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I'm Christopher Lightman. This is open source.

And here we are on the darkling plane that the sage Matthew Arnold imagined,

swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight

where ignorant armies clash by night.

We wake in Memorial Day Week 2022 in the land of assault weapons,

a world of pandemic and climate breakdown,

feeling we're living somewhere between the age of anxiety and the end times.

We're in a test of spirit and soul.

And some people turn to religion, others to poetry.

Our guests are the philosopher Cornell West,

a union theological seminary who has styled himself

a blues man in the ivory tower.

And David Bromwich,

starting professor of English at Yale,

ranging wide in recent books titled Moral Imagination and American Breakdown.

Cornell and David,

you are my dream diagnosticians of the American condition in good times and bad.

Can we hear you both please take an opening stab at naming this set of symptoms

...