TRANSCRIPT 🔗
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Speaker 1: Doctor Matthew Mehan.
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Speaker 2: He's the Associate Dean and Associate Professor of Government for the Van Andal Graduate School of Government at Hillsdale College's Washington, DC campus.
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Speaker 1: He's also the author of what I can only.
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Speaker 2: Describe as the most beautiful pro America, Happy America twenty two hundred and fiftieth Birthday book called The American Book of Fables. It is gorgeous. First of all, doctor me and welcome the show.
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Speaker 3: Thanks for having me, Mandy, and appreciate those kind words about the book too. Well.
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Speaker 2: First of all, your people at Hillsdale. I had chatted with them about having you are on the show, and then I forgot that. I said, send me a copy of the book. So I get this box in the mail of this really rather large book and.
00:00:43
Speaker 1: I opened it. I was like, this is glorious. Where did this come from?
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Speaker 2: And I had to wait for another email to remind me that it was actually from Hillsdale and get you on the show. First of all, explain how you thumbnails, like, what's your elevator speech on this book?
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Speaker 1: What is this book?
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Speaker 4: The book is a love letter to America for her two hundred and fiftieth birthday, and what I refer to it as a kind of gratitude making machine. We've lost our habit of patriotism and being grateful to God, to country, to our forefathers, to our founders, to our fellow citizens, and to our families who settled this country. And the whole book is a sort of a road tour of thirteen regions of the country, explaining the declaration of independence line by line, phrase by phrase, through sections for littles, middles, and bigs, so nursery rhymes for littles, old and new, fables for middle graders, old and new, and then primary sources from the founding and settlement and history of the country, as well as poems and short stories old and new, written by me and others. And it's basically a beautifully illustrated account of our founding but also the great settlement of this country to refoster gratitude in the hearts of our whole family. It's not a children's book, it's a family book.
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Speaker 2: It kind of reminds me of and I cannot remember the name of the series. When I was a kid in the seventies, there was this series of almost encyclopedias, but they weren't encyclopedias, and they would have one book on poetry and one book on stories and things of that nature. It kind of feels like that in one book about the United States. But I want to ask you about the reworking of the Fables specifically, because I thought that was super interesting.
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Speaker 1: Where did that idea come from?
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Speaker 2: And how did you go about trying to decide which morality tale to throw in there.
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Speaker 4: Yes, I'm a professor of government, but I got a PhD in literature and how literature can help teach leadership and civics, and that's what I
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did my studies on. And so I've always seen the fable tradition as the preferred art form of free peoples because it's actually a way of training what Ben Franklin called witty wise citizens. And we the time of the founding had every bookshelf, had Lestrange, Caxton or Lafontaine, all of these really cool, very complex books of fables, not just for kids. We think of fables as something for little kids in primary school, but the fable books were actually for the whole family, and their upper register was really complicated to teach us how to be sort of witty wise citizens, or as the Gospel of Matthew put it wys and serpents innocent as doves, which is no small feet.
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Speaker 3: Right, there's this.
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Speaker 4: Notion of wit training our cleverness, not just how to be good, but how to be good in a way that we can shift for ourselves, govern ourselves, take care of ourselves. That kind of limited government, republican education. Fables is it, and no one had done an updating of the fable tradition in three hundred years. It was pre Founding era, so it was kind of this massive open lane to do a great, big work.
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Speaker 2: Well, in my mind, fables sort of all provide a more entertaining way to reinforce morality, right. I mean it's like you can read the Bible, of course you can, but at that time we didn't have the international version or the more modern translation, so it could be a bit of a bit of work to get through the Bible. Whereas you can take one of these fables, they become very accessible. You don't have to become a religious person, but they still instill the same value system.
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Speaker 4: Yeah, it is the sort of the old line of what is the ethical duty of a poet. He's both to delight and instruct and sometimes we have all delight with no instruction, and sometimes we have a lot of instruction with no delight. And so the fables are exactly that, a very good sort of spoonful of sugar with the medicine to go down.
