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The Current Transcript for March 20, 2023

Host: Matt Galloway

STORIES FROM THIS EPISODE

Prologue

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GEORGE W BUSH: American and coalition forces are in the early stages of military operations to disarm Iraq, to free its people and to defend the world from grave danger. Coalition forces have begun striking selected targets to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage a war.

MATT GALLOWAY: It was 20 years ago today that an American led invasion of Iraq began, part of then President George W Bush's so-called war on terror. When it was over, hundreds of thousands of civilians had been killed. Thousands of American troops were dead. The dictator Saddam Hussein was removed from power and a country was left in ruins. In 30 minutes, the legacy of war and what the next generation of Iraqis hope for now in their country. Also this morning, the pandemic led to a life rethink for many people. Is this all there is? Is there something else I should be doing with my days? The journalist Peggy Orenstein was among those asking herself the big questions and the answers led her to the barn.

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PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It's kind of like cutting hair but with a toddler who's bigger than you, has hooves and is covered in lanolin, which is a greasy substance. So they're slippery.

MG: In an hour, what sheep shearing taught Peggy Orenstein about creativity and her parents and why knitting is an act of protest. We start, though, in the parched American southwest where the well has just about run dry. Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and this is The Current.

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COLORADO RIVER

Guest: Susan Ormiston

MG: A new report ahead of a United Nations water conference this week paints a bleak picture. The world is quickly running out of water. The report says governments aren't doing enough to address climate change and reduce waste, and that is affecting our water supply. The growing water crisis dramatically impacts parts of Africa, Asia and the Middle East, but it's also being felt in the United States.

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JACE MILLER: So typically, we're harvesting anywhere from seven to nine times per year, and that's due to 340 days of sunshine, superb soil conditions and when things are right with the stars, when we have water.

MG: For generations, Jace Miller's family has farmed in Arizona, but there is a chance that tradition may end with him.

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JACE MILLER: Most people tell me that this is a dying lifestyle and there's no way to make a living. But at the same time, it's what I'm going to do till I die. In life, we all have a hill to die on. Mine is agriculture in Arizona.

MG: Jace gets much of his water from the Colorado River system. It provides a critical drinking and irrigation supply for Arizona and six other states. It's also integral to power generation, thanks to a system of dams. But in recent years, water levels on the river have dropped, causing issues for the people who rely on it. Susan Ormiston is CBC News’s international climate correspondent. She has been travelling along the Colorado River for the past week and she is in Boulder City, Nevada. Susan, good morning.

SUSAN ORMISTON: Good morning, Matt.

MG: How much water is being taken out of the Colorado River compared to what would be going in?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Right. Well, simply the mighty Colorado River, and it's big, is shrinking, but the demand on its precious water isn't. So more water is being pulled out than is being replenished. And Matt, when we talk about water, we are measuring in acre feet. And for the last 20 years, the Colorado River flow has averaged just over 13 million acre feet. But about 15 million acre feet is going out. So that's a deficit of about 2 million acre feet. That's a lot of water. And the southwest is in this grip of a two decade old drought. And it's starting to really show its misery, especially in Lake Mead, which is the US's largest reservoir behind that mighty Hoover Dam. It sunk down near record lows. And that's where we're headed. But we started outside Phoenix, Arizona, Matt, about an hour south in Pinal County, a farming district where new housing developments are creeping up to those farm fences. And that's where we met Jace Miller.

MG: Tell us about him and his farming business. What does that look like?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Well, Jace is a talker. He admits that he's kind of a philosopher farmer. He runs a farm business with his dad, his granddad, his wife, and, you know, with his great granddad not too far in the rear-view mirror. They lease land and they work at mostly forage crops, alfalfa, Bermuda grass, some corn, cotton, a couple of thousand acres. They also work land for other farmers, about 20 people work with them. And Jace is nearly 31. At a time when most young men are moving off the farm, he is steadfastly staying put. But in the southwest where water is gold, he's losing it. And we caught up with him baling alfalfa.

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JACE MILLER: My grandpa says and dad always said, you know, a farmer is an agronomist, a meteorologist, a mechanical technician, an electronics technician.

SUSAN ORMISTON: There are a couple of sources of water around here, groundwater, a bit of rain, and that water from the Colorado River. And Matt, it's pumped through a pretty amazing series of canals called the Central Arizona Project or CAP. 540 kilometres long built just to bring water here to the desert. And you have to have water rights to use it in the past. Jace has gotten his allotment of what they call CAP water. But last year, because of this drought, his water was cut between 40 and 60%. And this year, the river water was cut off entirely.

MG: And so he's doing all of those different things. As he said, he's an agronomist, a meteorologist, a farmer, a business person. How is he adapting to the new reality with the water crunch that he's facing?

SUSAN ORMISTON: It's tough. You know, he drove us out to land the family has had to fallow. That means, you know, nothing grows there this year except weeds. And without enough water, he's had to shrink the fields that they can work. We saw Big Tumbleweeds settling in the empty irrigation ditches. And new desert plants are already popping up, beginning to take over. The dry ground is etched with cracks. It's a pretty stark picture of the new realities for many farmers out here. So he's had to give up working this land in order to have enough water to irrigate other fields because there is groundwater as I said, but it's also restricted. Quite simply, he's got to adapt to a lot less water from that reservoir at Lake Mead behind the Hoover Dam.

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JACE MILLER: Well, there's not enough water behind the dam. And as the law reads, we're the last men on the totem pole here in Arizona. So we took the brunt of the cuts as an industry and as a state. Arizona has received the worst cuts out of the seven or eight states that are in the Colorado River pact.

MG: What is that, the Colorado River pact?

SUSAN ORMISTON: It's complicated, but it's really a pact negotiated to give stakeholders a percentage of water rights. And it's governed by something called the law of the river. Essentially, it divides up the water from the Colorado River between the seven southwest states and later Mexico joined in. But remember that canal system I talked about in Arizona? Well, it was built in 1968 with federal money. And what happened is in exchange, Arizona agreed to take junior water rights, which meant that in times of drought, California would get its share of water before Arizona. And that's what's happening now.

MG: What does he see as the responsibility of his industry, the agricultural industry, in the water shortage that is playing out in the southwest?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Yeah. Well, we're talking about a desert. It is fertile land if there's water. There's lots of sun as you heard. But here's the thing. Agriculture sucks up at least 70% of the water compared to residential use. And at the same time, they've really made their enterprises more water efficient. They've had to. But alfalfa is really thirsty. It's a high water crop. And farmers like Jace feel they get blamed for being too thirsty. His whole pitch is, look, food security is more important than swimming pools, but mostly that everyone should be taking cuts in this climate because this is the future.

