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Mark Danner in Conversation with Robert Hass
UC Berkeley
Mark Danner, Robert Hass Event, 4.12
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Genaro: All right. Well,
I’d like to welcome all of you to a conversation this afternoon between
Professor Robert Hass, who is the Distinguished Professor of Poetry and Poetics
here at Berkeley and for our department, and Mark Danner, who is Chancellor’s
Professor in Journalism and English.
This conversation will focus on the writing of politics and the writing
of war, the intersection between political writing, journalism and narrative
and novels, so sort of the relationship between descriptions of torture in both
style of journalism as well as recuperating that through literary imagination.
So I’m very happy to introduce Mark. He is, as I said, Chancellor’s
Professor of Journalism and English. He has been a frequent teacher in the
department over a number of years, and he is, as I think many of you know, a
world renowned journalist who deals primarily with conflict, with war, with torture,
with the exploitation of the human body across the globe, for purposes of
exploitation generally.
He has been a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books since 1993, as well as a contributor to The New Yorker from 2001 to the present.
He’s been a story editor at the New York
Times Magazine for a number of years
as well as a general editor at Harper’s
magazine. He is prolific as a writer. His books include the very recent
“Torture and the Forever Wars,” 2016—I think it just came out, right?
Mark: “Spiral.”
Genaro: “Spiral.” And then
“Stripping Bare the Body: Politics, Violence, War,” “Torture and Truth:
America, Abu Ghraib, and the War on Terror,” and a compelling description of
murder in the Southern Hemisphere, “The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the
Cold War.” This book won a New York Times Notable Book citation in 1998.
Among his honors and awards, and there are quite a few of them, of
course, is that Mark is a recipient of
MacArthur fellowship in 1999 and brings that, I think, to our
conversation. He has taught a number of courses in the department. Some of
these are titled From Centaurs to Superheroes: Metamorphosis, Monsters and the
Supernatural Everyday. Portraits in Black: Dictator, Autocrats, Cuadillo. Was
that a team taught course?
Mark: No, that was just
me.
Genaro: Just yours?
Another is Self-Creation: Confession, Memoir, Autobiography. And Tolstoy and
the Birth of Literary Realism. So once again the relationship and the overlap,
the imbrication between literary narrative and narratives of documentation of
war. So with that let me just turn this over to Bob and to… [Applause.]
Robert: Thanks, Genaro.
So there’s so many things it would be interesting to talk about, but I thought
I’d begin with Mark’s literary career, and maybe for some of the students I
need to say a little bit about that. During a civil war in El Salvador—the
reason is I thought I would ask him about the first sentence of this book, “The
Massacre at El Mozote,” which I read last night online was described as
probably the most taught book of investigative journalism in this country, and
it’s an amazing and terrifying book.
And in 1981, in December, in the hill country in El Salvador, covered to
some extent by the press, a terrible massacre occurred, something awful. And
some of the story came out and it became an early example of one of those
obfuscation narratives—is that right, did it happen, did it not happen. There
became propaganda wars about what we now think of as what’s false news and
what’s not false news.
It took…this book was published in 1993, in which, drawing on a truth
commission that was established in the Clinton administration to look at
American foreign policy in the Reagan years, uncovered, through exhumations of
bodies, this small village in which almost everyone was killed. The end of this
book is a list of 800, 793 men, women and children murdered in a mountain
village. And Mark, given the assignment by The
New Yorker magazine—
Mark: Yeah.
Robert: Went to do a
short piece on this and ended up writing a long essay that became one of the
three in history, I think, stories that took over a whole issue of The New Yorker, alongside James
Baldwin’s “The Fire Next Time” and Jonathan Schell’s “The Fate of the Earth,”
“The Massacre at El Mozote,” which is where I first read it and first heard of
him. So that’s the background. Let me read you the first paragraph—or let me
read you the first paragraph. [Laughter.]
“Prologue:
the Exhumation. Heading up into the mountains of Morazan, in the bright, clear
air near the Honduran border, you cross the Torola River, the wooden slats of
the one-lane bridge clattering beneath your wheels, and enter what was the
fiercest of El Salvador’s zonas rojas—or
“red zones,” as the military officers knew them during a decade of civil
war—and after climbing for some time you take leave of the worn blacktop to
follow for several miles a bone-jarring dirt track that hugs a mountainside,
and soon you will find, among ruined towns and long abandoned villages that are
coming slowly, painfully back to life, a tiny hamlet, by now little more than a
scattering of ruins that is being rapidly reclaimed by the earth, its broken
adobe walls cracking and crumbling and giving way before an onslaught of weeds,
which are fueled by the rain that beats down each afternoon and by the fog that
settles heavily at night in the valleys.”
That is
quite an opening sentence.
Mark: They wanted to
break it into three sentences persistently. It was a long fight with The New Yorker editors.
Robert: So you had a
career out of college as an editor before you became a writer.
Mark: That’s true.
Robert: You were then one
of those editors who would have tried to break your sentence up into three
sentences.
Mark: Well, I like to
think I wouldn’t have touched that sentence. [Laughter.] It was too perfect, you
know. But yeah, that was my career out of college. I worked at The New York Review of Books, and then Harper’s, and then the New York Times, and then became a staff
writer at The New Yorker.
And thank
you for doing this, I should say, first and foremost. And thank you to Genaro
for the really flattering introduction. Yes, I have a lot of trouble starting
pieces, as most…as a lot of writers do. It’s not uncommon. But I seem to only
be able to start at the beginning, and only when I have the kind of taste of
the first bite in my mouth can I seem to go on. That’s gotten a little less
over the years, but it certainly was true in that case.
And I’ll
tend to wake up or have some revelation—it’s kind of a romantic idea of writing
that’s not really accurate, but there it is—that suddenly I’ll feel it and the
sound will be there. And that much, that kind of plunging the reader in with
the second person, which is an unusual thing to do, to kind of plunge the reader
into the place just as I arrived at the place.
I mean, I
tend to tell my students a lot that what you have in your quiver, or in your
tool box that’s most valuable is the ignorance with which you meet a place or a
situation, that is, this kind of blank slate on which you can record things
that other people who might know the territory won’t notice.
