it as an old man in the 20th century yeah Yeah. So he is, and this is a,

this is a fictional Liberty that I know that he took because Owen Brown died much younger than this. I was going to say, I was going to say that you can, and this kind of is my interpretation of the book because it fits along with some of his other stuff. I think you can make a very good argument that who is telling this story is actually not real that they're spectral that this is not like this is basically a ghost

because the real owen brown did die in 1889 this book is told from the vantage point of 1909 but in the very opening it has a scene where owen brown returns to his childhood home in the year 1889 to watch a burial and he's not sure who's being buried so it's it's you know what i'm saying so it was his own burial man yeah yeah yeah so it's like i love it well so and and that's i love it that that though is, is a recurring Russell Banks theme. That's hard. The idea of return, like seeking out, like, return to home and everything. But two, the idea of storytelling as an act of, how do you put it?

Like, incorporeal? Incorporate? Like, making real. Incorporate. Yeah, making real or manifest real or manifest a uh an event or a person like consolidating an idea or or an identity into a single entity like you see this over and over throughout his work like he even says it in the beginning of flick of affliction like this is not wade's story to tell this is my story to tell

and these are facts but facts don't make history like the the and and incontinent drift too he says at the beginning he says you could have a recollection but a recollection would not be sufficient like we have to retell the story and in retelling it we relive it that's the power of stories and it's the power of you know that's what gives us identity and convictions and morals and these other things these questions that we were asking earlier so i think that that's this is kind of what i was saying earlier like there's a way to read this as like oh this is a fun story of john brown but in my reading this story is about owen brown this story is about how owen brown kind of halved himself he split himself in half and he

became the almost sort of shadow self of his father who basically pushed his father to violence it's sort of an inverse of the affliction thing it's like he pushed his own father to because like that happens multiple times in this that happens at pottawatomie that happens at like wakarusa his like john brown is like action action action but when it comes down to it he can't Because that happens multiple times in this. That happens at Pottawatomie. That happens at like Waka Rusa. His like John Brown is like action, action, action. But when it comes down to it, he can't actually do it. And no one is like, no, father, let's go fucking hack these guys. And so that's what I mean.

And again, coming back to this, like some of the similarities with Twin Peaks, you have a shadow self like You have a hero, and you have a hero's shadow self. The parts of him he cannot reconcile. There are just contradictions. But they push him towards these heinous acts that maybe they're good, though, in the end. Maybe they serve a larger purpose. But in so doing, did he lose a part of himself? Did he lose a part of his own identity?

These are questions that he wrestles with across multiple books of his own identity like these are these are questions that like he wrestles with across multiple books of his it makes a ton of sense i i in fact it so i have this uh copy of continental drift and it has this little like about russell banks thing in the back of it and he actually talks about this as well because um a number of his books are either set in or feature characters from uh jamaica and like the caribbean broadly yeah and so like he has spent a fair amount of time there as well and so he is talking here about um well the the thing just says in order to capture a narrative voice capable of encompassing the disparate worlds of blue collar New England and Caribbean voodoo, Banks invokes the Haitian loa or mouth man, the spirit of the dead that speaks through the mouth of the living to help tell the story.

I'm really interested in reinventing the narrator. This is him talking. It's a convention that went out the window in the 20th century. I want to feel I have my arm around the shoulder of this reader and I'm explaining, narrating, telling a wonderful story to this person that I've stopped, like the wedding guest in Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. I'm like the Ancient Mariner stopping the wedding guest in his rush to tell this wonder to him and i want to have that sense of intimacy a face-to-face arm around the shoulder contact and i thought about that like in the context of cloud splitter because like yeah it's like so

this was published in 1998 and like i couldn't tell you how many like single voiced historical novels that are 800 pages for like being like it's much more common now to like to write a historical story like from a bunch of different perspectives you know to like that's you know we've come out of the 60s and 70s and like like underworld came we came out around this time and like took that sort of approach yeah don't do a little yeah exactly so like this is a book that's very long and like not at all i mean it's like a page turner once you get like cooking with it but i definitely could see people getting bored. But like, it's all one voice, like you say, and there's all these questions about like who it could be.

It's much more like a 19th century book. And so, but again, it's like written theoretically in the 20th century. It's composed, the text of it is composed in the 20th century it's composed the text of it is composed in the 20th century so you have this element of like a 20th century mind looking back so he does have this element of like knowing it's all kind of like a vanished world to a degree like he knows that like when he's talking about his family's poverty in the 1840s and like living in a cabin and like falling off a roof breaking his arm and like his father just reset it and he's had a weird arm since then for his whole life and that's just what health care was back then you know and like kids dying

the the burning scene with this like with the sister like like some of the violence scalding like the baby the baby scalding scene like it's like that's what i mean it's like there is there is violence in this book that has nothing to do with morality you know that's like you know that that's why it's just like the world was the violence. It's the violence done to poor people. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a tough life, man. Doesn't Owen say that at the end? Like, I am now the modern man or something like that.