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JACE MILLER: You know, everyone says, well, agriculture predominantly uses the most irrigation or water for irrigation. I say, absolutely, but we get a pretty damn important product out of it and that's food and fibre. You know, it kind of brings you back to an adage of my grandfather. You know, you need a farmer or a rancher three times a day. Whether you get up and go to your refrigerator, you stop at a restaurant or you pull into a drive through, you need a farmer and a rancher three times a day. Can you say the same for a doctor, a policeman, a fireman? Not saying that those jobs aren't necessary. They're absolutely necessary to the quality of our life. But agriculture is the basis for modern civilization. It is the foundation. And without food and fibre, none of your other problems really matter.

MG: Agriculture is the basis for modern civilization. This is a hot button issue. Does everybody agree with his take on this?

SUSAN ORMISTON: No. Of course, no. The drought and the vanishing water is really forcing some hard negotiations in every state. Water managers are trying to be collaborative, but Matt, everyone tends to think that their right to the water is more just than the other guys. So it is a very intense time. And we spoke to Kathryn Sorensen, who used to be Phoenix's water manager. Now she works with a think tank on water issues. And she says the crisis is forcing a hard look at who uses what water in a desert.

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KATHRYN SORENSEN: I think we need to take a really hard look at land use patterns. Here in our deserts, it takes a vast amount of water to grow crops. And it takes about six acre feet per acre to grow cotton, for example, or alfalfa, whereas it only takes about one acre foot per acre to grow a subdivision or for urban development. We can't continue to live on the razor's edge where there's a threat of getting to drastically low levels in Lakes Powell and Mead and still maintain the kind of economy and quality of life that we have come to enjoy here.

MG: How much of what we're talking about is being exacerbated because of climate change?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Well, as you might imagine, it depends on whom you ask. I mean, Jace acknowledges that climate is changing. And scientists affirm that the amount of snowpack in the mountains, the runoff and how an arid ground absorbs that runoff is fundamentally changing. That's the climate change part. But what we did hear in Arizona is that climate change is still polarizing. For some, it's political. And some still see this drought as it's a natural and unfortunate cycle. Kathryn Sorensen, well, she's a pragmatist. She doesn't want to politicize this anymore, at risk of alienating some people who need to be part of the solutions.

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KATHRYN SORENSEN: So it's hard to say how much of this is climate change and how much of this might just be a natural unfortunate drought cycle. But I will say fundamentally, it doesn't matter. We have to plan for the worst case scenario. It's great that we've had good snowpack this year. We'll take it. But fundamentally, if we don't solve the problem of an overallocated river system, then it's just a math game and we'll lose.

MG: So we started just outside of Phoenix on the farm. We're kind of heading our way out. I mean, we get to Lake Mead. Lake Mead is a fascinating place in part because of what's happening to Lake Mead and what it doesn't look like anymore. Tell us a bit about what the lake looks like now.

SUSAN ORMISTON: It is spectacularly beautiful. It's a huge reservoir, the largest in the U.S., nestled in these rugged mountain peaks right behind the Hoover Dam. It's a national park. There's marina boat ramps, which incidentally have had to move multiple times in 20 years, about a kilometre and a half down to the shrinking water's edge. It's quite interesting to see this. The water is dotted with Boulder Islands, they call them, and way up the face of those craggy rocks are these bold, whitish lines which show where the water used to be. And they’re way up the rocks. The last time the lake was high, nearly approaching full was in 1999, and it's dropped in 20 years to about a quarter full now. Just as an example, in March 10 years ago, Lake Mead was about 75 feet higher. And we hiked out to a lookout spot with the park’s superintendent, Mike Gautier.

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MIKE GAUTIER: So what we're seeing here today, obviously, is a tiny segment of Lake Mead. But what's most evident in the photo is the bathtub ring, what's called the bathtub ring. You can see where the high watermark was. 1983 was the highest at 1220 feet and down today where the water level is about 1046 feet.

SUSAN ORMISTON: So dropped.

MIKE GAUTIER: Dropped. And that 1220 was a high point. Normally lake’s at 1200 feet. So we're looking at about 150 feet of water elevation loss. And think of it as a cocktail glass, so to speak. You've got canyons and the rivers at the bottom. So as it fills, the glass gets full and you have more water at the top of it, it goes down. It declines a little faster.

MG: I mean, people who have seen the images of it, the bathtub ring is really shocking. What's the worst case scenario here when they're talking about something as important as Lake Mead?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Well, just adding to what Gautier said, one prediction is that Lake Mead could drop another 20 feet by September, Matt. And if it drops a lot further, it risks running into what they call Deadpool, which is an elevation where water can't get over the Hoover Dam in effect putting a big plug in the Colorado River and preventing it from flowing downstream. And that would be disastrous for like 40 million people who depend on this water. And that's at current rates and without any intervention. So you can really see the urgency here.

MG: The thing with the river is that it flows through these different states. There are seven states that rely on the water that is in the Colorado River. What is the role of the federal government in all of this, in making sure that those states have the water that they need and that that water is managed?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Well, you've reported on a few inter-provincial negotiations. You can imagine it's not easy to get seven states to agree on anything. But if they can't work out how they're going to divvy up less water, the U.S. government is going to impose cuts. The states have already blown through several deadlines this year. And the Bureau of Reclamation, which is the federal agency overseeing water in the United States, is preparing a plan for this spring.

MG: In light of, you know, the disaster possibilities that have been articulated and the Deadpool that would lead to the water not being able to get over the Hoover Dam, what else is being looked at here? What are the other solutions that are being proposed to avoid those scenarios?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Well, pretty much everything. I mean, I listen to water managers saying we have to triple down on conserving water at the residential and commercial use. We have to look at land use as you've heard. Who is using what water. There's no denying this region has to change its water culture and, you know, get used to less water, a smaller allotment of the Colorado River. I mean, Las Vegas, it's just 40 minutes away from Lake Mead, and it depends on Lake Mead for 90% of its water. We spoke to Colby Pellegrino. She's a senior water manager for Southern Nevada, and she's really clear eyed about the future.

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COLBY PELLEGRINO: What has to happen is we have to use less water. Climate change, every indication we have is that the future is going to be drier than what we're experiencing today. There's a very good chance that what we're experiencing today, and considering historic drought, could be the historic wet period of the next hundred years, which is quite scary. But that's why we're focusing on conservation locally and encouraging everyone else on the river to do the same right now.

MG: And so for those on the river, obviously, I mean, you don't want to overstate it, but in many ways it's an existential threat to the way that they live. For people who are outside of the Colorado River system, why does what happens in Lake Mead matter?

SUSAN ORMISTON: You know, there's been a high focus on Lake Mead over the last year. I'm sure you've seen some of it because of this low point. It's happened so fast. Even the experts say they didn't expect it to drop this quickly in the last two years. It's so big and it's so low. So people are really looking at that. And also, you know, there's kind of a macabre fascination with Lake Mead because as this waters drop, they found some really interesting and weird things like human remains and, you know, buried boats and various old docks and infrastructure that was covered by water is being revealed. And there's going to be more. So people have been kind of really looking at Lake Mead, but it's also on the map globally. That's what Pellegrino says. And here's why.