And it
seemed to me one of the remarkable things about El Mozote is that looming sense
of place. Later, in the next paragraph, someone, one of the ex-guerillas there,
calls it espantoso, spooky, ghostly,
it’s full of ghosts. And I definitely, before I heard it characterized that
way, I definitely felt it. Because you go to investigate a story—and this was
investigating a massacre that had killed a thousand people, including a couple
hundred children, including infants and an unborn child—and you have a sense of
apprehension and spookiness before you reach the site as you’re doing this
preliminary reporting. And I certainly had that as I was reaching the site.
So I think I
was trying to convey that to people, that that’s how I felt, and that’s what
the place is like, and to try to plunge them into it. You also, you know, the
motor of prose is suspense, and you’re trying, I think, as a writer, to grip
people in a kind of vice of suspense from the first words, from the first
sentence. And that’s one of the attempts, one of the things I was trying to do,
I think, with that sentence, is pull them in so they couldn’t leave.
Robert: We’re saying
again to the students that this particular attack was carried out by death
squads that were financed by a special committee of the American Congress that
was very enthusiastic about supporting the Salvadoran military against
communist threat in our hemisphere. Is that accurate?
Mark: Well, it should
be said that this massacre was carried out by conscripts of the Salvadoran
army. And indeed, when the forensic anthropologists who were exhuming the
site—it was highly controversial because it had been claimed that this was actually
a battle between the guerillas and the Salvadoran army, there was no massacre
and so on. And the book begins with the discovery of the 128 children, the
bodies of the hundred, which were these little coffee colored bundles of
material that were buried in the earth.
And the
opening description is a description of finding those children, which finally
proved that indeed it couldn’t have been simply an encounter between the
guerillas and the Salvadoran army. But at the bottom, underneath those layers and
layers of children, at the very bottom the anthropologists found bullets in the
earth, right?
So one of
the, actually a Berkeley artist, Claudia Bernardi, was there to draw these,
where all the bodies were, and she did it on vellum. So you’d see layer after
layer of bodies, and then at the very bottom she marked where those bullet
holes were. And the bullet holes—or excuse me, the shell casings—were stamped
when you reached the very bottom of this deep pit with all these children,
those bullet casings were stamped with two words: Leavenworth, Kansas. They
were supplied by the American taxpayer.
And it was
as if at the end of this long search through claims, counterclaims,
controversy, lies, you found at the very end the signal tiny object that led you
back to the beginning, to how this had actually happened. And it was an
amazing, incredible story that showed, among other things, that, you know, it
had been originally reported on the front page of the New York Times and the Washington
Post, and the government, that is the government of the United States,
denied it—this was during the Reagan administration—and effectively made it go
away.
And I
realized then a lesson I’ve learned many times since, which is when you become
a journalist or think you want to become a journalist, very often it’s on the
partly idealistic view that if you simply expose to the world the things that
have gone wrong, the horrible things, the world will make it right. That is,
that what stops terrible things from being made into, you know, evil from being
eliminated is people don’t know about evil, and it’s a journalist’s job to show
evil. And this was the first major lesson to me, that it’s not information,
it’s politics, and that this was about, indeed, politics, not simply information.
Robert: You can see why
this conversation can go a bunch of different ways because we can go straight
to, as we were talking about, whether there was nerve gas used in Syria. But I
want to stick with the literary thing for a minute and ask you—
Mark: Sure.
Robert: You had to have
some kind of model for the kind of sentences that you were writing. I mean,
writing about…I think where would you go for this? Conrad, Graham Greene? This
was not your first overseas assignment. Haiti was?
Mark: Haiti was, yeah.
Well, Conrad, Graham Greene, that’s very flattering. I’ll just let that hang in
the air. [Laughs.] Hang in the air a
moment. Where’s my mother? [Laughter.] My mother isn’t here. Yeah,
Conrad, Graham Greene. Well, I don’t think either of them would have written a
sentence that long, I don’t know. Not Graham Greene, certainly. I don’t know.
Part of my
teaching is based on the idea that you learn how to write with your ears. You
read and read and read, and you have voices in your head, which is the premise
of your question. I know that V.S. Naipaul was a kind of idol of mine,
although, indeed, the sentence is nothing like anything he would have been
gauche enough to write. His model certainly is Conrad, if there is one,
although he would never admit it. But I don’t know if I could identify
specifically.
I mean, you
and I have taught courses together on Tolstoy, as Genaro mentioned, on
Dostoevsky, on Chekhov. These are all writers who I admire deeply. I mean,
Tolstoy, that was the most wonderful class I think I’ve ever given. It’s just,
you know, I learned so much in that. But I don’t know whose particular voice I
could identify behind it. I just don’t know. There’s so many people I’ve read.
I know that
the former editor of the New York Review,
the late editor of the New York Review
I think had a lot of influence on my writing, and I worked for him as an
editorial assistant right after college. It was my first job. And I watched him
take these manuscript sheafs of pages that seemed fairly well written to me,
and he would go through with a pencil and rewrite them extensively.
And it was
my job to retype the manuscripts, so I got this course in how to tighten up
your prose, parallelism, very basic things that Orwell writes about in
“Politics and the English Language,” among other places. And he did a great
deal to teach me how to write. But I don’t know how to identify the sort of
voice behind that. I’m not sure.
Robert: I just spent some
time with a Croatian writer, so we were talking about Srebrenica and talking
about your writing about Bosnia, which also…that was done over three or four
issues of the New York Review.
Mark: Eleven issues,
actually, but who’s counting?
Robert: This is again a
story of a massacre, really.
Mark: Well, the
Srebrenica story was, I believe, three issues, but the Bosnia coverage was, I
think, 11. Yeah. Srebrenica is an astonishing story. But of course the siege of
Sarajevo, which I wrote about, was also an astonishing story. And I did a piece
on what’s called the market massacre in Sarajevo, which really changed the war,
in 1994.
And part
of…I was working at the time on a documentary for ABC News. And Peter Jennings,
who was then the anchorman, was anchoring this hour broadcast, but the
corporation ABC decided he could not come to Bosnia because there were rumors
he was going to be assassinated. And so we couldn’t do the hour without him at
least there doing a standup, and, you know, this is kind of the form. And we
finally were able to persuade them to let him come for a day.
So we were
there for months. And when he came we had to take care of everything he had to
do in a day. And that day happened to be the day of the so-called market
massacre, in which 78—a mortar shell landed on an open air market that happened
to be covered with scrap tin, so the mortar itself, its shrapnel produced
secondary shrapnel out of this tin, and it went through and cut—we had just
been interviewing people in this market literally five minutes, six minutes
before. And we were starting to drive away when we saw, you know, realized what
had happened, went back in and these people had been eviscerated, many of whom
we had just interviewed.