I think he does. Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, through his experience at Harper's Ferry, watching this all go down from a distance, I think that's what he says. Like, I'm a modern man now. I think that's what he says. Like, I'm a modern man now. And so he you think about it, it's like he played this enormous role in history as a part of this gang eventually. But that's literally the last 50 pages of the book and the rest of it is just incredibly psychological.

There's no like politics. There's no scenes like everyone was up on the, you know, the boom, the bones man's rag development of the psyche and i think you're absolutely right too that like he's so caught up in like is my is my dad turning me crazy am i right to stay with him that he doesn't stop to consider like am i driving my dad crazy yeah like yeah just like as like if a guy is drawn to like messianism like that does it help him or hurt him to have like someone so indulgent you know what i mean like would john brown have found himself compelled to such sort of like heights of of leadership and uh if he didn't have this sort of like bizarre fawning tortured relationship with this one son who uniquely among his all their sons stays home all the others go and do something else and they come back and they participate but like they

have families and do other stuff and like there's this one son who hangs around like what would have happened to john brown if the fourth son left you know i do think that's a great question and something that's interesting is that john, his mother died when he was eight. And he apparently spoke a lot about this when he was interviewed, especially after Harper's Ferry, like when he was waiting to be executed. He spoke a lot about his mother dying when he was eight and how, you know, important and psychologically damaging this was to him. important and psychologically damaging this was to him well owen brown his mother john brown's first wife i think her name was diane she died when owen was eight and so you and it's again this is kind of what i'm saying you can make the argument that you have two beings who are kind of opposite from each other in these very interesting ways, but whose impulses and desires like their lusts and their sins and their and their desires and their desire for blood and for changing and altering history feed off of each other in these very important and powerful ways that at just the right moment in history kind of lightning strikes and they they make these split

decisions that change the course of history forever and so it's like you have like i said you have these characters who are father and son whose lives are kind of parallel in a weird way because john brown's parents were abolitionists just like john brown was which means that owen brown's parents were abolitionists just like owen brown was john and owen experienced these very similar childhood experiences um you know what i'm saying like they have i don't know i'm not saying that this was his exact uh i'm not saying that this is russell banks's exact argument when he was writing the book i'm just saying it seems a lot like a lot of the other themes he has in a lot of his other books. This like very taut, like this very fraught relationship between father and son.

I mean, I would say it sounds like that he as an artist, Banks as an artist encounters that story somehow or it gets his and he maybe because he lived up there. And he maybe because he lived up there. And the thing about it that appeals to him as an artist is that, like, yeah, he sees this like he like I'm sure it was like once he saw. Oh, one son sort of stayed with him the whole time. Like, what's what's that all about? Like that's when the novelist brain kind of clicks on, I bet. And and so that's where the story comes from and that's what sort of yeah what makes it so fascinating is it's because it's like we all sort of know what he did it's more fun to sort of speculate on what what kind of person does that yeah you know what i mean you know because yeah it's like what are the what are the specific consequences and you were saying like that about the um you know and then you know these two have this sort of parasitical relationship and then at the wrong period of time the pilot light comes on and then it's like the fbi is at their door and

raiding their laptops and looking at their message boards you know it's like it's like it's a tale as old as time you know that's what's kind of fascinating about it uh and he doesn't go out of his way to sort of draw those uh kind of um parallels i don't think at all he just sort of lets this other world exist and finds the common cause with it on the sort of emotional level, because if you think about it. We talk a lot about the 19th century and about slavery as a as a political accomplishment, like the end of slavery is like, you know, you know, in terms of amendments and acts passing and that kind of stuff but the sort of political and social world of that time had bears no relation to ours right now you know like the material world of the night of 19th century america uh is nothing like it is now and there's such a limited number of like, there are important,

but a limited number of lessons to take from that kind of place. And I think what was really interesting about that book was that he it's entirely focused on just like, you know, what it was like to be alive at that time. And what were the what were the fights people were having right for the you know what what felt urgent to certain people and what you know like um yeah because it's just there's it we look back on it now it's like oh obviously slavery was the biggest social cause of in history but then you got this other guy trying to convince people at when it's happening to give a shit you know like you know speaking of like parallels um that's just how it's always been and he found like that's what the book is about it's about

like the sort of nuts and bolts like network building and like solidarity building of that movement and just sort of what that looks like at the kitchen table. And it's pretty grim a lot of the time, especially at that time. What is your idea that when he went to Harpers Ferry, he knew what he is doing? He might not get out. When you take over government property, government property, with a handful of men, you know, all of you know they may die in the morning, you know exactly what you're doing and you're not being romantic at all. It was a self-sacrifice? No. Whatever I believe enough, I have to do what I have to do to do it, to make it real. That's what a belief is all about, isn't it? He believed that men should not be bought and sold.

He also believed, and he was perfectly right, that no nation that did that could survive. As he himself says, the day he was hung, or the day before he was hung, I now believe, I paraphrase, that the crimes of this guilty land will not be abolished, will not be wiped out by blood. I saw that it could be done, he's a crime of this guilty land where none of the abolishable, none of the wiped out by blood. I thought it could be done, he says, with a very little bloodshed.