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COLBY PELLEGRINO: This is one of the first really large, really economically valuable river systems that is experiencing some real stress related to climate change. So I think not only are the nation's eyes on us, but the world's eyes are on us to say, how are they working through this? What problems are coming up? How are they creating the solutions to those problems? Climate change is going to affect everyone's water resources, but looking at how we work together to solve those problems is something that I think the entire world is interested in.

MG: So Jace Miller is one of those people who is facing that existential threat. Go back to him. Where does all of this leave his efforts to try to keep that family farm alive?

SUSAN ORMISTON: Yeah. He's a new father. He's got an 18 month old son now, Carson. And, you know, he wants him to be the next generation farmer in the Miller family. And in spite of the gloom at the moment, he's not giving up, he says. Yet two miles from his home, he's seeing farmers who are worried about their water sell their land to solar companies. There are big solar panels cropping up in the valley of the sun on former agricultural land. And it's not that he opposes solar, Jace says, but he doesn't want the farms to fail. If nothing, Matt, he's determined and he believes in people's passion to find a way out of this crisis. But out in that fallowed field, he summed it up this way.

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JACE MILLER: We've been fighting for the last 120, 130 years here in the Southwest. There's always going to be a fight over the water. You know, I remember as a kid hearing the old joke that whisky was for drinking and water was for fighting. And now the last few years, it really hits home and it's not quite as funny as it once was.

MG: Susan, thank you very much.

SUSAN ORMISTON: You're welcome.

MG: That's the CBC’s Susan Ormiston in Boulder City, Nevada. You can see more of Susan's reporting on the Colorado River tonight on The National on CBC Television and CBC Gem. Your CBC News is next. And then, it has been 20 years since the start of the Iraq war. What has changed and how is that country working to rebuild, particularly through a young generation that grew up in the wake of that war? We will talk more about that coming up in six minutes. And then in about half an hour, a conversation with the author Peggy Orenstein about her new book Unravelling and how she sees knitting as an act of dissent.

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PEGGY ORENSTEIN: My larger beat as a writer has always been examining the unexamined in everyday life and particularly women's lives. And our work with fibre has always, always been a source of public voice and a way to express dissent or patriotism, depending on the situation. It is really political. What's the first thing Women? American women, United States women did when Trump was elected? And people would say, well, they marched. And I’d say, no, no, they knit and they made those hats. No matter how you feel about those hats, there's a reason why that was the first thing that we did. If you go back to the revolutionary days, women boycotted British cloth and made homespun and did these public spinning bees where they would spin in the town squares. That was one of the big acts that galvanized the American Revolution. Today, public knitters in some ways I think are even more radical because I think when you make something with your own hands, you're almost by definition pushing back against technology and consumer culture. But they have mobilized against nuclear proliferation. They have made temperature scarves that document climate change. They've dumped hand uteri on the steps of the Supreme Court to support abortion rights.

MG: More from Peggy Orenstein coming up later in the program. My name is Matt Galloway. You're listening to The Current on CBC Radio and the CBC Listen app. We're back after the news. Stick around.

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IRAQ 20 YEAR

Guests: Louisa Loveluck, Ghaith Abdul-Ahad, Nadje Al Ali

MG: Good morning. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current.

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MG: Still to come, the author Peggy Orenstein on shearing sheep, making yarn and knitting as a political act. That's in just under 30 minutes. But first, a nation trying to rebuild 20 years after the start of the war in Iraq.

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FIRST MALE SPEAKER: Saddam Hussein and his regime are concealing their efforts to produce more weapons of mass destruction.

SECOND MALE SPEAKER: Please let us be clear that the Iraqi people, whose only true hope lies in the removal of Saddam, they will be left under his rule without any possibility of liberation.

THIRD MALE SPEAKER: On my orders, coalition forces have begun striking selected targets of military importance to undermine Saddam Hussein's ability to wage a war. These are opening stages of what will be a broad and concerted campaign.

[gun shots sounds]

FOURTH MALE SPEAKER: Because of you, the tyrant has fallen and Iraq is free.

[crowd cheering]

FIFTH MALE SPEAKER: Today, I can report that as promised, the rest of our troops in Iraq will come home by the end of the year. America's war in Iraq will be over.

MG: Launched in the name of liberty, 20 years ago today, the U.S. led invasion of Iraq saw hundreds of thousands of Iraqis killed, as well as thousands of U.S. army personnel. And despite promises of freedom two decades ago, the country is now mired in political violence and corruption. Louisa Loveluck is the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief. Louisa, hello.

LOUISA LOVELUCK: Hello.

MG: What goes through your mind as you listen to some of those big moments in the Iraq war?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: You know, I think the further we get from those days, the more shocking and stunning they become. You know, in the early days, we had this talk of weapons of mass destruction. As we all know now, They turned out to be false. There was talk of liberation, of freeing Iraqis, but actually what ultimately happened was people ended up having to spend pretty much a decade indoors hiding from the violence. And then the thing I just think about really is the toll, like you say, this invasion to free Iraqis. It led to, at the very minimum, and here we go, these are the documented deaths at the bare minimum, 210,000 of the 300,000 killed Iraqis were civilians. This meant that two thirds of those who died were not soldiers, were not fighters, were the people who the American led invasion came to save. And ultimately, these are people or at least the families of the people for whom the implications of the invasion reverberate through this day.

MG: How would you describe what Baghdad is like in 2023?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: It's a much changed place since 2003, certainly. I've been reading a lot of the commentary about this 20 year anniversary. And what you hear from a lot of people is that Iraq is recovering, Iraq is a lot better. And it's certainly the case that you don't have much open violence on the streets anymore. There isn't a civil war. There aren’t bombs going off. But that doesn't make life good. That doesn't make life dignified. And in fact, what happened in 2003 was the U.S. led invasion, the U.S. led coalition, it backed a political system which institutionalized the sorts of problems which have led to the majority of Iraqis today being disenfranchised, having a system that is so corrupt they cannot provide clean water. They cannot even provide clean air. And as I say, while there may not be open violence, there really is very little sense of hope for people that things are going to get better.

MG: You have a story in the Post this morning about the children of war, a whole generation that grew up without Saddam Hussein in power and have had to come to terms with the legacy of this war. What did they tell you about what the legacy of that invasion has been on their lives?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: I mean, I think it goes in stages. First of all, the sort of opening chapter of that legacy really is one of loss. It is very hard to find someone in Iraq at this stage who has not lost someone in the war or in the violence that followed. And the thing with these three young people we spoke to, but which you hear from many, many people, is they essentially lived their lives inside. They didn't get a chance to have a proper childhood because there was so much going on out on the streets. One of the boys actually said to us, and he laughs about it now, he went to Syria at one point in the mid 20 tens and he saw a swimming pool for the first time. And he looked at it and he said, wow, this is amazing. It's like a river, but it's better. And as I said, you know, he laughs about this. But what that means is that he did not have a regular childhood. He was cut off from everything. So first of all, you have the loss. But as I say, there is also the political system that evolved from 2003 onwards to essentially make the country the preserve of the elites, these incredibly and increasingly corrupt forces from all different sectarian backgrounds, all different political groupings who basically run the country for their own profit and not for these young people. So they've grown up not really having a say in anything. And now in 2023, they basically have to reckon with the fact that so then, to be Iraqi at this stage is still 20 years on not to have a say in their future in the grandest sense.