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Speaker 3: But I also, you know, it's America.
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Speaker 4: We are an innovative people, So I innovated on it. It's not just the Boy who Cried Wolf. It's the Boy who Cried Wolf that takes place just south of Kittiehawk, next to the Red Wolf Preserve of the eastern East Coast species, the last vestige of that population, and he fires instead of crying wolf, he fires a signal rocket as a nod to the invention of flight and Cape Canaveral, and the space thing in the family that hires him is.
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Speaker 3: Actually the local family from that era.
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Speaker 4: So each of the fables weaves parts of our local ecology, our local history. And the Boy of Cried Wolf is actually to explain the part of the Declaration of Independence we hold these truths. What does it mean to hold fast to the truth. It's a very difficult proposition to remain truthful even under pressure.
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Speaker 2: Well, one of the things I really like about the book is that it's sort of there were times when
I was and I have not read the whole thing.
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Speaker 1: It's quite large. I mean, this is a this is a weight hundred Yeah.
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Speaker 3: It's three hundred and ninety six pages.
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Speaker 1: It's a weighty tome, as they say.
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Speaker 2: But as I was flipping through, there were things I was reminded of that. You know, I'm fifty seven years old. It's been a hot minute since I sat in history class. So for me it was like, oh yeah, I forgot about that, and I forgot about how these things go together. So it's a really easy way to sort of reinforce what you learned many many years ago and have not thought about since, without having to go back and dig through the dry history books. Why did you decide? Did you do it on purpose in to coincide with our two hundred and fiftieth birthday? Was that coincidental? Has this been on the back burner until now? Or was that purposeful?
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Speaker 4: So this is my third best selling illustrated book, and the first one was actually mister meh AND's mildly amusing Mythical Mammals. But I also had and an Annamuralia attached as an addendum, and the publisher wisely said, that's lots of alliteration.
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Speaker 3: And too big a book.
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Speaker 4: So I had always wanted to work on the fable tradition, and I've been practicing that genre, which is it's actually as it takes some practice to.
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Speaker 3: Get a hang of doing it well.
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Speaker 4: And so I've always been wanting to update the fable tradition for America. But about five six years ago I realized that to two hundred and fiftieth was the perfect opportunity. And then I sort of realized, oh, I can do instead of the lion and the tiger and the elephant, I can do the manatee, the buffalo and the beaver and actually sort of explore our nature, which really hasn't been done. I mean, the fable tradition is part of it. Why it makes us witty wise about morals is we think of moral types that help us, like the lion king of the jungle, the tyrant right who might roar, and the mouse that can like it turns out that a squeaky mouse meaning a little a good conscience and a wise mouth from a citizen who doesn't have any power can actually bring down or help a king, right, it's sort of there's all these little moral types and that's in the natural kingdom, and they're very easy to use for us to think things through. But the beaver that's never really been sung properly, And it turns out the beaver's a great lesson in how to use technology properly. He wants to build a damn no matter what, right, and sometimes it's not the right place to build a damn.
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Speaker 3: Right.
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Speaker 4: So the desire to just kind of invent without any controls is sort of like a moral type that we have to sort of fak through, especially while we're navigating AI. So I want of having lots of fun with the American animals to teach about new moral problems that Americans face.
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Speaker 1: I'm just going to say this.
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Speaker 2: I am a theater major, don't judge, but one of the things I thought would be great is if there was some kind of like little if you turned some of these fables into scripts for kids to act out in class, because that was one of the things I loved doing when I was a kid. And one of the things, I mean, I don't even remember what great I was. In maybe third or fourth we acted out some of Aesop's Fables. Now, I went to Catholic schools, so these are basically morality tales, and it stuck with me. And I cannot tell you how many times I invoke the Emperor having no clothes on a regular basis because it applies to so much of what we see in society.
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Speaker 1: So, I know you guys do curriculum.
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Speaker 2: Stuff at Hillsdale four schools, and you have charter schools.