And that…you
know, it’s a terrible truth, but a real truth, that a key part about being a
successful reporter is to have luck. And that was luck. Luck was being there
for that and luck was not being there five minutes before. And Peter Jennings,
I remember thinking wow, he’s a great journalist. He comes for one day and the
biggest story of the Bosnian war happens. As I say, this is kind of grim. But
it’s true.
And I think
writing, I guess I’ve written about a number of massacres and incidents of
extreme violence like that, and they seem to be…and you can shape a piece of
writing around it in a way to give you a picture of an entire conflict. There’s
a kind of self-organizing principle behind it in a strange way.
And I found
myself a couple of days later, right after the massacre, up in Pale, which was
the headquarters of the Bosnian Serbs who were shelling, who had launched the
mortar, having lunch with Radovan Karadzic, who is now at The Hague, of course,
who was the leader of the Serbs and who had launched the mortar.
Robert: And is a pretty
good poet.
Mark: And who’s a
pretty—exactly. In fact I began by talking about his poetry. I also
interviewed, in Sarajevo, his—he was a psychiatrist, or is a psychiatrist,
too—and I interviewed his training analyst, who said Radovan—you know, this is
a guy who’s up in the hills shelling Sarajevo, killing 20,000 people—Radovan,
he has an overgrown sense of grandiosity, he said.
But I
interview Karadzic a couple of days later and told him I had been there at this
massacre. And, you know, it’s a scene very hard to describe, but I described
it. It was kind of a lake of blood, and you couldn’t…it was just astonishing
carnage. And he said, “Did you look in their ears?”
I said,
what…whose ears? The bodies, the bodies. Did you look in their ears? I mean,
I’ve written this before. But he tried to argue to me that they were corpses
who’d been in the freezers and that the Bosnian secret police had created this,
you know, it was a fake explosion. They then skittered out with bodies and
placed them around and it was utterly fake.
And it was
one of the weirdest—you know, we were sitting there eating stew and he was
surrounded by this troop of bodyguards who had clearly been chosen for their
beauty. They were all in these kind of purple jumpsuits and these beautiful men
with these high cheekbones, and they were all around him. And we were sitting
there eating our stew. And he was this man of incredible hairiness. I mean, the
most hirsute person I’ve ever seen. Hair out of his ears, and his eyebrows, and
his… And telling me that I hadn’t check their—you know, how, since I hadn’t
checked their ears—and indeed, I hadn’t checked their ears—I would have seen
that their ears were frozen, that there was ice in their ears. And I assured
him, you know, the volume of blood meant that they couldn’t have been frozen.
But it’s one of the weirder conversations I’ve ever had.
And it is…he
is somebody who, I mean, Janet Malcolm has written about this, that most people
you meet could not be in a novel. You know, people in novels are of a certain
characterized character. They are characters in a novel. They are not—and this
is one of the lessons of realism, perhaps. And he is a good example of someone
I’ve met who certainly would have been a good novelistic character, without a
doubt. He was almost unbelievable. And a shrink, and a poet, and a professor as
well.
Robert: And a mass
murderer.
Mark: And a mass
murderer.
Robert: This story is in
“Stripping the Body Bare,” and it’s one of the places in your writing that put
me in mind of “Kaputt.”
Mark: Ah, yes.
Robert: Which leads me to
the question of other literary models for the kind of journalism you were doing
in these years.
Mark: Well, I mean, “Kaputt”
is a great…how many people here have read “Kaputt” or know Malaparte? That’s
Curzio Malaparte. He has a remarkably limited allegiance. I don’t know why. Even
though his books are in print. But Italian-German writer during the Second
World War. Newspaper correspondent, but also did a couple of extraordinary
novels. One is “Kaputt,” one is “The Skin,” which are, thank goodness, back in
print and are extraordinary.
And he
certainly, his sense of the grotesque, his kind of satiric eye on violence. I
don’t know that I had read “Kaputt,” actually, before I wrote “Mozote.” I don’t
think I had. But I think there are certainly similarities there, there’s no
question about it. And his recognition that violence and civilization go very
much together, that they’re not contradictory.
I mentioned
Naipaul already. I am, as I said, an enormous admirer of Tolstoy and of the way
he has of creating symbols that don’t seem like symbols. You know, the…oh, god.
I’m trying to think. The eating of the pumpkin seeds in “The Cossacks,” you
know, before the seduction. I don’t know if—anyway, there’s this wonderful,
easy way with symbols that just seem not to be confected in any way at all that
I’m deeply, deeply fond of and that I think is really the true indication of
literary art. I think very few artists do it. But I certainly admire him. But I
wouldn’t call him an influence. That would be almost pretentious.
Robert: And the Polish
writer?
Mark: Absolutely.
Kapuscinski.
Robert: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah, Ryszard
Kapuscinski, who I knew pretty well, and who Harper’s had actually published “The Soccer War,” a great short
piece of his, which was published after I left, but I had met him with Jerry Marzorati,
another editor at Harper’s, and he became a friend. He was an extraordinary man
who wrote the books “The Emperor,” “Shah of Shahs,” “Another Day of Life.” You
could name “Soccer War,” as I mentioned, which is a collection, a number of
others.
And is a
wonderful—I mean, he’s certainly someone who you would name in the category or
genre of literary reportage. I’m not quite sure what that is. Kapuscinski is
often criticized, much more in recent years, for having exaggerated, created
composite characters. And it’s true that some of the events in his work are
kind of parables, in a way. It isn’t possible to lean on a lot of it without
breaking through to a kind of literary creativity which contradicts some basic
journalistic rules.
On the other
hand, I think his works have considerable greatness and tend to push the bounds
of genre, broaden them, and I’m an enormous admirer of his. That class I gave
in the Department of English called Portraits in Black: Autocrat, Dictator,
Caudillo, we read “The Emperor.” Even though most of what we read were novels,
we read “The Emperor. I think there’s nobody better at understanding and
showing the mechanics of power, and that power is about itself. It’s not about
effecting change, it’s not about raising up a society or even tearing it down,
it’s about itself. It’s about self-perpetuation. And “The Emperor” is a kind of
brilliant excursus on that, I think, on that theme.