But he was wrong about that. He was right then and he's right now. I think he was a great American prophet. And he was one of the great, one of the really great Americans. One of the really great people, one of the really great people from Jefferson, Elkin, and others. Now what about his role as a leader of the Underground Railway? Now was it again a practical thing?

Was the Underground Railway practical? Yes. You've got a lot of people in Canada, a lot of people. What's practical? You're talking about human freedom. Now does John brown and the other white people who acted like him to help the black to gain freedom change in your view the collective good but all rights must bear in a way for the suffering of the blacks no the collective guilt

low-rightness bear in a way is not for suffering with blacks it's something they brought upon themselves no but not everybody every white man has to pay for his history i gotta pay for mine and it's not what you've done to me which man is you that's what you've done for you the man is issue something that is interesting and then i think that like the reader or anybody who studies john brand has to account for it's like pot okay potawatomi was pretty fucked up right like they murdered three they murdered five people five men like the shermans doyles and the wilkinsons i think dragged him out of their house and just fucking hacked him up. But Harper's Ferry, if you read the events at Harper's Ferry in the vein of kind of like what I just outlined, that like Owen and John Brown need each other,

it does provide an explanation for what happened at Harper's Ferry. Or maybe not. I don't know. Because actually actually now that i'm saying it it doesn't really make sense because you mean the fact that owen completely pussies out and does absolutely nothing at the actual event it's like literally sits in a tree like it's an amazing scene it is it's it's an amazing scene um And we know that that itself is probably fictionalized. I don't really know. I'm pretty sure.

Yeah, how could? Sure. Yeah, Owen was told to stay. Owen was basically the getaway driver. He was told to stay at the farm outside of Harper's Ferry and wait for them to come. There are two things that make no sense that John Brown did at Harper's Ferry. One, he let the train go.

The Ohio Baltimore Express makes no fucking sense why he did that. Well, it does unless I'll get to that. The second thing is he had time to get out of there. They had time to get out. And no one knows really why he didn't. I did read one book that said one reason that they thought wise because john brown kept getting into interminable debates with the slave owners and generals he was holding hostage in the firehouse so that if that's true that means my man was truly a poster he was

like going out to the very end he could not fucking stop debating he was like no listen uh but i think that like they're in my good name once and for all i think that what had happened was that john brown chose martyrdom which is itself i knew yeah of course i mean it's like that's what he chose but you'll have to consider though that came at the cost of other lives not including his sons i think at least two of his sons died that day including some freed slaves also were were killed um it was uh it was very bad very bad folks um but the the weird thing is is that owen is not there and you're right he watches it all unfold basically from a tree and it's just an interesting thing to think that like if he had

been there if it had gone differently if he had been in Harper's Ferry with John Brown if it had gone differently if they could have got out on time who knows um but essentially what happens is you know john what happened in real life is after harper's ferry owen brown basically fled to ohio or pennsylvania he was underground for a long time then moved out west he spent the rest of his life out west um with the rest of his family, like Ruth and Jason. I think his mom, they also married. They joined him out West and they were like very socially active in like the Bay Area. They were like, I don't know.

They were well known. People knew the Browns. People like when to go to him. That's interesting to think they were the original, you know original Berkeley crew. They're like the Forrest Gump of lefty types throughout America. They kind of were because they were big opponents of the Chinese Exclusionary Acts. They were temperance activists. They supported prohibition uh yeah they just

embodied at different times every every aspect in the lefty rainbow you know from from from great to terrible yeah absolutely i wish ideology was like that nowadays like people's beliefs are so boring like i wish there was like a temperance guy that was like you know shaking it up a little bit man yeah yeah i agree no i mean the thing yeah so you know what another sort of like um so where i grew up was in catonsville, Maryland, which if you know that town, it's likely because of the Catonsville Nine, which are some of my favorite people to talk about because they weren't really talked about much in my town until recently. And these are the group of Jesuits who in 1968 came to our draft board and broke in and burned a bunch of draft cards with napalm and some were arrested and some fled uh daniel and ted barrigan the uh the two jesuit priests were part of it

and again it was like you know uh no one was hurt who's to say how much it actually did but it was just like a very sort of like uh direct action you know they did not like they had backup draft cards like that at the time it like did make some bit of difference for somebody and um so yeah when i think about that so that wasn't that was 100 years after after brown and these guys you know but you do think about like yeah there is just sort of one type of lefty now you know there isn't there isn't a lot of room like in the mainstream for the people who are saying like yeah why don't we burn some shit shit man the republican versions of that person are in their mainstream for sure oh yeah you know overrepresented oh yeah far too represented you know that they are the mainstream of their party at this point you know

