Mr. Blue Blood and His Marvelous Adventure

My guest on the show today is Greg Barnhisel, English professor at Duquesne University and author of the recent book Code Name Puritan: Norman Holmes Pearson at the Nexus of Poetry, Espionage, and American Power.Our conversation is in one sense about the subject of his book, Norman Holmes Pearson, who was a pioneer of both the American intelligence establishment and the modern study of the humanities. But it's also about the death of what Pearson represented, or embodied, which is the American cold war establishment, or—to abstract even further— the death of any unitary establishment whatsoever possessing the power to author a consensus or narrative to which most of the nation would defer. It's also about one of my abiding preoccupations, as a son of New England, with the old yankee WASP elite culture. Yale men. Taste-makers. Ghostwriters of national narratives. The kind of people who knew how to quote Virgil, chair a foundation meeting, and quietly stage a coup in Latin America. We talk about whether this specific kind of establishment power he represented has faded entirely or morphed into something else (some version of what we sometimes call the professional managerial class.

Hope you enjoy.

Peace

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