MG: Some of those young people were involved in the protests in Iraq in 2019. Hundreds of people were killed. We know that people were disappeared, as they say, as well in those protests. What were they looking for in that moment in terms of trying to seize a brighter future?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: I mean, the phrase was we want a homeland. And what that really meant was they wanted their own country back free of outside intervention. One thing that I found interesting when I moved to Iraq in 2019 is any news article you would read would describe every single individual that you met in terms of their sectarian background. You know, we've come as foreigners to see the sectarian makeup of the country to be very important and to say something about who people are. But actually, this is something that in 2003, again, was kind of imposed from the outside. The political system had to be run on sectarian lines because that meant that the exiles who came back to rule the country could then have a constituency. And in 2019 when these young people came together, one of the big things that a lot of them were saying was, you know, this isn't about Sunni or Shia or Christian or whatever identity is being used to divide us in the past. This is about wanting to say no to corruption, no to external interference. And they really pushed and they really tried to overthrow the system. But of course, when there is that much money at stake, when there's that much power and influence at stake, ultimately the system rallied the violence that you refer to as incredibly shocking and some of the worst street violence that I've seen in 10 years of reporting on this kind of stuff. And ultimately, you know, they crushed them and the system prevailed.

MG: And so where does that leave that next generation now? Just finally, I mean, what do they hope for 20 years after this invasion in terms of a better country, in terms of an actual homeland as you said?

LOUISA LOVELUCK: I mean, I think they hope for a normal life. You know, they hope to have a job. They hope to be able to raise their family without having to worry about tomorrow, without having to worry about whether they could put food on the table. One of the things that one of the young men, Mohammed Halevi, said which I thought was very poignant was that he wrestles all the time with whether or not to stay in Iraq or to try and make another life outside. And he doesn't want to go. He's Iraqi. He doesn't want to live anywhere but his home country. But the reason he does look for the Plan B is because while things look ostensibly fine now, you know, there aren’t clashes on the street, what we've seen time and time again is that things can happen and they can happen very, very quickly. So, you know, people are looking for other options because they don't have hope really that things are going to get better.

MG: Louisa, thank you very much.

LOUISA LOVELUCK: Thank you.

MG: Louisa Loveluck is the Washington Post's Baghdad bureau chief. Ghaith Abdul-Alhad is an Iraqi journalist and correspondent for The Guardian and the author of a new book, “A Stranger in Your Own City”. Ghaith, hello to you.

GHAITH ABDUL-ALHAD: Hello.

MG: What's going through your mind 20 years after the start of this war?

GHAITH ABDUL-ALHAD: Well, I mean, I can't emphasize what Louisa was saying, that the further you are from these events, the more shocking it is. And it is kind of like reliving a sort of a PTSD because of listening to George Bush or Tony Blair. So what the 20 years has been, it's been kind of, you know, one conflict from another. It's basically two civil wars wrapped into each other for two decades.

MG: I mean, you used the phrase PTSD. It must be incredibly difficult to think back about everything that has gone on in the country over the last 20 years and the promises that were made and what the country has ended up being.

GHAITH ABDUL-ALHAD: I mean, the promises were clearly false within probably a month, two months from the invasion. I mean, I remember that feeling and that was the scene in the book. And I go to this one poor neighbourhood in 2003, and this man is describing the neighbourhood as if he sees it in a dream. And he says, you know, the Americans, do you know what America is? They have these huge machines and they will turn everything so beautiful. But then you see the Americans standing there allowing the looting to happen, allowing the infrastructure to be destroyed. And of course, this is a nation that was bombed in 91 by the Americans and then put under severe sanctions for 13 years and then you have this war. So Iraq was really broken the moment the Americans entered. And this is why the regime fell within two or three weeks, because no one wanted to fight for Saddam because they had hopes that something better will happen instead. I mean, and this is a sad thing at the moment. And this is what Louisa also talks about, this moment in Iraqi history, words like parliament and democracy are so soiled by this corruption that when you talk to the young Iraqis, and it's instantly parliament means corruption, means parliamentarian with, you know, convoys of cars, means contract siphoned, public money siphoned, look at the streets, the situation now. And that is the big problem. So one of the casualties of this war has been democracy itself or the concept of democracy.

MG: For you personally, I mean, you were there in that moment that I think so many people remember watching on television when the statue of Saddam Hussein was pulled down with the help of U.S. Marines. And when I talk about promises, that was one of those moments that people thought this shows something, things will be different after that.

GHAITH ABDUL-ALHAD: Well, it was not with the help of U.S. Marines. It was the U.S. Marines who pulled the statue. I remember kind of going down to the street and my neighbour tells me the Americans are here. And I see these American Marines there with big amphibious armoured vehicles and I followed them. And gathered around the statue, a group of Iraqis trying to knock down the statue. They’re just kind of denting the plinth. And then the U.S. Marines kind of just pull into the square, bring down the statue, cover the face with an American flag and that's it. That is the moment when you realize this regime was over and this is a new chapter in Iraqi history. I mean, I think only a fool would have imagined at that time, and probably I was a fool too, that an American occupation would lead to something better. But, you know, it was a Faustian deal because a lot of Iraqis, even Saddam's own generals were ready to get rid of him because he was a mad dictator. He was leading the country from one war to another, but no one was ready to see the American incompetence, I mean, which is an occupation, illegal occupation bound to fail. But the second thing which is the second disaster is the political system helped to be put in place by the Americans, which is a political system based on sectarian ethnic divisions. We call it in Arabic, each sect political party would take a share from the state as if they were spoils, you know. This party takes this ministry, the other party takes that department. And they siphon public money and they use that to build their own patronage network. And that is another disaster which of course, that kind of sectarian system put in place led eventually to the civil war that we saw. And we still live in its shadow in certain parts of the Middle East.

MG: I want to bring another voice into the conversation, but can you very briefly just go back to something that you said before, which was you were talking about, you know, it would be foolish to think that things would change. But you said I was probably a fool too.

GHAITH ABDUL-ALHAD: I mean, yes, because I tell you, it was a Faustian deal. You know, you want to get rid of Saddam. You want to delude yourself that okay, it's fine. Saddam will be toppled. But again, I mean, I want to emphasize, I mean, I saw my first war when I was five. And then the second war when I was 15 and then the sanctions. So I mean, we didn't expect. We didn't want a war. No one wanted an occupation, but we wanted to get rid of Saddam.