Robert: Assad is a kind
of terrible example of that.
Mark: Yeah, he is a
terrible example. I mean, it’s fascinating that we, you know, the United States
in 2003 started this whole process, which seems to be forgotten now, with the
invasion of Iraq, in which the U.S. invaded a predominantly Shia Arab country
that was ruled by Sunnis. And right next door is a predominantly Sunni country,
Syria, that’s ruled by a minority of Shia. And we’re seeing this kind of weird
process go on in which the United States is having to redefine its attitude
toward, among other things, representation and…
Anyway, Assad
would have been—and the father, Hafez al-Assad, would have been a good
candidate for Ryszard’s lens. He was working on, and never finished, a portrait
of Idi Amin in Uganda, and that was to be the third of a trilogy, along with
“Shah of Shahs” and “The Emperor,” but unfortunately, he never finished it.
It’s very
useful to teach Kapuscinski not only in the English Department, but in the
journalism school. I just taught “Shah of Shahs” in a course on war that I’m
giving now. Because those boundaries of truth and truth as conceived by a
journalist, in which the words between quotes supposedly have to have been said
at some point, and truth to a novelist, or to a more literary writer, in which
you have a higher truth, those things in fact shade off into one another, that
they’re not quite as clearly divided, I think.
Robert: So let me ask you
a question about journalistic ethics before we go on.
Mark: Oh, boy.
Robert: With this what
you can say between—
Mark: I left myself
open for this.
Robert: —between quotation
marks and not between quotation marks. I was doing a travel piece for a
newspaper, and I quoted an English fish job broker who I met in Busan, Korea,
saying you have to understand that Korea is Poland. And I understood that he
meant caught between Japan and China the way Poland was caught between Russia
and Germany.
Mark: Right. Mm-hmm.
Robert: And I wanted to
explain to the reader, who would not immediately get that, that, and the
easiest way to do it was to put in quotations it’s caught between China and…
But he didn’t say that. He implied it.
Mark: And they wouldn’t
let you at the time.
Robert: Well, no, they
didn’t know whether I… [Laughter.] It was entirely my personal issue. What would be your rule of thumb?
Mark: Oh, my. Well, I
would probably do, quote, “you have to understand that Korea is Poland,” close
quote, dash—caught between two great powers.
Robert: You would be
scrupulous.
Mark: I like to think I
would be.
Robert: It’s so much more
fun to have the guy say it, you know.
Mark: I know, I know.
I’d like to think I would be. It should be said you’re raising something that
journalists tend to be very self-righteous about. They cling to rules, whatever
rules of objectivity they have, very…by the skin of their teeth or by their
fingernails because these rules are very hard to locate a lot of the time, and
the one on quotations seems easy enough. But in fact, whatever is between
quotation marks was not said. You know, people don’t talk the way people do in
quotation marks, generally.
I’m reading
a book right now—we’re reading it for this class—called “War,” by Sebastian
Younger, and he does an odd thing. Things that he heard said and he wrote down
in his notebook he puts between double quotes and things other people told him
secondhand he puts in single quotes, which is an interesting notion. I’m not
sure I agree with it, but it’s an interesting idea.
And the fact
is that quotes very often—and we know this from the famous case with Janet
Malcolm between Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson, a Berkeley resident and scholar of
Freud and Sanskrit and Janet Malcolm of The
New Yorker that they don’t necessarily need to be. They can be approximate.
It’s another
thing to invent a character, to take several characters together and make one,
which Michael Herr did, for example, in “Dispatches,” which is thought to be a
great classic of journalism. Now there are, and he has admitted, composite
characters there. Most journalists would say you can’t do that because you’re
quoting somebody who doesn’t exist. And on the other hand he did it. There it
is in Modern Library and everybody would consider it part of the canon of
modern journalism.
And
meanwhile we have this huge fight about fake news, which basically looks at
news in general, and rules of veracity that we’re talking about now as
themselves fake or disguising a greater kind of bias of the elite press. So
this operates on many different levels, and it’s a fascinating issue, and it’s
not settled. It’s being fought about as we sit here and we go tonight and watch
the news, if you watch the news, or when you read the paper in the morning, if
you read the paper, you will see it being fought about. So we live in a great
time to be teaching in a journalism school and in an English department, I
think.
Robert: So I wanted to go
there, and I also want to make time for people to ask, but we talked about
another kind of writing that you did. I’m thinking about there was, again, for
you students, at the time of and just before the outbreak of the Iraq war, Mark
and the writer, English writer, Christopher Hitchens, in a way did a road show
of debating about whether the war should happen, and what had happened, whether
it was a good idea or not.
And Mark
turned out to be absolutely right in his predictions about what was going to
happen, and Hitchens is now dead and a kind of friend to both of us, despite
this, was absolutely wrong about it. And then after you’ve written this series,
having written about Iraq, and it’s in “The Body Stripped Bare,” you did a
series of review essays about the memoirs of Cheney and Rumsfeld and the other
main figures leading up to that war. That’s not investigative journalism.
That’s kind of the first draft of historical criticism of primary sources of
self-serving politicians. How do you describe what you were trying to do in
that?
Mark: That’s a very
good question. I think they were, in a sense, portraits of people, historical
figures who are still with us, of course, including Dick Cheney, who has a
different heart than the one he was born with, and as far as I can tell will be
with us forever, probably. But they were really portraits some years after the
events that made them famous and that made them important in the public realm.
They were
occasioned by Errol Morris’s “Fog of War”—or I’m sorry, what was the title of
it? “Known Unknown,” a film on Donald Rumsfeld. So I started with that and used
his memoirs as well and wrote a series of three pieces, then a series of three.
There was also a film on Cheney and his memoirs, and a book about his heart
troubles, and I did three on that. And then I did, actually, a piece on Robert
Gates as well.
And I don’t
know. They are a little different, I agree. They were done in the New York Review, as a lot of my work has
been, and they were kind of historical portraits, I guess you could say.
I’ve been
reading, the last few days, these collections by Stefan Zweig, the Austrian
writer of the first half of the 20th century, who did these little
books called, you know, they would be called “Five Miniatures,” or “Four
Miniatures,” and they’re like nonfiction short stories. They’re quite
intriguing just for their implications for genre and what it is. And he will do
a piece on Balboa discovering the Pacific. They have no sources—I mean, they
have a lot of sources, but the sources aren’t listed. The discovery of the
South Pole, Waterloo.
