![]() The “Slow Burn” approach is well-established at this point: Take a well-known event in recent American history (Watergate, the Clinton impeachment, Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke’s 1991 campaign for Louisiana governor) and explore, in exacting detail, the surrounding political, cultural and social detritus - the better to understand how Americans experienced them at the time, and, therefore, how they fit into our national narrative. The two series serve together as a convenient case study in how we might approach them and where they might lead us. With still-inflammatory characters like Rumsfeld, Chalabi, and Miller to draw on, the Iraq War is a potent basis for such stories. It matters how we write them, what we include, and what we leave out. In the spirit of this weekend’s holiday, you can almost think of it as a new founding myth: America was reborn in the Middle East’s crucible, not as the leader of a rules-based, liberal international order, but a multi-tendrilled, ever-expanding and unaccountable corporate hegemon.įounding myths are powerful. But it doesn’t map neatly along ideological lines - influential thinkers and activists from the far left to the far right share the “Blowback”-ian conception of the March 2003 invasion of Iraq as a Year Zero for the post-Cold War era. It might seem at first like a typical intra-left difference in temperament. “Blowback” is didactic, its hosts bombarding the listener with their sturm-und-drang argument about the Iraq War as a portal to hell that directly caused our modern-day political ills. “Slow Burn” allows space for figures like the late anti-Saddam Iraqi politician Ahmed Chalabi, former New York Times reporter Judith Miller, and, yes, Donald Rumsfeld, to speak for themselves, either in the present or through the historical record, and invites the listener to draw their own conclusions. But history is storytelling, and in the world of storytelling, style matters. To an extent, it is: Both shows are painstakingly researched, and tell the same cautionary tale. The difference might seem stylistic, not substantial. Team “Slow Burn” wisely declined to take the bait, but after just a single episode, the battle lines were clearly drawn: the mealy-mouthed, ambivalent, lamestream media against the pirate truth-tellers who laced their own account of the war with Howard Stern-like audio drops and profane tirades against Rumsfeld and his cronies. When Slate launched “Slow Burn” in April, the loyal, rabid “Blowback” fanbase attacked, egged on by influential lefty-world media figures. One might imagine that they would feel a certain solidarity, a shared mission to provide their generation with a clear-eyed, heavily researched and reported view of a conflict that shaped the world in which they came of age and are now inheriting. A little less than a year before that, the left-wing journalists and respective Vice and “Chapo Trap House” alums Noah Kulwin and Brendan James released “ Blowback,” an unapologetically left-wing re-examination of the war’s many causes and ongoing effects.Īll three hosts are millennials whose respective series gave listeners a detailed - and, speaking as a listener, sometimes too detailed - account of the folly, hubris and collective mania that led to the Iraq War. In the fifth season of Slate’s “ Slow Burn,” which concluded just weeks before Rumsfeld’s death, host Noreen Malone delivered listeners one of the series’ signature deep dives on an event that looms so large over American history we’ve almost forgotten the details of what actually happened. But if you were paying attention recently, a revealing skirmish over their place in it was waged in a very modern medium: the serialized podcast. Visit megaphone.Both Rumsfeld and our Iraqi experiment in nation-building have now passed into history. The season’s reporting was supported by a grant from the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Artwork by Derreck Johnson based on a photo provided by Robert Wheeler. Our theme music is composed by Alexis Cuadrado. Supervising Producer of Narrative Podcasts.Įditorial direction by Josh Levin, Derek John and Johanna Zorn. Season 7 of Slow Burn is produced by Susan Matthews, Samira Tazari, Sophie Summergrad, and Sol Werthan.ĭerek John is Sr. To see the cover of the Handbook on Abortion, some of the photos the Willkes used, and the brochure “Life or Death,” go to /handbook The Willkes’ Handbook on Abortion, and the photographs they distributed along with it, would help kickstart the right-to-life movement. Their daughter would convince them to shift their focus to another hot-button issue. ![]() ![]() Jack and Barbara Willke got their start on the Catholic speaking circuit talking about the pleasure of sex within marriage.
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