MG: Stay with us because I want to bring one other voice into this. Nadje Al-Ali is director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at Brown University, the author of “What Kind of Liberation? Women and the Occupation of Iraq”. Nadje, hello to you.

NADJE AL-ALI: Hello.

MG: What are you thinking when we look back at the last 20 years? Top of mind for you, what do you see as the impact of those two decades?

NADJE AL-ALI: Well, in addition to what Louisa and Gaith were saying in terms of the general loss of lives, loss of an infrastructure, loss of a united Iraq, my particular concern has been the impact of the invasion and occupation on women and gender relations in Iraq. And similar to Gaith’s view, I think that I can’t think of that without also thinking of course about the impact of the Baath regime and sanctions. I think often what gets lost when people think about the invasion and occupation is that Iraq had already been subject to what has probably been the most severest form of sanctions regime 13 years, you know, following the invasion of Kuwait in August of 1990. And that had a devastating impact on not just infrastructure, but particularly on families, on women, on gender norms. There was a shift towards greater social conservatism, and that got much worse following the invasion. So to my mind, amongst the biggest losers, I mean, there are lots of losers, but I would say I would argue that women have been the biggest losers in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation. And that is because despite, you know, the horrible human rights abuses and political repression that people experienced during the regime of Saddam Hussein and the Baath more broadly, you know, women were doing relatively well, particularly in the beginning in the seventies, I mean, during the oil boom and when there was economic growth in Iraq. I mean, Iraqi women were amongst the most educated in the region. I mean, the government encouraged them into the labour force, into the education sector, including higher education. Things changed during the eighties, during the Iran-Iraq war when the country became militarized and women had to become superwomen because Saddam Hussein asked them to have five children to make up for the demographic imbalance between Iraq and Iran. But you would find women in all kinds of positions and the government bureaucracy. And when I visited Iraq in the eighties, I saw women truck drivers and women working at the petrol stations because men were fighting at the front. But then things got really, really bad. Even worse during the nineties, during the sanctions period where in the context of wide scale unemployment and also, you know, lack of state money, women were really pushed back into the homes. And that is the context in which then the invasion generated not only a great, great shift towards conservative gender norms because the militia, the sectarian militia started to control neighbourhoods, but also because of the mushrooming of gender based violence.

MG: What about now? If you take a look at the young generation that we were hearing about earlier, that generation that doesn't perhaps remember life under Saddam Hussein, they may even not have been born at that time, what sort of future do you think they have?

NADJE AL-ALI: Well, you know, I think that if there's any hope for Iraq, it is with the young people who have not experienced the political repression under Saddam Hussein. Yes. I grew up in the aftermath of the invasion and occupation, but the orientation is we don't want any of this. You know, we don't and should not have to choose between the dictatorship as we had in the past and the dictatorship we have with the present and the chaos and lawlessness. And they, you know, want a different Iraq. They also are challenging, you know, strict codes in terms of dress code, in terms of mingling, you know, that has been imposed by the sectarian militia. They're very much disillusioned with the current government due to the very factors that Louisa and Gaith pointed out in terms of corruption and incompetence. And I think they’re also following the protest movements and the fact that many were subjected to arrest and violence. This disillusionment with any kind of traditional political expression, many turn towards culture. I think there’s a very vibrant creativity and cultural scene in the Iraq, especially amongst young people. But there's always been, you know, people trying to turn towards film, towards music, towards poetry and literature. But things are bubbling. I mean, you know, young people are not happy. And, you know, of course, not just young people, also older generations.

MG: Gaith, where do you see that? Where do you see that bubbling? As you've said, I mean, trauma remains in a society not just a decade or two decades after, but that that has a long tail. Where do you see, as Nadje says, the bubbling of the next generation?

GHAITH ABDUL-ALHAD: I mean, the bubbling Nadje and Louisa have both talked about is what you saw in 2019, that kind of major uprising that took place in the streets. That is part of this whole bubbling. And of course, the uprising was not only about kind of throwing stones at the police, but it was also the cultural manifestation of that new generation that comes out into the street and as something which is very important. While the political system in Iraq is still one dominated by sectarian rhetoric, by division, by building these kinds of sectarian ethnic militias, the young generation, the post 2003 generation has come out of this, you know, especially after the defeat of ISIS. And I think that is a very important thing. We can talk about. If you ask me what's positive in Iraq 20 years later, I would tell you this new generation just kind of out of this whole political Islam, out of the shroud of sectarianism, the militias and all these things. But of course, what remains missing is accountability. Accountability to the people who led the war, who executed the war, and the Iraqi military commanders who killed other Iraqis.

MG: And without that accountability, there's still something missing even if there's that sense of hope, to your point.

GHAITH ABDUL-ALHAD: Absolutely. Because there is the trauma that you talked about, you know, the trauma still trapped in the society. And the traumas that never disappear, it always finds a new manifestation. So we saw the trauma of Saddam times emerge in a horrible sectarian torture, violence. We see the trauma that kind of came with ISIS and then how it was re manifested by the security forces that was fighting ISIS. I mean, go to any police station now, any police station and just be arrested for one day and you will see the torture that you would be subjected to even if you had nothing to do, even if you're just a witness. And that's happening because of a trauma of violence, but also because of the corruption. And without accountability, without holding the past 20 years and even before accountable and telling the people this did that, we will never be released of that trauma. Yes, there was a moment when, you know, Saddam's capture and trial could have released us from the trauma of Saddam. But it was such a short trial that up until today, we're still trapped in Saddam's trauma too.

MG: Thank you both for talking to us. This is an important anniversary to mark, but also to both of your points, to think about what happens now with that next generation that has had enough and wants a brighter future. Thank you both for being here.

NADJE AL-ALI: Thank you.

GHAITH ABDUL-ALHAD: Thank you.

MG: Nadje Al-Ali is director of the Centre for Middle East Studies at Brown University. Ghaith Abdul-Alhad is an Iraqi journalist whose new book is “A Stranger in Your Own City”. When you think about hope and about promise, today is actually a day to mark that. For some in Iraq, Iran and many other countries, today marks a time of renewal. It is Nowruz, the Persian New Year. And this is a song about the celebration of the promise that a new year can bring. This is Bahar Bahar or Spring Spring by Hayedeh.

[Song: “Bahar Bahar” by Hayedeh]

MG: The song about the promise of a new year, Bahar Bahar or Spring Spring, marking the start of the Persian New Year, Nowruz. It's also the first day of spring. Coming up after your regional update, the sweater from farm to closet. The author Peggy Orenstein on learning to shear sheep and personal and political implications along the way. That's in 90 seconds. I'm Matt Galloway. This is The Current. Stay with us.