Robert: And then he did
Nietzsche and—
Mark: Yeah. He did a
book which consisted of three portraits, Holderlin, Kleist, Nietzsche. And
they’re wonderful. They’re all back in print. Zweig has come back into some
kind of fashion. And they’re wonderful and they also, from the point of view of
a writer, you think wow, this is an interesting—I mean, basically he’s
approaching what seem to be works of journalism/history from the literary side,
you know, from the other side. And they’re wonderfully entertaining. They’re
very good.
So I think
it’s true that those pieces are different, and they’re contemporary historical
portraits. Theodore Draper, a writer I greatly admire, who wrote for the New York Review for many years, did a
book called “Present History.” And I think those are part of that idea of
present history.
Robert: And then there
was the writing you did Obama as a political campaigner and Trump as a
political campaigner.
Mark: Yeah. Well, I
followed the campaigns as a reporter, I think every presidential one, since
2000. And I had a singular, I like to think of it as a singular method, that
was encouraged by Robert Silvers, who I mentioned before, was the editor of the
New York Review. And it was simply to
go to Florida—usually it was Florida—because all the candidates, because
Florida is so central, would end up at the last part of the campaign flying
into Florida every day. No matter where else they were in the country, they’d
end up in Florida.
So I would
rent a convertible and drive from rally to rally, and in between would listen
to talk radio, and would interview people. And I did that, Obama—actually,
Obama I wrote about when he was in Philadelphia. I did a piece called “Obama
and Sweet Potato Pie” about his campaign and this raucous, raucous rally where
these women started flirting with him from the crowd and yelling that they
wanted to make him some pie.
He had
mentioned he liked sweet potato pie. And you heard, “I’ll make you some pie!”
And everybody was kind of yelling at him. And he was very young, you know. It’s
hard to remember now, but he was very young, a very attractive guy, and he had
groupies. And I was trying to—and it seemed to me that none of the coverage got
that across, and the sheer fun of his rallies.
And
similarly Trump’s rallies were just tremendous events. I mean, they were
incredible things, where you’d find yourself at an aircraft hangar with 30,000
people, pushed together so you literally couldn’t move your elbows. You were
packed. If you fainted, you wouldn’t fall down, you’d just stay there, and
nobody might discover you for some time. And you would stand there for three
hours until the man showed up.
And it was a
fascinating thing. I would interview everybody within my elbow width. And then
he would show up, and he’s just this fascinating figure. Incredible to watch
him because he speaks in stream of consciousness, which means that you never
know what he’s going to say. There’s incredible tension. He’s extremely
charismatic and just a fascinating figure.
And I was
also, at the same time, going to Hillary rallies, who is a disaster as a campaigner.
It’s not a secret. Her rallies were very small. We would make a good Hillary
rally here. [Laughter.] It wasn’t quite that bad, but, you know, they were small. And she was
just very methodical, and she spoke like a schoolteacher.
And it seems
to me that that’s just one very interesting way to cover a campaign because
what you get in the national news is this kind of national conversation which
bears very little resemblance to what’s going on on the ground. What’s going on
on the ground are these stump speeches interrupted by yelling and hectoring,
and of course they rev up speakers, and it’s this carnival aspect, you know,
people selling all kinds of swag, you know, shirts, and hats, and key chains,
and it’s a carnival, and it’s fascinating to watch.
And during
an hour speech you will have one line that the candidate will utter, and you
will realize, if you’re a reporter, that that’s the line that’s going to make
the news, that’s it. That’s the one that’s meant to continue the national
conversation. But all the rest of it has no place in the national coverage. So
it’s a fascinating thing to me to actually see what’s going on at these
rallies.
And I always
thought, throughout the campaign, that Trump was going to win, even though—but,
you know, the polls showed differently, and there was just no comparison
between the two campaigns. And he’s a—and he remains a fascinating, crazy
figure who dominates our mental lives the way caudillos, the way autocrats do.
They own your mind. And he owns our minds. And he has since 2015. And it’s
remarkable.
People talk
about will there be an autocracy. And in fact this characteristic of autocracy
is already part of the country. I mean, we’re already there with the fact that
we’re dominated by what he does on a given day and by what he says. And there’s
a reason he uses Twitter. He inserts himself into the news cycle every day. And
it’s funny because I think of my class Portraits in Black that I gave for
English, and he would fit in it.
Robert: What are some of
the books you taught in that?
Mark: I mentioned “The
Emperor.” The autobiography of Joseph Stalin. “Señor Presidente,” which is an
incredible book by Miguel Angel Asturias. “Akhenaten,” which is a book by
Mahfouz.
Robert: Did you do
“Autumn of the Patriarch?”
Mark: We did do “Autumn
of the Patriarch.” “Feast of the Goat,” which is Vargas Llosa. Goodness, I’m
doing badly here. We did a book called “The Dictator’s Handbook,” which is
actually a nonfiction analysis of how dictatorships work because I thought
there needed to be a little bit of theoretical, quote, unquote, theoretical
stuff in the class. What else? I’m leaving out several.
Robert: But on the
subject of classes, and then we’ll turn to questions, it interested me that
several of your courses have really not had to do, or not overtly had to do—you
taught a class on the history of the confession or the memoir, and one on
metamorphosis. Starting with Ovid or…?
Mark: Well, first of
all, I’m going to take issue and say the confession class, it seems to me, does
have to do with reporting. It’s how you’re creating, through a narrative, a
character, your own. And we started with…I guess our first in time was
Augustine, but we did Kathryn Harrison, “The Kiss,” which is a contemporary
memoir about a woman who had an affair with her father. We did “Abelard and
Eloise,” we did Rousseau, we did Oscar Wilde, “De Profundus,” many others.
Usually my
classes do a book a week. It really was about the creation of a character. I
think of it as kind of a journalistic course. But metamorphosis is just a theme
I love. We did Ovid, we did “The Golden Ass,” Apuleius; “Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde,” “The Picture of Dorian Gray,” “Batman,” the first Batman—Batman Year 1
it is. It’s not the first Batman graphic novel, but it’s the beginning, the
sort of origin story of that.
So I love
Ovid. And to me the idea of transformation and metamorphosis is such a part of
our culture, you know, our fascination with transformation, with superheroes.