it's like you know i just think uh you know open the windows let the ideas in stir them up a little bit see what they do yeah i mean it's just you know, they all they were just people. I think the better the better we understand that the more useful we can find or the more easily we can find inspiration, you know, because it's like you don't have to hang your hat on individual people, except that they're imperfect. John Brown was an imperfect person. perfect john brown was an imperfect uh person well i think that like to some to sum it up basically like basically we need people who uh for better or worse are able to contain within themselves or observe the sort of social contradictions around us and how sometimes violence and extreme disruption may be inevitable doesn't mean that the three of us sitting here are going to be the ones to do it but it does mean that like a figure will rise that will probably do it i think that just seems it's happening all the time it's happening and has it has happened. So it's like, are we going to get to a violent point? It's a lack of movement you know like not budging

i think that if you see violence as that whether it again at the individual or at the mass level it's like yeah it's like it makes sense that we are living in a in an era where uh you're seeing more and more of that well and in the, the question of violence pops back up again. If we had hung Nathan Bedford Forrest, we might not have, you know, Jefferson Davis Middle School today. You know what I mean? You're absolutely right. I was also thinking of the parallels, like when we were talking about

if Brown hadn't chosen martyrdom but kept going, I was thinking about the parallels with Fidel Castro's life, when him and his ragtag band get caught at the Moncada barracks, and he just so happened to wiggle out of it while other people were sent to death, but then they regroup, and then he leads the revolution, and that ends up happening. Fidel Castroro another like sort of complicated guy not for me but i'm sure you know in the opinions of a lot of people it's like what would have happened if the crazy white boys were whatever dude would have rode again and kept

riding you know that is so fascinating to think about because it explains why he was fascinated with napoleon it makes total sense john brown was not a linen or a fidel castro if he was he would have tried to live to fight another day but what he did was he chose he chose honestly it's like he almost knew he would be choosing the martyr route it's why he was interested in why napoleon lost and and also kind of lays out like i i i had read some when when i'd finished with the the reading here i'd read some review from this guy he was a professor somewhere and he was talking about like how he was active in the the vietnam anti-war protests and how that like there were a lot of conscientious objections for Christian faith-based reasons. And then on the left, there were a lot of Marxist-Leninist things.

And that's also another thing that tees out there. It's like martyrdom figures heavily in Christianity, not so much in Marxism-Leninism. So it kind of matters your approach to this. And I think that's because martyrdom, like terrorism, is ultimately a symbolic act. Symbols can be very powerful. They can move history, move people to do it. Yeah, martyrdom's not necessarily bad.

It is certainly not cowardly. But it's not winning. And that's what Lenin and Fidel were trying to do. The thing, too, because I definitely was thinking of him in terms of martyrdom. I happen to agree with you that, yes, I think he chose that path. But I also think whether or not he chose it, that's the role he plays in our historical cultural imagination and and you know what's important there too is like again i go back to this idea that he's this failed businessman that he's this guy who just like can't get his foot on the ladder of like this new kind of economic America.

And he's like on a certain level, like literally the guy who can't get his life together, but is also like so eaten up by climate change that you can't like disentangle those two things in his brain. So he goes and he lights himself on fire on the steps of the Supreme Court, which is what happened. I don't know anything about his personal life, but I'm just saying, obviously a person has to get to a place of inner struggle to arrive at that thing. And I'm always really struck by those people who take that kind of quote unquote like non-violent approach but at the same token like it's an incredibly violent thing to do you know it's like it's you know

it's an incredibly violent thing to do to place yourself in a public area and subject strangers it's the same as like you know jumping in front of a subway train or something like that is it just forces this level of of responsibility and trauma on a lot of bystanders to the degree where it's like comparable on a certain level like to the mass shooters you know what i mean and it's like in terms of its ultimate effect yeah yeah you know i agree yeah so like brown i really feel like he's one of those guys man it's like if he like i don't know man what what if uh what if he just you know gotten that one little bit of of wool out of there and it was all clean out in england and like he came back and he could buy a couple mules and like new dresses for his

gals yeah and just like a couple new sheep you know just like take you girls to the picture show tonight yeah what if what if things start looking up and then it's like he can just you know go go hang out at the meetings at the next town over and just sort of like listen to what they have to say and just go along with it rather than being like you know because why choose that unless you feel it's your like your last way to make a difference you know you know it's gonna be you know if that's if you know you don't it's like that's a that's a very desperate, painful thing to throw at people. And, yeah, I don't know about that as a as a form of protest, even though it's obviously, you know, less of a crime than the other, you know, than than the sort of mass violence options or whatever. But he definitely falls on that end of the scale, you know, because at a of uh mass violence options or whatever but um he definitely

falls on that end of the scale you know because at a certain point he just like he walks into the situation knowing that it's militarily unfeasible knowing that he's going into it not as strong yeah i guess that's where the capacity with castro dips off because they were way more prepared for what they were entering. Yeah. No, at a certain point, I think he was consciously going against any kind of like military instinct and just going for like, we're going to meet fate. You know, like come what may. aspect of it i mean an hour and a half in but it's like if you're him and you see the world around you as a literal con content uh continuation of biblical times of the bible he was yes he was completely assured of the fate of his soul which is really fascinating right as someone who uh was so spiritual and godly was able to make these

exceptions about like murder and these you know maybe manipulation yeah it's interesting it's interesting and so it's i think but i think that that is kind of the thing that propels him to that you know what i'm saying because those are in conflict and what will usually wind up out of a conflict an internal conflict like that, will maybe be violent. And so I think that it is consistent and it makes sense. But, yes, he was – it does seem he was completely assured of the fate of his soul. And perhaps – I was going to get into it, but perhaps maybe not.

