Show Notes
You might know Morgan Spector as the critically acclaimed leading man in The Gilded Age and The Plot Against America. Or for his appearances in Boardwalk Empire, Suits, Homeland, How to Make It In America (one of Van’s favorites), or even as a producer on The Big Scary “S” Word. What you might not know is that Morgan is both an impressive critic of policy and an advocate for democratic socialism. We invited Morgan on to talk about Independence Day (1996), a delicious conversation that’s next in our queue. But we also recorded an in-depth installment of “Politics Behind the Scenes,” our occasional side-convos with guests about the urgent real-world issues of the day. In this special episode, Morgan chops it up with Van and Lyle about: * Meaningful anti-imperialist positions on Russia’s war withUkraine; * The illegal war in Iran is also evil; * Nationalizing the defense industry and taking the profits out of war; * How we might envision a peace economy; * Why we all love Graham Platner; * The Israel problem in US foreign policy; * Why we’re bullish on electoral leftism; and * How the Democratic Party has s**t the bed so bad that left populists have a real opportunity to takeover the party from within. A lot going on here. You don’t want to miss this episode with one of Hollywood’s best political minds.
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From the vault! Re-releasing one of our earliest and most popular episodes, with antiwar veteran and organizer Alexander McCoy. New episode coming next week. ✌️ “When I understand my enemy well enough to defeat him, then in that moment, I also love him.” So begins the 2013 film adaptation of Orson Scott Card’s classic sci-fi novel Ender’s Game. Neither achieving box office nor critical success, the movie still evokes a wide range of reactions. Especially when it comes to its ambiguous relationship to the original text. Van and Lyle have fellow vet and strategist Alexander McCoy on the show to debate their competing reads. Along the way, they come to agree that certain insights gleaned from the cinematic rendering might be at odds with Card’s politics. Ranging from the ultimate lovelessness of war to the emptiness of any strategy unharnessed from justice and peace. Alex on Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/alexandermccoy.bsky.social Further Reading “A Primer on Orson Scott Card and the Ender’s Game Controversy,” by Anna Silman The Internationalists, by Alexander Ward “The Great Humbling,” by David Klion “Four Futures,” By Peter Frase Strategy and Conscience, by Anatol Rapaport Ender’s Game Trailer Teaser From The Episode
Ryan Miller, the next on the show’s fellow veteran lineup, was a Marine in Okinawa from 1998 to 2002, spent years in About Face: Veterans Against the War, helped Oakland decriminalize plant medicines in 2019, and now works as a therapist in psychedelic integration. He joins us to discuss Bonni Cohen and Jon Shenk’s film documenting three special operators from SEAL training through Afghanistan to Iraq to a clinic in Mexico, where ibogaine and toad venom do what sixty pills a day could not. For Lyle the film’s real subject is a trauma apparatus built to repair faulty equipment rather than heal people (one SEAL is sent to the military’s brain-injury center, patched up, and returned for four more deployments). As the scholar Nadia Abu El-Haj has argued in Combat Trauma, PTSD was popularized by Vietnam Veterans Against the War in rap groups that turned pain into politics. As the decades followed, this promising origin story nonetheless raced toward an endpoint constituted—in Ryan’s words—by psychedelic-assisted stormtroopers. Van invokes Fanon’s French torturer, begging his psychiatrist for a way to sleep at night and keep his job. Then there is the narration itself, where the enemy appears only as bad guys, terra nullius in uniform. No Afghans, no Iraqis, not even Mexicans in a film set half in Mexico. The one line that breaks the frame, a SEAL wondering whether we’d have a military at all if we didn’t abuse children, lasts no more than a second. Further Reading and Listening Ryan Miller’s therapist profile Combat Trauma by Nadia Abu El-Haj “Can we heal wartime trauma without confronting the real causes of war?” by Lyle Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War by Samuel Moyn Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World by Malcolm Harris The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love by bell hooks “Colonial War and Mental Disorders” from Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth Bang-Bang’s Netflix’s Marines episode w/ Sam Carliner Bang-Bang’s Combat Obscura episode Teaser from the Episode In Waves and War Trailer
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.bangbangpod.com