[song fades up and out]

PEGGY ORENSTEIN UNRAVELING

Guest: Peggy Orenstein

MG: Hello again. I'm Matt Galloway and you're listening to The Current. It was just a little over three years ago that I last spoke with the American writer Peggy Orenstein. She came into the CBC studio in New York City to talk about her new book, “Boys, Sex and Masculinity”. And then COVID hit and her book tour was cut short. And so when it came time for those who could to hunker down at home, some people baked bread, some people binge watched TV series. Peggy Orenstein decided to embark on a more ambitious project. It’s right there in the title of her new memoir, “Unravelling: What I Learned About Life while Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater”. Peggy Orenstein, good morning.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Good morning. How are you?

MG: Well, I'm well. This is such an interesting thing because as you say in the book, you could have just stuck with sourdough, but you did not. Why did you decide to do this, this project?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Oh, you know, I'm a longtime knitter. I knit and I kind of talk throughout about what it means to learn things from your mom. I learned from my mom when I was about 12 or 11. And I'm a curious person. And sitting there in lockdown, knitting was the only thing that sort of grounded me and calmed me like a lot of us who were off suddenly doing our handwork, baking bread or, you know, imitating Harry Styles Cardigan or whatever people were doing. And I just started thinking, you know, who thought of yarn? Like how did this happen? How did knitting happen? Because what else do you have to do but think about things like that? And I just had the, you know, kind of curious urge to go all the way back and see and deconstruct it. I mean, that's my job, right? Is that I like to look at how things happen and why and go deep into deconstructing where they came from. So there I was sitting and looking at yarn.

MG: And so we start with sheep shearing?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah.

MG: Well, you could have thought about yarn. You could have followed this through. You didn't need to go into a barn. What was the interest and the appeal of going into the barn?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: You know, I guess I really can't fully explain why I felt the need to do that, but there was also what it brought me that I sort of had this idea. You know, a book is a braid. And I thought, well, I've always wondered kind of where fibre came from. I never had time to try to make something from scratch. Maybe I'll really go deep on this. But then there's all this other stuff like why we don't think about our clothes the way we think about our food or the history, the law, looking at the whole world through fibre and textiles that I didn't know about. So one of the things I didn't know was how hard it is to shear a sheep, Matt. It's incredibly difficult, as it turns out.

MG: As it turns out and as we learned in the book. I want to play something for you. This is from 1964. It's a newsreel. Have a listen.

SOUNDCLIP

[music]

MALE SPEAKER: Jeffrey Bowen has travelled to many countries demonstrating his techniques. In Russia, they honoured him with a hero of Labour award. And now it's the turn of British farmers to want the skill of a man who's been doing this sort of thing since he was 16. It's not exactly high class hairdressing, although some barbers might pick up a few tips on how to tackle those long-haired teenagers.

[music]

MG: The news should sound like that, I would say.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I know. Isn't that great?

MG: It'd be better now if it did that. Who was the Nureyev of sheep shearing?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah. That's Bowen and it's the Bowen method. And he was a guy in New Zealand. And, you know, I think there's also this aspect of this seems so weird, partly because we're such an urban culture now. You know, we don't think about how far back. You know, if I said I was going to grow garden from seed, you wouldn't think that was peculiar. You know, of course, seeds don't kick. And it's really important to know with sheep shearing that it does not harm the sheep. You have to shear sheep or it dies. So it's kind of like, you know, cutting hair, but with a toddler who's bigger than you, has hooves and is covered in lanolin, which is a greasy substance that they exude in order to stay water resistant. So they're slippery. And you've got a hot wearing blade. And so doing it correctly is really important. What he did was very much like a ballet. There's a number of steps and positions and you move yourself in the shape that's ergonomic, that's safe for the shearer, for the sheep. And you know when you have that dream that you're suddenly on stage on Broadway and suddenly you don't know the lines.

MG: Indeed, yes.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It was like that. Like imagine you were in a ballet with Nureyev and nobody told you the steps. That was what it felt like to reach shearing sheep, you know, for the first time.

MG: As you mention, I mean, the sheep need to be sheared. Animal rights activists have said in the past that this hurts the sheep in some ways.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: That's so wrong. It's really important to dispel that myth because part of that then leads to the comfort with, you know, our use of synthetic fibres in our clothing, 70% is made from synthetic. And that's plastic. It’s petroleum derived plastic that does not biodegrade, that just sits in landfills usually in the world’s south where it's called dead white men's clothes. So I went to the ranch where I was shearing, and it was a ranch where they did regenerative farming. And I was wearing my fleece that was made of recycled water bottles and feeling very good about that. And I didn't realize that was kind of the equivalent of waving a ham and cheese sandwich on a white bread at a bar mitzvah. You know, it was not great. And plus it sheds all these things called microfibers that are these invisible bodies that again, if I can use a Jewish metaphor, when I was growing up in Minneapolis, we throw our sins into the lake of the New Year on Rosh Hashanah to start over. And I used to imagine that all these sins of 100 years of my congregation were in this one lake, like what the bottom of that lake looked like, this kind of tarry mass. Microfibers are like that, but they're real and they're the biggest threat to the ocean and they're coming off of our plastic clothing.

MG: So okay, let's get to the shearing.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It's more fun.

MG: Well, but it's connected to this. And we'll get back to the larger story in a moment.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It's so hard to hear about that, though, because I mean, it’s like I'm already recycling, I'm composting, I drive my Prius. You know, it makes you want to just take to your eco certified bed. I just wanted to buy a pair of pants. But you have to know these things so that we can push back against them and make this world a better place.

MG: Absolutely. So you need special shoes to shear sheep?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes. You do because of the lanolin. And lanolin may sound familiar because it's in a lot of your like cosmetics or lotions or various other things. And even if you wore hiking boots or something with a really good tread, the lanolin on the floor is slippery and it would just make your feet shoot up from under you and down you'd go on your butt. So you have to wear these sort of suede slippers that build up a pattern of lanolin and stick. And, you know, my daughter, I was prancing around the house before I went to the ranch because afterwards, no, and my daughter who was in high school was sort of looking and going, so, you know, what are those? And I said, yeah, I'm going to wear them all the time. And she was like, you're not, mom. No, you're not.

MG: One does not just willy nilly shear the sheep. I mean, it's our man Nureyev of the sheep shearing who came up with the technique.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Right.

MG: There is a mantra that you repeat to yourself. Belli, crutch, undermine, topknot, neck, cheek, first shoulder, short blows, long blows, last side. What is that?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Love those long blows. A blow is basically just, you know, it's the different parts of the sheep and you're turning the sheep and you're turning your body. And, you know, for me, you have to be very careful. I purposely chose a woman to teach me because I thought, you know, upper body strength, I don't have it. There are not a lot of women sheep shearers. It's a pretty rare thing. And I also didn't pay attention to things like, oh, I don't know, she was half my age or that people say that minute for minute, it burns twice as many calories as marathon running or that, you know, the sheep has herbs and kicks and it doesn’t hurt it, but it doesn't want to be there any more than your toddler wants to be there when you’re giving it a haircut, you know. So the whole place, I have to say, it looked like a crime scene not because I was hurting the sheep, but because I was snipping the ends of my fingers a lot. And the thing that you don't want to do is throw the blade because the natural instinct of the sheep is wriggling because it's hot, it’s waring, it’s sharp to throw it and or drop it. And my teacher said if you do that, it's 20 bucks every time you do it because it breaks the blade. Instead, drop the sheep. And I worked so hard to focus on that and not drop that blade. And I didn't. I didn't drop the blade once, but I did slice up my fingers. And I was very stoic because I didn't want anybody to think I was a big baby about it.

