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Taliesin Nyala: Hello this is Taliesin Nyala from the Office of Communications at Mount
Holyoke College. On March 31, Rachel Maddow, of MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, came
to Mount Holyoke to discuss her new book, Drift. Just before she went on stage, she
spent a few minutes talking with us about writing the book and what that was like.
Rachel Maddow: I had this idea that is the thesis of this book, and at the time that
I was really bothered by it, I had my own radio show and I soon there after got my own
TV show. But even with all that leeway to say what I want—and I've always had editorial
freedom in all the shows I've ever had—I felt like what I wanted to say on this subject
I could not say in short form. It doesn't sound by easily, which actually makes talks
like this a challenge. Because what I have to say about this is 288 pages. That’s where
it starts and that’s where it ends. There isn’t really a way to excerpt it, there
isn’t a way to fit it between commercial breaks, there isn’t a way to make it shorter.
I needed to lay this out in a way that showed the evidence as I saw it and made this case
and I needed to do it in a long form way. So I do not like writing. I write all day—I
write scripts, you know, for me to say. In terms of writing for the eye, it makes me
want to die, but I wanted to get this case made, I wanted to make this point and I did
it, it is what I wanted it to be. The thesis itself I don’t think it is particularly
original to the extent that the thesis is about where we are now. I think a lot of people,
a lot of people who are smarter than me and more articulate than me, even have maybe said
it better, which is about the fact that, we no longer feel like we are a country that
goes to war, we feel like we are a country that has sent its military to war and the
military and the civilian experience is so different right now that its not just a cultural
divide but almost a moral divide in the nation that they are sacrificing in the military
and we not in the military are the opposite of sacrificing. I don’t think it is a unique
observation—a lot of people have noted that. I think the thing that is unique is that I
think that we didn’t get to this place in a post-9/11 time frame. I think that the changes
in the country that allowed us to get into this pickle that we all agree we are in right
now have sort of happened over the course of the last 30 or 40 years. They're not indelible
changes but they're over that kind of a time frame. I think that national security and
war making in the defense budget and things like that are something where we are prone
to upset and prone to conspiracy theories, because conspiracy theories are much easier
to understand, you pick a bad guy, that’s why things are screwed up because there's
some evil force screwing it up and that's not true. That’s why the book is called
Drift, because it’s about us making—us having gotten ourselves into this situation
not on purpose, we drifted into it. There doesn’t need to be a conspiratorial cabal
explaining all things that are bad in the world. That’s a form of over-simplification
that I think we are prey to, particularly when we don’t have other ways of understanding
the complexity. And in this case, I think it is worth understanding the complexity it's
not ungraspable you just need to be willing to bear with it for a few dozen pages and
then you can understand more than you might otherwise if you were just braying about it
in some partisan way.