I was going to get into the comparisons with one Muhammad Adab, but we won't go there. with one Muhammad Adab, but we won't go there. Well, it is true that the, you know, the sort of eventually vindicated side in moral battles in American history tend to be less... tend to be less, like they tend to not be the people causing the war. They tend to not be the attackers. You know what I mean?

It tends to be responsive and it's like you think of the civil rights movement being a nonviolent movement, like in many ways, like at least at its, at its inception, uh, and for years into that movement, um, you think about- And then you see the dogs and the water cannons and everything, and you're like, I'm just saying it always gets tested. It always gets tested. But, um, you know, it's, um, it's really interesting to see that, like, because, again, like you can see in this thing, like Brown's sort of. Brown's pro-violent approach was never the popular one. It was never the sort of mainstream one at his time. It wasn't. This book is not about like a guy who super popular. And now his kind just doesn't exist anymore.

It's not like the Irishman or something like that. He's not Hoffa. He was not a leader of men. He was born. If you think about it from like a Christian perspective, you even think about, you know, King Day. Well, not then King David Shepherd Boy, King David cuts Goliath's head off, right? He doesn't just like let Goliath's body just lay there on the field and let, you know, the Philistines come, you know,

cart him off and have a proper burial. What does he do? He goes into the town carrying that giant's head, waving it around. And you can see the kind of same effect by how a guy that grew up steeped in that says no no no it's not enough just to like go in there and like you know suffocate these people in the middle of the night we have to like hack them to pieces yeah make it make a statement yeah no it's it's like it's honestly it's uh he he just completely involutes the the like the the the slave owner mentality morally and it's pretty brilliant in that way because owning people is

savage it's a horrible thing and it's like it's important you know like that's what i mean when i say it's important for people to like be part of that conversation or whatever and i like beach into the choir here of course but it's like you know there has to be room for the people who really do think in moral terms first because like i think as the last couple years have shown like eventually all these issues become moral issues you know like you know eventually you know you're gonna have to fight for someone being exploited and someone being like actually actually shut out of the functioning of the country and deprived of rights at a certain point. And those are like, you know, you've got to be prepared for those moments, you know, in a certain way. in a certain way yeah you know it's interesting it definitely seemed like on the left um or at least on the sort of like marxist left like there has been a pushback against like i guess what you

could call like moral uh arguments or sort of like humanism or humanistic sort of impulses in like people argue in favor of like a sort of materialist analysis that like we're all sort of bound to each other through these structures and everything but if you do look at the like circumstances for like when and why marx wrote capital uh that was a moral act that was marx putting himself in the position of the English working class and siding with them. That's why it was such a revolutionary part of political economic analysis in the same way that like John Brown's actions were, too. They were two people who put themselves they sided with the oppressed. And, I mean, Marx, you know, sitting in a British library for like 30 years and like, you know, while his body fell apart isn't as much of a act of martyrdom or revolutionary violence as what John Brown did.

But you could argue that their actions had consequences that reverberated across centuries and i'm reading charles portis's masters of atlantis right now and there's this great quote that he has from uh an interview he did in the believer because charles porter's had the same job at the tribune in london that marks had like 100 years before and he has this great quote because I guess he got, he had to go fight in Korea or Vietnam or something like that. And they were asking him about like what it was like, you know, to have the same job, this very infamous figure in history. And he said, well, I'll say this, the Tribune could have saved us a whole lot of grief if they just paid

Marx a little bit. So here's a question here's a question because we've spent a lot of time talking about the about john brown the man to get it back to cloud splitter the book is the book inherently you know let's not say conservative versus liberal or whatever, but is the book inherently or is the book fundamentally optimistic versus pessimistic? Is it a book about how we are a slave to fate or it is a book about how a man can make his own destiny like that's something i still i i mean i think it's pretty pessimistic but i don't know that i'm right about that i'm up i'm i would i would like to be uh disproven of that almost like i i would make the argument that a man is tied to his fate uh and i think that even owen's act of at the end of separating from his father watching harper's ferry the raid fail

you know leaving i think that even that is an act of uh fate and not really one of choice. I think that if you look at the trajectory of Owen throughout the course of the book, at every point he makes a sort of momentous decision in his life, something that he thinks is a step in the direction of his own liberty and freedom and his own identity as a as a, you know, sovereign, proprietary individual the his own guilt over the sin involved or his own hang-ups about race and sex and even gender like i think that it it all brings him back to his father so it's like it is weird like he himself kind of has these sort of conservative impulses that he can't really reconcile within himself and that is kind of what makes him useful to his father and what makes his father useful to him in a weird way.