MG: The sheep that you were shearing is named Martha?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: One of them, the final sheep. Yeah. My ultimate sheep was Martha.

MG: And so how did it go?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Martha was very patient. She looked like a patchy, you know, a patchy toddler afterwards. She was the third sheep I sheared. And the first one took an hour and a half. By the time I got to Martha, I think I sheared her in 30 or 45 minutes. But man, it's exhausting. It is the single hardest thing I have ever done physically. It was really, really hard.

MG: I mean, because in part, you talk about in the book that you're drawn to almost extinct professions. I don't know how many sheep shearers there are, but do you have a new respect for that profession as somebody, as you said, who doesn't have a lot of connection with that world at all?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I don't think I ever thought about it. I would have thought frankly that it was automated. Well, you know, I would have thought that they just put them in some kind of machine. And it's interesting that is one of the things that so far has not been able to be successfully automated. It has to be done by hand. And I think that the respect that, you know, of course there's abuses. Of course there's abuses just like there's abuses of, you know, our pets. But when sheep shearing is done ethically and properly, it's beautiful. It doesn't hurt the sheep. It makes these gorgeous fleece. And I think that what I really learned was a respect for the natural fibre of wool and for sheep and what they can do for fire suppression, for the environment, for the world that we live in that I hadn't just hadn’t thought about the collapse of the wool industry in North America. There used to be in the 1950s, I found out, a Miss Wool of America pageant that was hosted by, If you are Old enough to Remember Art Linkletter.

MG: Oh, yeah.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah. And, you know, Frankie Avalon would perform. And like Avalon was the Justin Bieber of his day, I guess. You know, all the big stars wanted to be on Miss Wool of America. And it went on for like 12 years. And then, you know, people didn't wear wool anymore and it went away.

MG: So you shear the sheep, you have the wool, and then you have to card the wool.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes.

MG: And this is really interesting because you write about this in terms of the process of that giving you an opportunity to connect with your father. Tell me about that.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah. Yeah. So you clean up the wool, which I mean, it's full of what they call vegetable matter, but you and I call it poop. You have to wash that all out. And then you've got this fluff. And the way that it connected me with my dad was really special. So this was lockdown, right? We didn't know how long this was going to last. My dad was back in Minneapolis. He's since died, but he had dementia, hearing impairment, various other things in a facility. Nobody can go in or out. My brothers can't see him. I certainly can't fly out there. And as he's declining, you know, it's hard if you've had a parent who's declined cognitively. It's really hard. And if you're too far away, you can't really talk to him on the phone easily. I would try to call him every day, but I would find reasons honestly not to. You know, I was busy, it was two hours later there, whatever it was. And the carding is so boring. And what you're doing is you're taking these two basically dog brushes and carting the small amount of fleece, you know, boom, boom, boom, boom, back and forth, back and forth till it’s nice and fluffy. Then you roll it into a puff and you put it aside to spin. And it would take me 10 minutes to make one of those puffs. And I read that it takes 579 puffs to make a sweater. So that's forever. And while I was doing that, I might have my dad's aide put him on face time and I would just sit and be with him. And he was watching Twins reruns. You know, the Twins always won because there was no baseball. And he thought it was something that he was doing with his walker, which he wouldn't tell me. He said it was a trade secret that was making them win every time. He didn't know it was reruns and he thought I was there too. He would say, Peggy, can you hand me that glass of water? And I'd say, you know, no, dad, I can't reach it. But, you know, I could just slow down. These ancient arts are slow. They're very slow and sit with him and just be next to him and have that time together and sing. We sang a lot because the part of the brain that is affected by dementia is different than the part that stores song lyrics, and that's one of the last to go. So we would sing You Are My Sunshine, We would sing Give My Regards to Broadway, we'd sing all these old songs. And now that he's gone, he died in August. He was 96. That time, in our whole life together, in my whole life, it's among my most precious, precious memories. And having that opportunity that I never would have otherwise had to just slow down and be in his space in that very present way, it was just a real gift of during the process that led to this book.

MG: That’s really beautiful. And I mean, a lot of this book is like a conversation in some ways with your parents.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It is. You know, I say in the beginning that when I'm knitting during lockdown, I'm having an ongoing conversation with my mom all the time, which is a little weird because she was, you know, dead at that point for four years and I was still talking to her. But I realized what I had wanted in that conversation was something that was kind of in defiance of physical nature, which was that I wanted to have a conversation with her when she was my age. And I wanted to be this age too. And so I think a lot of that conversation and a lot of the conversation in the book about mothers is, I have an acronym, SLHFM, she learned from her mom because so many people, women that I met learned knitting or whatever they learned, not shearing, but usually some aspect of craft from their moms. And it got me thinking about not only what I learned from my mom because knitting was a real source of connection for us, but what I learned from her that I loved, what I learned from her that I maybe wish I hadn't, what I wish I learned from her that I didn't, and now that I have a daughter, how all those things go forward, the things I want her to learn from me, the things I don't want her to learn from me. I never taught my daughter Daisy to knit because I knit in a weird way and it's inefficient and I don't want her to learn that way. And I thought, well, that's one. There are things that we don't want our daughters to learn from us too, that we don't want to pass along, that we want to stop with us.

MG: Knitting means a lot of things to a lot of different people. It's not just a way to make clothes. Listen to this. This is a recording of women who got together to knit hats in protest of the presidency of Donald Trump.

SOUNDCLIP

FIRST FEMALE SPEAKER: I decided yesterday that I wanted to have a pink hat because I'm going to march in Washington. And I came here and the place is filled with women. Everybody is knitting a pink hat. You can hardly get pink yarn in New York City right now.

SECOND FEMALE SPEAKER: Knitting definitely reduces tension. And so when there are people who are leading our country that I think really are incompetent, knitting helps me cope.

MG: Knitting is kind of a protest act. What do you make of that?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It has a really venerable tradition actually. I mean, when I said that I was first doing this project, people would, you know, be a little surprised that I had gone from teen sex to knitting.

