#1549 Welcome to Listening to America

Listening to America

History, Politics, Unitedstates, Society & Culture, American

4.6 • 1.1K Ratings

🗓️ 29 May 2023

⏱️ 63 minutes

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Summary

This week, Clay Jenkinson inaugurates the first episode of Listening to America with WHRV's Barbara Hamm Lee in the studios of WHRV in Norfolk, Virginia. How will Listening to America be different from the Thomas Jefferson Hour? Clay explains the mission of Listening to America--to go out and find the authentic voices of America as we approach the 250th birthday of the United States. In a nation as large and diverse as the US is it even possible to seek the Soul of America? The first of the Listening to America episodes was recorded in front of a live audience at WHRV.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast introduction to the first of our new programs,
0:04.8	listening to America with Clay Jenkinson, when I decided to change the direction of the program
0:10.8	somewhat. Jefferson will still be here. Our usual guess will still be coming. The Jeffersonian
0:16.8	will always be a central theme of everything that I do because from the time I was 25 years old
0:22.7	until today, I've been a Jeffersonian. I want to live in Mr. Jefferson's America with, of course,
0:28.3	some key adjustments on slavery and women and Native Americans and so on. But I believe in
0:33.9	Jefferson's vision of a self-governing people, a people who educate themselves, a people who are
0:39.3	up to the challenge of sorting out their public business together with civility, majority rule,
0:45.1	science, and good sense. My host for the initial program was my old friend Barbara Hamley of WHRV
0:53.4	She hosts a Thursday noon program called Another View, which is very popular, and she agreed to be
0:59.0	the guest host on the first of these of these broadcasts and podcasts, and I couldn't have been
1:04.0	more gratified by that. We were in the studio. There was a live audience, I suppose, 60 or 70 people.
1:12.2	I've had a long and interesting history in Norfolk. My old friend Paul Lasseco of the TCC
1:17.9	Robert Theater has been one of the people that worked hardest to make all my dreams come true.
1:24.8	When I wanted to do a play, Mr. Jefferson and Maria Cosway, my head and my heart, he agreed to
1:31.5	produce it. In fact, that was the first thing I believe that we ever did together. I performed a
1:36.6	range of characters on the stage of the Robert Theater. Theodore Roosevelt, Jay Robert Oppenheimer,
1:42.8	of course Thomas Jefferson, I've debated Hamilton. When I wanted to do Shakespeare,
1:48.5	a sort of a one-man Shakespeare recitation program, he agreed not only to be in it and to direct it,
1:55.1	but to appear with me after the intermission in the maybe the greatest scene in Hamlet. Act
2:00.5	5 scene 1, The Graveyard, which ends with Hamlet saying alas,
2:05.9	poor Yorick, I knew him, Horatio, a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent fancy.
	...

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