So their fates are tied together in this very complicated way. It's a little Abraham and Isaac, if we can riff on the Bible a little bit. He even mentions that at one point. That's one of my favorite past passages he says that like if my grandfather owen had told the story my grandfather own would be god my father would be abraham and i would be isaac and that's the story that i would have to tell my father would tell the story of abraham but i would have to tell the story of isaac and he's and like you know no sayings like that and he says that's the story we would pass down and then he says but who would be who would be the next who would i be a god to

and that's an interesting question like who would who who would isaac be a god to you know what i mean that's a question we don't deal with in the bible that's not the i'll tell you what jesus kind of deals with it in the new testament when he says to people, he says something interesting. Christians never talk about this, but he says to, I think Matthew, he says, are ye not gods? You know what I mean? That's like something nobody that deals with the scriptures engages a little bit, that Jesus kind of thought of men as making their own

sort of destiny and governing and choices and whatever i'm not sure i'm persuaded by it but it's interesting that it's in there well dude there is this question of this re these recurring patterns because you have the thing with god abraham and isaac but then you have the image of job like the the what's it called john when there's like then you have the image of Job. What's it called, John, when there's a quote at the beginning of a book? An epigraph. An epigraph. The epigraph of this book is from Job. And an important part of the book is a speech, a sermon that John Brown gives, and it's about Job. And afterwards, Owen is reflecting on it, and he's saying like... All right. is that real

i don't know i could not figure that out a real sir i was wondering about i looked that up and i could not figure out if that was real or not yeah um but what owen says after that is he says you know for father for john brown he was job and god was But for me, I'm Job and my father is God. You know, so it's this weird, it's this chain, right? And that's the thing with Affliction, the book too. It's this chain that gets passed down from millennia, really. You have chains of God and Job, God and Job, God and Job, you know what I'm saying? Like every man's father is his own God and he is job and then he passes that on and then he lets satan come and they basically shoot dice for your fate yeah

you bad christ you I know you. Ah, yes. You. Yeah, you goddamn son of a bitch. I know you. You're my blood. You're a goddamn fucking piece of my heart. You don't know me.

You don't know me. Fuck you. Fuck you. You done finally done it. Done it right. Done it like a man done it. Just the way I taught you. Oh. God damn. I love you, you mean son of a bitch i do love what do you know about love

love hell i made a love call it what you want everything you know comes from me. Yeah. Bang! It's a very 19th century understanding of what we now talk about as, you know, trauma. And, like, that whole sort of range of feelings and experiences. But, yeah, I mean, it's all, again, like, to say like one i'm i my father is my god and that kind of thing and like it's it's such a 19th century understanding of what like you know writers now talk about like storytelling which is really what like but like to talk about it in terms of who is who's god that is such like a different level of stakes like there's an understanding now that like all

characters have their own story to tell and all all these different perspectives are kind of metaphysically valid um it's another thing to talk about perspective like from the point of view of like yeah the people close to you in your life are your gods on a certain level like narratively in your life and um i yeah i just love how sort of um how just sort of like present that kind of thinking is in this book it's just so it's just like you don't think about things on those terms very often now that's what sort of like really struck me about this book was that this you know, it wasn't so much like the language. It was just like in the way people were thinking and how decisions were made. That's how it's sort of like.

That's how the world was built on a certain level and the woods, lots of woods. Well, I think you're right. In this other interview I saw with Russell Banks, he even says that the world that John Brown and Owen were in was a very almost pre-modern world. And that's basically what you're saying. And that's consistent with Owen Brown saying at the end, I'm a modern man. This is a change occurred, right? America and the world was transformed into something else at this time.

It was a slave society. Like, you know, that's like one aspect of it. The Civil War did change everything. And one thing about that is slavery did end at a certain point. It was a slave society and it was a pre-capitalist society. And so what we get after that is industrial capitalism. That is the new world that was born. And it's almost like John Brown was kind of the one that, like,

was the, you know, was the person that kind of, like, you know, birthed it. He lit the match that burnt it all down, you know what I mean? Like, started up the new thing or whatever it all down you know what i mean like or started up the new thing or whatever but you know yeah um he at the very least he hastened it you know yeah like you said i think it was probably inevitable at some level but uh yeah a big role for sure that's it that's that's another thing when you talk about a sort of phantom aspect to him is it's like his role in history is up for debate on a certain level like even to people who respect him and admire him and recognize his importance the ultimate function of his uh you know or like his legacy uh is really up for discussion at this point

and how it always has been you know there hasn't ever been like he won the battle of blank you know it was like he did this thing that failed for a good reason that then led to a greater level of support for a cause that made the civil war more inevitable than it would have been otherwise but it's not like it's not like you know the south attacked us because of harper's ferry you know it was you know well it wasn't like there were years to go so it's like it's a really fascinating thing that he is like a transformative figure who is also a failure which i guess is what you call a martyr i guess that's what that's what a martyr is yeah it is interesting because South, a lot of the slave owners actually tried to diminish and kind of bury Harper's Ferry. They didn't want to talk about it.

