I think the United States is particularly
vulnerable to cultural matters.
I think many of our political problems and difficulties
have cultural roots.
I think that what holds us together
is a permanent problem, a very long-standing problem.
The Civil War and the racial division
and that regional division is kind
of an egregious, easily identifiable manifestation
of that.
You take health care, who the kids who are now
doing their second, third, fourth tour of duty
in Iraq, the way social issues that are not
issues in many, many other Western democracies become
social issues here, anything you name, social security.
All of these things have cultural roots in my opinion.
They are matters of imagination.
I don't believe whole countries become depressed or not,
except economically.
But we do have a problem of imagination
that is a collective problem.
And one of my fears is that the recognition of that
will just translate into sophistry.
So the Democrats will hire a better sophist than the sophist
that the Republicans had.
And this sophist says, we can appeal
to the Christians this way.
And the sophist says, well, if we put the question this way.
And if I think what is the counterbalance to sophistry,
it's honoring our artists.
So I've already said last night, yesterday afternoon,
that I think the most important aspect of education
is teaching very small children music and poetry.
Probably for the college kids, I would
say they need to read William Carlos Williams,
they need to see the films of Preston Sturges,
they need to read Willa Cather, they
need to read American works that deal
with the strengths and weaknesses
of American imagination.
You know, Mark Twain must guide us.
We all have many reservations about Bill Clinton.
He said something that I remember at a reception
at the White House.
They had Nadja-- what's the violinist name?
It's a hyphenated name.
The woman, young woman.
Yeah.
[INTERPOSING VOICES]
Sonnenberg.
Nadja Sonnenberg played.
And she played light stuff.
She played a defiant piece, she played somebody's setting
of a Gershwin.
I can almost remember who.
And she mentioned before she played that it was the 100th
anniversary of Gershwin's birth.
And I believe extemporaneously or if not anyway impressively,
Clinton, who does like to talk, stood up and said,
"You mentioned that it was the 100th anniversary of George
Gershwin's birth.
The other day we celebrated the 100th anniversary of William
Faulkner."
Then he said, he used the word that you and I are using,
he then said, "Think of those two imaginations, William
Faulkner and George Gershwin.
Just think how different the history of our country could
have been for the last 50 years if we had been guided by those
imaginations."
I thought, here's a politician who
can use the word imagination without making
you feel embarrassed.
And here is a good point.
So I don't think there's an easy or simple relationship
between art and politics.
And the only thing I'm really an expert on
is arranging the sounds of words.
I am an expert.
I don't know anybody who knows more than I
do about consonants and vowels.
I really mean that.
But on questions like this, I'm really talking from my head,
I have a strong sense that probably everywhere--
I'm sure in France they would tell you
right now that their political problems are cultural problems.
But I think in a particular way for us,
because memory is such an issue for us,
memory is such an important issue.
In a particular way for us, culture
is a terribly important matter.