And we have this in common with the classical world. Centaurs, you know, they
were fascinated by this idea, this dichotomy between gods and human beings and
the mixture of the two. There’s a continual, if you go back—Ovid is obvious,
but Homer as well, and Hesios. I mean, there’s a great theme of this mixing of
kinds of power and kinds of humanity and the godlike. And it seemed to me just
a great theme.
I try to
create something that has a fascinating theme, that’s intriguing, that can go
through history, but that also you can compile a reading list that is just great
work. It seems to me if you want students to read the large load of reading I
assign, then you have to have really good stuff. And that’s why the Tolstoy
seminar we gave, we read basically all of Tolstoy’s major work. It was a huge
reading burden, but people read it because you get addicted to Tolstoy.
And I think
metamorphosis is another example where, you know, Ovid is just incredible. Now
do people pick up Ovid? No. But if you assign it, they’re going to read it if
they’re introduced to it in the right way, I think. So I guess there’s no
journalistic explanation for metamorphosis, though, I think.
Robert: Well, except that
we live inside myth, maybe.
Mark: We do.
Robert: I recently reread
the end of “The Aeneid” and realized it’s kind of a Justice League of America.
Mark: [Laughs.] That is true. Of course he
didn’t finish it, so Virgil would take… He wanted it to be burned after
he…supposedly.
Robert: Well, listen, we
should turn to questions from the audience that people have. Yes.
Female: I have a question
about how we detect truth.
Mark: How we detect
what?
Female: How we detect truth.
I’m asking because—this is more a question, perhaps, about radio journalism
than sort of print journalism—but I’m sometimes struck when I listen to
accounts at how convincing I find some things and not others, and I can’t quite
tell why, because there’s the matter of coherence, and there’s matters of
detail, and it’s something you [figured out before], but there’s things you
feel like you just can’t make out. But the example that I would like to ask you
about as something you might comment on is Jeremy Scahill.
Mark: Mm-hmm.
Female: I was always
convinced by the things that he recounts, and I often wonder what is it that
makes it so convincing.
Mark: Well, I know
Jeremy Scahill’s work and I admire it. He is best known for a book called
“Dirty Wars.” He did another book on…oh, what’s it called? It’s changed its
name several times. The private mercenary company Black…
Male: Blackwater.
Mark: Blackwater, thank
you. I think it’s now called X Zero or something.
Male: Yeah, he sold it
and he’s now got another company.
Mark: Right, he’s got
Erik Prince, yes, who returns, who’s, of course, small, little known fact, is
the brother of our current Secretary of Education.
Male: [unintelligible] 00:49:53
Mark: He did, he…well,
that’s the thought. That’s what he’s proposing, that he take over Afghanistan,
among other things. But anyway. Well, I like…as I say, I admire Jeremy
Scahill’s book. In fact “Dirty Wars” was going to be a book in this Bang Bang
Abroad class that I’m doing in the journalism school. But I’m not sure…you’re
asking why does his stuff seem real?
Female: Yeah. I just give
him as one example. I guess the reason I was interested in this is that do live
in a [world] where we’re aware of all kinds of things [feel] manufactured that
are actually false, and yet it’s sometimes not so hard to actually distinguish
what is truth from what isn’t. And yet I’m not entirely sure what my intuition
about that seems to be based on, and in fact I could be wildly long, because
how do I know if Jeremy Scahill is making stuff up?
Mark: Well, it’s an
interesting point. The fact is that there are millions and millions of people
convinced by what they see on Fox News, and some of those things are false.
Some things on MSNBC are false, too. So I think that the idea that one can
simply detect falsity by watching carefully is probably false.
Female: Yes.
Mark: We all have a
kind of master narrative. And MSNBC and Fox News are good examples of master
narratives that various people adhere to. Another good master narrative is that
Trump could never win the election. And that was pretty much in the New York Times every day, among other
things, through polling and through other things. So I don’t know.
There’s
something called verisimilitude, and that is when something seems true. And
there are various tools. It’s like the old Hollywood joke, to succeed in
Hollywood what you really need is sincerity, and if you can fake that you’ll be
a rich man or whatever. I forget how the joke went. Something like that. But
you can fake a lot of these things.
I’m always
saying to students or to crowds, when we’re talking about journalism, that it’s
an illusion to think you can know about the world simply through reading the
newspaper or looking at a few websites. You need to do a lot more sleuthing
than that, including, very often, looking at books. Which is one of the reasons
I like to assign books to students, so they actually are reading books rather
than chapters and so on.
But I think
there’s a weird reality about today which is that there is more and more fake
news at the very time that there are more and more easy tools within reach to
verify things. There is a vast—you know, you want to read about what’s going on
in Iraq, you can read regional papers, you can read papers here. You can read
stuff put out by military, NGOs. I mean, there’s an incredible wealth of
information around. But you have to have the wherewithal, and the eagerness,
and the skepticism to do that.
And I’m
always telling students you have to read the paper skeptically. When you read
something that’s been leaked from the Trump administration, one thing you
should be asking is who leaked this? What are they getting out of it? Why did
they leak this? Why is this in the paper? And it will help you see beyond the
way that the piece is trying to angle you behind it to what we like to call
reality, perhaps in some quaint use of the word, I don’t know. But I don’t know
if I’ve answered your question.
Male: I want to play
on the truth issue, too, and try to say something that I’ve been disparaging,
and not many disparaging it, which is that you guys are old, students are
young, I’m a transitional figure. [Laughter.] So I’m thinking back, and it’s the distinction between truth claims of
English versus the truth claims of journalism. And I taught the class here in J
school where Neil Postman’s book “Amusing Ourselves to Death” was a principal
item on the syllabus.
And it seems
to me that the people younger than me are made even more anxious than they
already are when you talk about how entertaining Trump’s rallies were, and how
non-entertaining Hillary’s rallies were because they are having trouble
realizing that you don’t mean Trump was a better politician than Hillary was, because
the criteria by which we evaluate truth is whether it was entertaining or not,
as Postman pointed out 20 years ago. That we’ve gotten to a point where they’d
say that in the difficulty we’re having of distinguishing what we mean by fake
or not fake, what wins is what keeps our attention and seems coherently
entertaining.
Mark: Right.
Male: You come from
book culture. You don’t come from screen culture. People who do come from
screen culture are engaging in a really dissonant activity, of saying yeah, you
know, he’s got a lot of likes.
Mark: [Laughs.]