MG: Yes.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: First of all, I think that for me, my larger beat as a writer has always been examining the unexamined in everyday life and particularly women's lives. And our work with fibre has always, always been a source of public voice and a way to express dissent or patriotism, depending on the situation. It is really political. What's the first thing Women? American women, United States women did when Trump was elected? And people would say, well, they marched. And I say, no, no, they knit and they made those hats. No matter how you feel about those hats, there's a reason why that was the first thing that we did. If you go back to the revolutionary days, women boycotted British cloth and made home-spun and did these public spinning bees where they would spin in these town squares. That was one of the big acts that galvanized the American Revolution. Today, public knitters in some ways I think are even more radical because I think when you make something with your own hands, you're almost by definition pushing back against technology and consumer culture. But they have mobilized against nuclear proliferation. They have made temperature scarves that document climate change. They've dumped hand-made uteri on the steps of the Supreme Court to support abortion rights. And I think it's that tension between something that is sort of ultrafeminine and seen almost as passive in some ways, although it's not, and something that is sharply political that makes women's handwork, whether it's knitting or crochet, but women's work with fibre something that becomes an act of dissent. craftivism.

MG: Craftivism. Yeah. I was going to say there's a word that's applied to it, right?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah.

MG: In the process of researching and writing about this and documenting that history of craftivism, you're also in the journey to make a sweater.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: As it happens.

MG: As it happens.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Which I’d have pulled up if you were not an audio medium. Yeah.

MG: Well, there's a woman who you consult about the design of the sweater and she says, what do you want people to feel when they see your sweater? What did you want people to feel?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Well, I joke that it's the ugly sweater. It's not that ugly, but it weighs three pounds. It had that whole quarantine year knit into it and that was a heavy as led year. So that was there too. But it got me thinking about how much when we make something with our hands, especially fibre, the memories, the life, whatever is going on gets knit into those stitches and then it can transform. During the lockdown, I was also making a blanket. And when I finished that blanket, I just couldn't look at it. It just reminded me of that time. So I gave it to one of my friends. And that transformed it from this thing that kind of was heavy on me to this thing that was light and comforting and an act of love for her. And she calls it Blanket. And she'll call me up and say, I'm wrapped in Blanket because I've had a hard day and Blanket always reminds me of how much I loved. And, you know, that makes us both feel good. And I think you can transform stitches and memory that way too into something, you know, beautiful and loving.

MG: What does the title of the book Unravelling, what does that word mean to you now? Because I think a lot of us felt like we were unravelling in that moment, right?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yes. And I've since realized, by the way, that I could have called it Ravelling because ravelling means both. Ravelling means unravelling and ravelling.

MG: I have learned something new.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Yeah.

MG: But I think a lot of us felt like that. And then we look back on it now, three years plus after and we wonder. It's hard to remember that in some ways.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: I know. Not just because of lockdown and what was going on with the pandemic, but that was sure. But also for me, that forced me to confront, and I think for a lot of us probably, a lot that was going on in my life. I was hitting later middle age, you know, my parents were declining and dying, my daughter was applying to college. So I was facing the emptiness. You know, I had felt like it's just the nature of life. And you think that you've got it all together, You've got this part figured out. You've hit the sort of place where you feel like, okay, and then it all falls apart and you do it again. And that was exacerbated by lockdown with the pandemic. And it was interesting with the book that actually my editors discouraged me. I had something about the pandemic in the title or in the subtitle initially, and they said, you know, people are going to be so over that, right? That’s going to be so far gone and nobody is going to care about that anymore. But I think we are really still and really need to, you know, process means a lot of things in that book, in Unravelling. I’m processing the fleece, I'm processing my life and processing what's going on with the pandemic. And even like the other day, I heard the words Tiger King and I thought, whoa! It was like it brought it all back, right? You know, who wants to remember Tiger King? How embarrassing. But it's a touchstone, you know, of a certain time in our collective life. So we were all unravelling and trying our best.

MG: And how do you look back at that now?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Well, in some ways I think it's a blur, but I also look back, you know, because for those of us who didn't, I mean, my dad did get COVID and we did eventually. But for those of us who did not get sick in those early days, for those of us who were lucky and who were solvent, it also allowed for a time where you had to stop and think a little bit about who you were and what you wanted and what was important. And I think for me, as somebody who was so perpetually in motion before the pandemic, it made me look around and think a lot harder about the value of family and community connection. And one of the joys of releasing Unravelling has been that I hear from people who read the book and for whom it sparks memories. It’s all about joy and love and connection.

MG: What do you want to learn next?

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: You know, if I could, I would go out and learn all those ancient skills. But for me, you know, aside from being with my dad and having that time, the other big gift of this book was rethinking what creativity meant to me. Through much of the book, I'm pushing back against it. I keep saying I'm so terrible at this. I'm very impatient. I am always castigating myself for getting it wrong. And then there's a point where I suddenly realize that that's the point.

MG: Yeah.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: You know, for those of us who do something somewhat creative for a living, the thing is that, I mean, it's a dream to be able to do that. But also commerce is part of it and you have to start thinking about, you know, what's going to sell and what you can do that's going to make sure that you can keep working and make a living and pay your rent and all this sort of thing. And that erodes some of that joy and some of that creativity and some of the purity of it. So the opportunity to be a beginner, to embrace that beginner's mind and be an amateur and to think about process rather than product. And I talk about having a cartoon up in my office by Lynda Barry talks about how when she was young, when she was little, she could just like, you know, draw, just drew. And then at some point the two questions come up which are is this good or does this suck? And those are kind of the death to creativity. And I talk about this term called creative mortification that I just love, which is that, you know, when you're usually a child and you're involved in something you love, whether it's art or music or baseball or, you know, your science project, whatever it is you're doing, that creative thing and somebody gives you a too harsh critique and you put down that test tube or that violin or that paintbrush or that baseball and you never pick it up again. That's, you know, mortification means death. And so the way to combat those psychologically lethal blows is to focus on the experience over the result and to be asking questions like what worked? What do I want to do differently next time, and have that experience of process rather than product. And I think that's sometimes what you lose when you do something professionally and to regain that by doing anything in your life. And for me, it was learning how to shear sheep and spin and dye and, you know, design a sweater. That was just a tremendous gift and a recalibration of what it means to live a creative life. And anybody can do that.

MG: It's really great to have the chance to talk to you again.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: It's wonderful talking to you, Matt.

MG: Peggy, thank you very much.

PEGGY ORENSTEIN: Thank you.

MG: Peggy Orenstein’s new book is called Unravelling: What I Learned About Life While Shearing Sheep, Dyeing Wool and Making the World's Ugliest Sweater”. That is The Current for this Monday. It's the first day of spring. Happy Spring. Q is up next on CBC Radio One. We're going to leave you with a throwback to the glory days of wool. How often do you get to say that on the radio? Peggy was talking about Frankie Avalon performing at the Miss Wool of America pageant in the 1950s. Here is Frankie Avalon and Venus. I'm Matt Galloway. Thanks for listening to The Current. We’ll see you tomorrow.

[Song: “Venus” by Frankie Avalon]

Monday March 20, 2023 Episode Transcript