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Speaker 1: That you're intimately connected with.
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Speaker 2: I would love to see this book become a part of some of those and those new tales for kids about technology and things that resonate with them with the same underlying lessons.
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Speaker 1: Have you guys thought about.
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Speaker 2: Incorporating this book into any of the you know, the curriculum stuff that you guys do, because I think it'd be great.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, we are.
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Speaker 4: We're working on that right now, actually, to have the American Book of Fables be a required summer course that then our summer class our summer book for reading, but then also integrate some of it into class.
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Speaker 3: I'm also working with a few online academies.
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Speaker 4: I just had a meeting yesterday to start including it as part of the middle school civics. So that's a slow I'm going to keep working on this. This book is a big magnum opis. This is a two hundred year book, so I've got time and I'm just going to be continuing. But I appreciate the word of the word of endorsement for that, because I think that is very good for that kind of work, and it's just only going to increase over time.
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Speaker 1: Now, the nursery rhymes, how did those come about?
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Speaker 4: So I've noticed, and a lot of educators would notice that nursery I'm just starting to fall out of our public memory, and they're very important for teaching people rhyme, song, beauty. But there are also littlenmonic devices to remember little things about morality, about history, and we've sort of forgotten that tradition. So I have in every section melodies from Father Goose. I couldn't call myself mother Goose. That was a little too off brand, but so melodies from Father Goose, and I take some old ones that you're familiar with, like Hickory Dickory Dock and Humpty Dumpty, but I also update a number of them, and then I write my own that fit and explain the various parts of the Declaration of Independence and the sort of the moral life of a free people. And so that's I think that's an important thing to do. And it's actually an art form of like compressing things that have deep messages in and by the way, Mandy back to acting these things out as scripts. I know you haven't gotten to this because it's towards the end, but when you get to the Upper Missouri to the bad Lands, the last story is actually a play within a play where a homeschool co op of blackfooted ferrets actually put on a play inside of this this story with Hugh the manatee, who's sort of the lead character I mean as of course, and episodically throughout each of the chapters. And so there's I'm basically sort of signaling exactly what you're saying in the book of like, hey, folks, you can actually sort of turn these into plays and scripts. And I actually we are talking about doing a kind of radio program of a number of sort of short Oh.
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Speaker 3: Yeah, that would be cool.
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Speaker 2: That would be very very cool if you did actual radio plays. You know, it's kind of funny to know how things have come full circle. We've gone from radio only back in the day to television and then or movies than television, and now we have radio shows that are back to where we started, which are dramatic performances that would be fantastic.
00:11:57
Speaker 1: The book is beautiful, it is It.
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Speaker 2: Is weighty, but it has so much cool stuff. Who did the illustrations on this thing? Because they are stunning.
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Speaker 4: My dear friend John Folly is a realist impressionst artist.
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Speaker 3: This is our third book together, uh, and.
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Speaker 4: We work hand in glove with each image to design it and really make it thematically symbolic and rich. And he can he can trace his master apprentice line all the way back through the Boston school to the Cultivol Arts in Paris to Raphael's workshop in Florence, like all the way back. So he is, he is best in show. He slums with me and it's great. So well, he's amazing.
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Speaker 1: It's a beautiful book. It's a great book.
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Speaker 2: It's one of those books that as you thumb through you are given so many more reasons to remember that you should be proud as you know what to be an American. And uh, doctor Matthew Mehan, thank you for your time today, and thank you for the beautiful book. When you're ready to, you know, start acting stuff out. I think that I would make an amazing blue footed ferret on the radio.
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Speaker 1: So if you need a voice, just let me know.
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Speaker 2: I'd be happy to contribute for this very worthy project.
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Speaker 3: Once a theater kid, always a theater kid, Mandy forever forever.
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Speaker 2: Thanks so much for your time today, doctor min Thank you. Okay, bye bye. Yeah, the book is stunning. It's huge, it's like a doorstop, it's it's really fantastic.