Male: And so…but
something rubs me the wrong way.
Mark: Well, the first
comment—first of all, I think that’s a very interesting comment. I admire
Postman’s book. He sees as the true dystopia not Orwell, but Aldous Huxley. I
remember that well. And I gave a course—actually, I didn’t mention it here—on
utopia also in the English Department, where we read Huxley.
I think my
coverage about Trump made it very clear that his entertainment value, which is
undeniable, made him more of a threat as a politician. And I saw that threat as
related to his entertainment value, to the fact that the larger culture, and
particularly the commercial culture, the culture of commercial journalism,
embraced him and in effect made him President.
Male: Yeah. Les
Moonves said I don’t know if it’s good for the country, but it’s good for CBS.
Mark: Exactly. I don’t
know whether he’s good for the country, but he’s very good for CBS. And it’s a
great quote, and God bless him for saying it because I quoted it in the first
piece I did on Trump. And this is the great paradox, among other things, since
we’re talking about truth in journalism, of commercial journalism, that the
presumption is that what you choose as the lead, which is, in a sense, the
Edenic act of journalism, right, choosing the lead—what is the news, what’s
important out of all of these sense impressions we’re getting, what’s the thing
that we choose, that’s the journalistic act at the beginning—the presumption is
that you make that choice based on objective criteria about what’s important,
which has to do with public interest. It has to do with a number of things that
we can talk about.
And the
fact, what was proven in the last election, in 2016, is that the entertainment
value and the attraction of eyeballs to the screen—because the New York Times is on the screen now, and
many, many more people see it on the screen, and the Washington Post and other journalistic stalwarts of our culture—they
judged the lead—and I’m going to make a loose, but I think accurate
statement—by how many eyeballs it drew.
If you were
Donald Trump and you went to Columbus, Ohio and did a rally, by God, it was
going to be broadcast live on cable TV and it was going to be covered as if it
was this major event on the front page, and it was going to get much more
coverage than Hillary’s stuff would.
Robert: Or John Kasich’s
analysis of the budget.
Mark: Yeah. Much more
than, needless to say, and thank God for that.
Robert: Right.
Mark: But it would get
much more. Why? Because it attracted eyeballs. And Trump said, it couldn’t have
been more than a month ago, but it seems like years, that I’ll win in 2020.
Why? Because the press won’t be able to part with me because I’m making them so
much money they won’t be able to part with me. Now I think that analysis is
wrong about him winning, but I think the premise is right, which is that he is
making a lot of money for a lot of people, and we have a commercial press. And
there is a contradiction between a commercial press and the ideals of
journalism that it is supposed to support. And we’re dealing with that in all
sorts of ways.
And there’s
also the fact, as we’ve been reminded the past few days with Mr. Zuckerberg
before Congress, that the distribution mechanism for the press in this country
now comes down to two companies, Facebook and Google. They are how we
distribute news. And they’re not professional journalists. You know, they’re
not journalism. But they determine how Americans get their news in their
majority.
And again,
they’re about eyeballs. So eyeballs used to be, you know, TV news was about
eyeballs, but you had the fairness doctrine put in place, in effect, in the
‘30s to balance that out. But that was gotten rid of by Ronald Reagan and it’s
ancient, so there’s no… I mean, it’s interesting that it hasn’t really been
brought up, the fairness doctrine, although maybe I missed it in the past few
days with Zuckerberg. Anyway, I’m not sure I answered you with that, but…
Male: I was very
interested in what you, the Polish journalist, or not so much journalist that
you were discussing earlier.
Mark: Kapuscinski.
Male: Mm-hmm. And I
was interested in what you think about—you mentioned a parable, which may not
be all the way like journalistic ethics, but at the same time it could be
completely true. And so I was wondering what you think the role of the parable
in journalism is now and then the role of journalism in something more like literature
and the tendency to confuse people about [unintelligible] 01:00:40.
Mark: Well, that’s a
great question. I benefited greatly by the various mentors I’ve had in my life,
and one of the most valuable to me was Frank Kermode, who I met when I was an
undergraduate at Harvard and he was delivering the Norton Lectures, which came
to be the book “The Genesis of Secrecy,” which is a book about parable, as much
as anything, and about its analysis in text, not just the Bible, although much
of it is about the Bible, but in other texts, including contemporary texts like
Henry Green’s novels and various other things.
You know,
parable is a compressed, small story that has a symbolic character. That’s one
way to put it. Or you can say simply that the story can be unraveled almost
infinitely. In other words, it doesn’t have a set content. It has a way of
unraveling and forming the subject of argument and discussion. It is also, in
so being, a teaching tool, right? And we know them best as the parables in the
New Testament, in particular.
I think
Kapuscinski, in, for example, “Shah of Shahs” writes about the moment in which
a repressive regime faces a demonstration and the police come out with their
truncheons and say to the crowd, or say, to make it a parable, to a man at the
edge of the crowd, get the hell back to your house or I’m going to beat the
hell out of you. And there is a moment, at some point in a revolution, where
that man declines to move. And once that man declines to move, the man next to
him declines to move, and the woman next to him declines to move, and suddenly
you have this illusion of ultimate power, which is ultimate power, because the
illusion is it, has dissipated.
Now he tells
this story in “Shah of Shahs,” and you have to ask, as a journalist, who’s that
guy? Wait, who? Where? What demonstration was it? What did he say? How old was
he? Where did he come from? And in fact, that man might exist, but he’s unknown
to the author. So it becomes, in effect, a parable about power.
Now the
question is, is this journalistically permissible? And my answer to that would
be yes. He’s somebody who famously covered, I mean, Kapuscinski, 23 revolution
and coups d’état. I have no idea where that number came from. But he’s telling
you something about what he knows, and he’s in Tehran. But did he meet that
person? He probably never did.
So what kind
of truth value do we give that little story? And I would say it’s a parable
about power. And I would say it has a perfect right to be in that book. And if
we are, as journalists, worried about it, we ought to lighten up. But I can see
how people would be worried about it. Does that answer your question?
Male: Yes.
Mark: I recommend that Kermode
book. It’s fantastic.
Robert: We can take one
more question. Peter.
Male: I’d like to go
back to El Mozote and link it to what we’ve been saying about from today. First
of all, is it true, the urban legend in the ‘80s, that Ray Bonner covered the
massacre, and it was briefly in the Times,
and then the Times fired Ray Bonner
because they [unintelligible] 01:04:44. Is
that true?
