SIAP, new to me interview I stumbled across and really enjoyed:
Bourdain Confidential
"I find, again and again, just by spending the time, by asking very simple questions, people have said the most astonishing things to me."
Published onJul 15, 2018 6:00PM EST
Maria Bustillos
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tldr:
What year were you born?
’56. I missed the draft. The Summer of Love… by the time I was seventeen and old enough to participate, the whole Summer of Love thing was ridiculous and had already gone sour. Any notion of a revolution we could all agree on was long gone.
Our attention spans I think are an obstacle to, and also our inability, by our highly…
You know, I just spent about ten days in West Virginia. I like them. I liked the Trump voters. They say grace every meal. Coal is gone.
I love them. And anybody who cannot understand how important even the promise of a slight increase in the number of coal jobs is, how important that is to their cellular tissue, their self-image, everything. How grotesque it is, for people to bigfoot in and say we’re all going to move you into solar, and why can’t you people… No!
The contempt and the ridicule which has been heaped on places like West Virginia, which is the heart, demographically, of enemy territory, as far as New York liberals like us are concerned. If we cannot… This is something we fucked up in the Sixties. We were fighting against cops and construction workers… cops and construction workers were exactly who we fucking needed! They were the first to die, in Vietnam. We weren’t gonna!
There’s nearly eight billion of us and we’re all in this mysterious situation. It’s a spinning blue pearl in space. None of us knows why we’re here. We have no idea, it’ll end, and it’s as temporary for the least of us as for, like… somebody who’s been alive for a day is in the same condition as an 80-year-old gazillionaire. Slice it any way you want, everyone’s in the same condition. Mystery, amazement, beauty. Strangeness.
Amazement and beauty are luxuries, however.
To be able to think about them, maybe? But… there’s a lot more than we think, right?
[doubtful]
Mmm… I see… I’ve seen so many nice people do really terrible things.
Me too. But maybe that’s because we persuade people that “having stuff” is important, or good…
How do you persuade people to feel empathy? To be kind, to be curious?
I know how.
This is the challenge.
You have to love them. That’s how you do it, you have to love them.
Yeah well I think… we’ve been falling down on the job, in that regard.
Wait. You’re good at that. You love people! And that’s what you’ve given!
I love West Virginia… I do! I really really do. Just… I’d almost move there out of spite.
[guffaws]
As a fuck you to everybody who agrees with me. You know what I mean?
Yeah. Yeah!! I completely do.
Because it’s kind of amazing. Bullshit does not fly in the hollers. You know what I mean? You either got enough food or you don’t. If you don’t, you grab a rifle and go out back and you shoot a squirrel. You either know how to dress a squirrel or you don’t.
Could you dress a squirrel?
Yes, I can.
edit: link:
https://popula.com/2018/07/15/bourdain-confidential/