I'm sure. The Civil War was launched because Abraham Lincoln won the presidency. You're right. Absolutely. Harper's Ferry was a step in that direction, but to them, it was like once Abraham Lincoln was president, man. Like, we got to get out of here. He's going to take it all away. Yeah.

He's going to take it all away. Yeah. Yeah, he's going to take our guns. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, man. That is an interesting point, though. Maybe I won't open us back up for winding down. But we kind of underrate, like failures you know what i mean and all

this thing you know and and to bring it back to terms again brown could understand in the bible you know when jesus on the cross my god my god why is thou forsaken me it's not a declaration of victory you know what i mean so even when you eat shit never underestimate the effect that's correct well yeah final verdict john brown i mean obviously it's like obviously once and for all right here gang settle it here once and for all i mean like final grade i went into it like thinking you know i was like this is a hero and somebody i look up to and i still feel that way i do feel though that like if you if you are going to feel that way about a historical figure like you know you learn learn a little bit about some of their complications and contradictions it's like this is a this is a something you need to grapple with if you yourself

want to know how to change the world i I think that that's an important thing. That's why I recommend everybody should read it. That's why I wanted to talk about it with you all. I read it once. Like I said, I read it once. It had one interpretation. I read it twice. I was like, damn, man.

You read this book twice? Yeah, I did. Okay. damn man this is you read this book twice yeah i did okay so let's just i just want to recap here for posterity so like russell banks died in january and it is now april 27th and it's like just starting to get warm especially like where where you guys are and like so that means from like january to through april terrence has been living in a world of your banks pills that's all i read lots of today he has read multiple russell banks books a row across decades, and the longest one he has read twice. He has watched Twin Peaks. He has watched the Paul Schrader adaptation of the Russell Banks novel Affliction. And I swear he's as smiley and and laughable as he as he always is.

This is a man. They should study him in a laboratory. I swear. Also sprinkling a little bit of Deadwood in there. I've been watching Deadwood. Oh, yeah. That's that's the you know, that's the final ingredient in the mix, man. Like talk about like territories that aren't states yet.

And there's like violence. I hope you're I hope you're eating well. I hope you're nourishing your body. You're taking care of yourself. I got to say, this was a Herculean effort for me. As it turns out, I'm pretty poorly read. This was... I feel very accomplished, because I think this is the this might be the

longest book i've actually ever read cover to cover i i want to say this is what i want to tell people russell banks is great he's a great writer to study because he's not pretentious in any way and by that i i don't i don't even mean that in a pejorative way i just what i mean is that like he shows that it's easy to tell a story it's a lot easier than you would think it is if you just imagine yourself telling it to somebody else imagine imagine another person that you're telling the story to and then sit down and write that story like if you imagine your audience in advance it becomes much easier to write and if you read like the way that he writes the way that it is kind of uh it's very unassuming it's very it's very accessible um and also there's something i wanted to say too like in continental drift there's like this the very last it's like the last lines of continental drift

let's let's let's let's read this one let's let's reconvene here in a few months and yeah i'd like to i'd really like to read that it's interesting it's very interesting um it's very different it's very different than clouds it is very different right it in fact it has as its central character almost like a hapless sort of like never do well it's like he's not like he's not really like tormented in the same way as some of banks's other central characters are he's kind of just like a dumbass he's just kind of like a yeah just like a like a townie lout man who just like doesn't like what's going on he's very very horny that's like that's not an affliction and sweet hereafter and clad splitter there's not a lot of characters

that are extremely horny continental drift is about a guy who is way too horny i noticed that the yeah the women in this one have uh uh notable uh uh notably perked breasts a lot of the time like there's a bit of that yeah like he's yeah i mean like very schroeder-esque that's what's right everyone it's like it's they're they're they're they're they're they're they're kind of like hard hard books for hard for hard readers you know what i mean like you know in a good way like that's what you mean by like unpretentious i think it's not in the way that like the current mode of like fictional realism is where it's like almost kind of like basking in the greediness and the poverty of it all it's like to me it's not like that at all it's let me let me let me i just want to read this part from

he's not dennis lahane or he's not dennis yeah uh i feel like this is kind of central to like what his whole thing is he says good cheer and mournfulness of our lives other than our own even wholly invented lives no especially wholly invented lives deprive the world as it is of some of the greed it needs to continue to be itself so i mean it's like even if they're fictional characters, even if it's Owen Brown and John Brown, who are ultimately fictional characters that we're talking about here today,

it's like, even if they're not real, like, imagining their whole lives, telling their stories, us listening to their stories and learning from them, that is a subversive act. And I'm not trying to, like, be, you know, too hokey about it or whatever, but I do think that there's something in that. And I'm not trying to like be, you know, too hokey about it or whatever.

