Show Notes
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Comedian and podcaster Orli Matlow, who hosts War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War, joins Van and Lyle for a conversation about Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton that turns out to be less about the musical’s politics than about how three very different people found themselves in three very different relationships to it. Orli came up through musical theater and loves Hamilton. Newsiesmade her pro-union. Hair made her antiwar. For her, the show is part of a lineage of musicals that shape how you see the world, and she embraces it openly. Lyle was once a theater kid too, but Hamilton arrived when he was a disillusioned left vet who saw the production’s bootstrapping mythology and founders worship as meritocratic catnip. Van, an Obama-era Pentagon guy at the time, was probably too deep in the liberal foreign policy bubble to care much either way. The episode lives in that gap. “In New York you can be a new man.” “I’m not going to throw away my shot.” “Look around, so happy to be alive today, in the greatest city in the world. HISTORY IS HAPPENING!” The self-starter theme runs through the musical like a pulse, and whether it reads as aspirational or as a false capitalist origin story depends entirely on where you were standing when you first heard it. The founders fetish is real. The erasure of the founders’ own radical economic views, their hostility to monopolists and wage slavery, is real. But Lyle’s critique has softened over the years, in large part by appreciating the idiosyncratic and often life-affirming reasons people like Orli appreciate the show. Sometimes the most interesting thing about a cultural phenomenon is not what it says but what it reveals about the infinite ways infinitely different people, in infinitely different passages of life, pass through it. Further Reading/Listening Orli Matlow’s website War is Stupid: An Anti-War Podcast About War Orli Matlow on McSweeney’s Alexander Hamilton by Ron Chernow “Race-Conscious Casting and the Erasure of the Black Past in Hamilton” by Lyra Monteiro “Ishmael Reed Doesn’t Like Hamilton” by Jaya Rajamani Teaser from the Episode Hamilton Trailer
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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