Mark: Largely. It’s a
kind of parable. [Laughter.]
Male: Is it true
enough to wonder why the New York Times
has the credibility that it still has in the eyes of all the other media?
Mark: Well, I can talk
about that for a minute. Ray Bonner is a very well known journalist from the New York Times who was covering Central
America in the ‘80s. He had been a Nader’s Raider. He was never actually
trained as a journalist. But because they didn’t have anybody in a bureau
there, he suddenly kind of got this job. It’s a complicated story. But the
editor of the Times, Abe Rosenthal,
who was kind of a legendary figure in his own right, didn’t really trust him.
He did cover
the massacre, as did Alma Gillermoprieto, who was working for the Washington Post. They both published, on
the same day, front page pieces about the massacre, on those two most prominent
newspapers in the United States. An amazing story that that happened. Ray was
subsequently fired, not as a direct result of that reporting, but as a kind of
cumulative result of a number of stories he did, including one about torture
where he essentially got it wrong.
When I went
and covered El Mozote, those two reporters, Alma and Ray, both happened to be
on the staff of The New Yorker at the
time. In fact, Alma was first asked to cover El Mozote and she said she’s never
going back to El Salvador, ever, so it devolved to me.
I tried to
nail the story down about why Abe fired Ray, and began this round of calling
all of the senior editors who had been at the Times at the time who were people that now, most of them, weren’t
at the Times anymore. They were
running foundations, they were running the Council on Foreign Relations, they
were very accomplished and powerful people in their own right.
And all of
them, to a man—and they were all men—admitted that Abe fired Ray because he was
too lefty, basically. None of them, even though they were completely separate
from the Times, they were independent
and so on, had the intestinal fortitude to go on the record, so I had trouble
actually asserting this. Even so, when the piece came out, I got a very angry
phone call from Abe Rosenthal, whom I had talked to, and I just picked up the
phone and heard, RR-RR-RR-RR-RR! This
kind of mad dog on the other end. And I finally put the—I mean, I knew it was
him, but he wouldn’t let me speak. But he was very, very angry at me.
Now you say
about the reputation of the Times,
and all I can say is, when you look at the Times’
reputation, they did, indeed, get the story right. He published Ray Bonner’s
piece. Now firing him later—it wasn’t as a direct result of that piece—had a
strong effect, no question about it, on the press corps in El Salvador because
Ray was the leading figure there.
You know, he
was New York Times. He would get up
at 5:00 in the morning and run ten miles, and he was an absolutely dogged
reporter. And suddenly, when your newspaper basically says we don’t trust
anymore and fires you, that, to everyone else in the press corps, says that
they’re on thin ice, too, so it had a very significant effect on the coverage
of the Salvadoran civil war, firing him.
Male: I think [unintelligible] 01:08:30. I’m very glad to have the clarification.
Mark: But I think El
Mozote probably contributed.
Male: But here we are
in a situation where the country is polarized between the people who believe
Fox News and the people who believe the New
York Times, and where are the people who shouldn’t be believing either?
Mark: Well, you know, I
hope some of them are on this campus, and I hope some of them are in my
classes. And I don’t know. It’s a good question. I think wherever they are,
their number is diminishing. I think that is certainly true. I think the effect
of the Trump administration on the Times
is as significant as it’s been on Fox News. I think the Times has become more partisan. The Washington Post, which has done great work, has become more
partisan. The notion of objectivity and rules-based journalism and so on has
taken a major beating.
On the other
hand, Trump, by leaking, you know, the major leaker in this administration is
the President. I mean, at the end of the day he calls a lot of people and they
talk to the press. And that’s basically a lot of the stories, and then it’s in
the paper the next day. So he’s dominating the leaks, among other things.
But I don’t
know the answer to your question. As I say, I think there’s a tragic dimension
here, which is that there are the means by which to seek out more of the truth
yourself, but it takes a certain degree of work and doggedness. And in fact
we’re becoming, all of us, more partisan because of the effect of the big man.
We live in the realm of the big man now. And whether he’s speaking, his voice
is music to your ears or it’s this threatening, raspy sound of the jailer
coming after you, he dominates what you hear, and that’s not good for everybody.
Robert: He’s more a scary
clown than a jailer, right?
Male: One more
question.
Robert: Okay, one more
question.
Female: Just to follow up
on that, I mean, I guess I would like to hear more about what are the means
that we can use because it used to be that you could just read more news
stories. But it seems to me that one effect of the contemporary media market is
that one news source reports what another news source says, so there’s only
repetition. And then if there’s anything about FOIA requests and things like
that. I mean, you can’t even get a straight answer from [unintelligible] 01:11:06 when you ask them a question.
Mark: Yeah.
Female: Like [they say]
we don’t have that information, or it’s in draft form, and you can’t have it,
so I don’t know how you ask [unintelligible] 01:11:15
Mark: Well, I think you
make a very good point. I think there are two points. I mean, at the same time
as you have a proliferation of outlets and of sources on the web and so on, the
reliability goes down, partisanship goes up. There is the fact that you get…
There is almost immediately the search warrant for Michael Cohen. There is,
almost immediately, these kind of primary documents that you can see and search
out and make judgments of your own. I think that is quite valuable.
It’s not always
true. You’re completely right about that. But it is much more significantly
true than it was 30 years ago. Maybe less true than it was five years ago,
perhaps. There are a lot of news outlets, but not as many trustworthy ones. But
I think you can kind of, as it were, what’s the word, kind of use intersecting
fire, as it were, to try to seek out things.
I think the
second point I agree with, that they’re shutting down FOIA requests. I don’t
think this will be permanent. But it is true that it’s a lot harder to get
information out of this government. I think that will start to change if the
2018 elections go to the Democrats. I think that’s one of the things that they
will, through oversight, will start to change about the way the government is
functioning. But it’s a very bad situation, I agree. I think there’s a kind of
cutting off of significant information.
On the other
hand, you still do have inspectors general in all the departments. What you
have now is a kind of war between those people and the new overseers. That’s
one of the reasons we’re getting a significant amount of news, because of that
conflict. So I think the election, I mean, it doesn’t take a genius to know
that November is going to be the most important midterm elections in our
lifetimes, without a doubt.
Robert: Mark, thank you
so much. [Applause.]
Mark: Thank you. Thanks.