But I do think that there's something in that. And I think that like you couldn't ask for a better kind of like mission statement for a writer than that. I don't know. That's why I think he's important to study. Whether or not you believe it, like that's the spirit in which he's writing, you know, so you have to sort of like take him. It's like, OK, if he's writing, like if he's just saying of like take him it's like okay if he's writing like if he's just saying it flat out to you here's what i have in mind you know uh yeah that directness can be great and uh yeah i'm interested because cloud splitter just uh was really knocked

me out man i like could not believe some of the parts of this book and um sometimes like you you have that experience with like a with an author for the first time and then like you read the rest of it and you're kind of like oh that was like the one that i liked you know i like and i so i'm curious to see but like that was enough that i will read more by him and i am reading more by him and yeah i think you're right that it's like it's um it's not it's not to say it's not challenging but it's not like written to challenge you on the page but it presents as we've hopefully you know displayed like some pretty intense discussions it provokes some intense feelings and and like thoughts and uh you know

it presents some pretty intense like physical stuff a lot of the time and uh it's just pretty gripping you know on on deep levels that is that's really uh exciting to uh to read interesting guy read. Interesting guy, for sure. I agree. And, you know, like I've said, we need a Michael Mann adaptation of the Raid on Harper's Ferry. We need it. We need guys in buggies, horse-drawn carts, muzzleloaders,

Beecher's Bible. There was another book, and then like an Ethan Hawke movie. Oh, there was. Where he played John Brown. Yeah. It was like another novel about him. Yeah.

The Good Lord Bird, which I have not read. I mean, neither. I have not either. But yeah, Ethan Hawke's got that chin. He's lanky enough. He could. Totally. It's like he was born to play.

He should just play John Brown a few times. Like, as he gets older well we just cross the several streams here and then just do a paul schrader thing of john brown where ethan hawke plays him because you know ethan hawke's been in that paul schrader movie first reformed yeah yeah it's perfect um all right guys now we hit two hours man i i i thought it would be like two hours but i didn't want to tell y'all that so i'm glad well it's your your obsession has been uh like long and and uh spoken of enough that like your guests are beginning to comment on it i heard that last week so it's like you needed to do this. You had a lot on your mind with regard to Russell Banks.

Yeah, it was leaking out into the normie stuff. I'm just happy to be here for you and take part. It's fun to ride the wave. Thank you for supporting me, friends. Thank you. John, before we go, though, why don't you plug your book and your writing in general? that came out last year. You should read that one, however you read it.

I also had a book come out called Homeplace in 2018. And then all the articles and stuff I do are on johnlingan.com, and I'm on Twitter at my name. Google it. J-O-H-N-L-I-N-G-A-N. That's everything. Only one of me is from what I can see. Please go check out John.

And please go check us out at Patreon. P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com slash TripBullyWorkersParty. John, as soon as I read the Credence book, I'd love to have you back on. I got to you know i just uh i gotta read the books first you know because i get really nervous if i have people on with that it's a little down the queue with all this russell banks he's got queued up well the third reading of cloud splitter believe it or not it's a story of uh hard scrabble young men trying to follow through on a dream and testing the limits of what they're willing to risk for it. Hell yeah. If you're detecting a theme or preoccupation. So, yeah, one way to look at it.

But, yeah, I had fun writing it. Yeah. They did, yeah. And they came by it honestly, sure it's ccr the great american band yes yeah i mean i would honestly say that like uh the other band that i got like really obsessed about on that kind of level while i was writing this because they were also east bay uh bands that became part of like the film that everybody thinks they're from new orleans it was sly and the family stone man so like i was i went into this book going like okay credence is like the great american

band whatever that means whether they were just like they just kicked so much ass in such a brief window and left so much great stuff behind um but then you start listening to more of that stuff and yeah man everything by sly and the family stone was just like amazing and you listen to it and you're like oh this is where like rappers got that move and like oh this is where like r&b 10 years later eventually like they were just like it was it wasn't like and they had great singles too it was unbelievable so uh one of those two something in the water in the in the san francisco bay area uh around that time um all right guys we've been going for two hours.

Thank you for all for your patience. Leave these people alone. Go check out John. Thank you, guys. Yeah, of course. Yeah, thanks, John. Yeah. Good to see you again.

It's been like five years almost since I've seen your face. I know. It's great. Yeah, that was 2019 when I was out there in Whitesburg. 2018? Was it really? 2018? Because Tom was still living here.

Oh, man. 2018. Wow, okay. Always at my heart, Whitesburg. Well, thanks for listening. That was a great night. That was a great time. We had a good night.

We'll have to do it again. Totally. Totally. Totally. All right. well thanks for that was a great night that was a great time um totally totally all right well thank you boys and uh yeah thanks for having a nice discussion about books on your uh on your radical podcast you know there's uh we're running out of spaces to talk about these big things for whatever reason our book episodes always do the best. I have no idea why. People like books, man. People do. They do on some level.

Yeah, somebody does. All right. Thank you, guys. All right. Well, we'll see you all later. Peace out. © BF- Media Ltd. All Rights Reserved.