Hello everyone and welcome to this podcast introduction to this week's program, the tragedy of Jay Robert Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer is one of my characters, in fact he's my favorite character.

You can read more about that, listening to america.org, ltamerica.org. I not only have a review of the film there and a video, but also a personal account of why I love this character more than Thomas Jefferson, more than Maryweather Lewis, more than Theodore Roosevelt, more than John Steinbeck.

David Cantry is so interesting because he was going on this trip with his son Dominic to the heart of the Teton mountains and I didn't know he would be home for the opening of the film.

I didn't think about it, but he texted me and said he was on his way to see the film. I had just come out of it and so when he was done he said we have to talk about this.

So we set up a special edition of the program, listening to america and had a great and wonderful conversation.

And my new friend John Gowins portrays Dr. Ward Evans, has still not seen it. This is a Sunday of the 23rd of July, 2023.

He's Dr. Ward Evans, one of the three members of the advisory panel, the security hearing panel, the one person who voted for Oppenheimer to exonerate him from the spurious charge of having been disloyal to the United States being a security risk.

I interviewed John Gowins a few weeks ago before the film came out. Now I've seen it before he has, it's all crazy because of all sorts of stuff going on in L.A.

But he will have seen it this weekend. We will have a conversation about that. So you know, how do you decide why a film is a great film?

I try to think of the films that I most admire in my life if someone said, what are the name, the greatest movies that you know of?

In 2001, a space odyssey, certainly. I think the deer hunter is one of the great films that I've ever seen.

Citizen Kane, of course, stunning. Antonioni's of the passenger. I truly love. Dr. Strange Love, which is in some ways related to this film, certainly top five films that I've ever seen.

But this film really does stand out. And not just because I love this subject and have portrayed Oppenheimer and am eager to do more in that character.

In fact, I ordered a new 1940s gray suit for my pork pie hat and my pipes. I have a couple of Oppenheimer performances coming up this late to the summer and fall. And I'm excited about that.

And I'm going to write an essay now about this. It's going to be about John Dunn, my poet from the 17th century, who gave the name Trinity to the test site at Al Magordo in New Mexico. Oppenheimer loved the poetry of John Dunn.

I'm going to write about that because Dunn is a metaphysical poet by which we mean he used scientific terminology and scientific thought doctrine as poetic conceits as metaphors and similes in his poetry and in his sermons.

But if ever there were metaphysical conceit, it's the detonation of atomic device in which, as the film says in its opening, Oppenheimer became prometious.

The Greek god who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humans and was punished forever by having his liver eaten out by vultures by day and the liver would then grow back to be tortured again overnight.

So I'm going to write about John Dunn and death, which is one of the great obsessions in Dunn's poetry and especially his sermons, how people reacted to the atomic device, particularly at Al Magordo because of course there were few witnesses at Hiroshima.

They were army or Air Force officers in the air. They didn't see what the scientists, including Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller and Kenneth Bainbridge and George Kisziakowski and Hans Beatha, etc. saw at the test site on July 16th, 1945.

So I'm going to try to wrap all of these things into one essay about why metaphysical conceits are important. Some things can't be understood without straining and stretching the metaphor beyond its usual signification, beyond its usual boundaries, and that's what a metaphysical conceit is.

John was my first love when I was at Oxford many, many, many, many years ago now. I studied John Dunn in the 17th century. At one time I knew more about John Dunn than I now know about Jefferson and I studied the sermons of Dunn, 160 of them, which are regarded maybe as the greatest sermons of the Renaissance and Reformation in England and some of the best English prose ever written.

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