Transcripts For BLOOMBERG Charlie Rose 20151224

Grappling with these questions. Who am i . What is a life full of meaning and purpose . This arose at a time when is very successful, married to a woman with great kids. My wife is a christian a protestant, i am jewish. She was challenging me to lead our family and faith. Silliness on a spiritual path. I discovered a lot about myself. The search for goodness. Charlie rose this is religious readings by the allergens theologians . David gregory spiritual texts, in judaism as in other faiths a lot of medieval scholars and phosphors were selfhelp gurus. They help you deal with anger and pride and humility. I think i discovered a path that was a loving path, on the path. One that for me at least was about something we dont talk about a lot in media circles. Cultivating a relationship with god. George bush and i have a number of conversations. He had heard that i was studying with a scholar in an attempt to deepen my faith. I walked into the oval office and said, stand up straight girls there is meet the press. He asked me about my faith. I said was strong and getting stronger. The question struck me in a way that intimidated me. I grew up with a cultural and ethnic identity, but not a real spiritual belief. How is my faith . How could it be better . How can i be better . By seeking answers and grappling with questions about living with meaning and purpose and trying to quiet myself. Become a little more humble. I am doing all this in these years as i am on the ascent in network news. That is not a place where the spiritual journey flourishes. Humility, think about others. The whole thing is structured around south. I failed then i continue to fail now. Charlie rose how has it changed your life . Both in terms of religion and practice of your daily life. Secondly, would have made a difference if you discovered this 10 years before. David gregory i think i mightve been a little bit different. I could have been different if i had been more committed to a path of deepening my faith, seeking humility, seeking goodness. I couldve dealt with some of the things that did hurt me. I succeeded young in this business. When things didnt go well for me at nbc and ultimately losing my job and meet the press part of that. I couldve done better at making people understand that my success was their success as well, that we were all in this together. I was a little bit more aloof and insular. Being on a path of faith and humility couldnt help anymore. I feel like faith has taught me things about understanding that my life is pretty small in relation to god and relation to the rest of the world. If i am just for myself, then who am i . Understanding that we are all in this together. There is such an important virtue and being committed to each other. Seeking to be better as individuals and to make the world better place. This outer directed thinking is a way that i think has helped me. At no point to i feel like thanks i have figured this out. Whatever weaknesses and flaws that i have are magnified through a search for greater spiritual awareness and maturity. But there is also the comfort that i am not alone. God is present. Goodness is still a goal. Charlie rose it was Timothy Dolan i think who said dont make this a project. Religion is not a project. David gregory for me, the search for god, the search for goodness, the search for the spiritual touch has become less about the head and more about the heart. It is as Cardinal Dolan says i dare, an act of love. Faith is ultimately about love. This is about having an openness to receive. An openness to each other humanity. To seek the presence of, whether it is perspective or appreciation. The presence of the divine. In a way that elevates me, comforts me, inspires me. And forces me in my life to try to do better. Charlie rose anger had always been my adversary, you say. David gregory my father who just died about a month ago really scared me as a kid. He was tall and intimidating. I really resent to that. I resented it as i got older. That he made me feel that way. As a parent i said i would never do that to my children. And so i did. I was very much like my father. When i had episodes where i would frighten my children. I realize that this is a problem. This is something that i have to control. Charlie rose as you talk to other people was there a common denominator in their messages to you . David gregory at a time when religions can so often divide, the message i got from evangelical preachers, joel osteen, Cardinal Dolan, and others. [laughter] David Gregory come on this is got to happen now. I am knocking at the door. There was an acceptance, a universal message of just having an openness. To try to do a little bit more. That was really a wonderful message of acceptance that i think we do well in organized religion to transmit a little bit more. To figure out what unites us. Common points of connection. Charlie rose let me talk at your professional life. What you doing . David gregory there is no time like now. It was tough. To go through. I succeeded for a long time very young. I had never known any setbacks. It was hard and it was embarrassing. I think it was unnecessary. It is about your identity as well as your job. It is the sense that people are looking at me and saying, what happened to him . He failed. Something ugly happened to him. I felt that. I felt in the community, in our journalistic community. I was also stung by the fact that there was a fair amount of indifference to what happened to me. I try to take some responsibility for that. People didnt really seem to care that much. They didnt really reach out. When i have more friends . Why dont i have more friends . For me, washington is a tough town, its a tough business, we get all that. If i did some of you put myself out more for other people, maybe i wouldve gotten more back. I colleague at nbc wrote that everybody always thought you were unstoppable. Thats not really the way that i wanted to have been known. I did see myself as unstoppable but i didnt have the same selfawareness. It hurt, but it led me to my faith, it didnt always hold me. I didnt have it handled. It was a big blow to my identity and what i cared about. Television magnifies us in the culture in a way where the level of recognition. To lose that identity i thought that maybe no one will care about me. If im not that guy on tv. Working through that and realizing that setbacks happen. Charlie rose you want to get back in there . You are much more connected to you really are. Perhaps this is about, as was churchills wife said, its a blessing in disguise. And he said its a hell of a disguise. David gregory i wouldnt mind a little less disguise. [laughter] can i just speak about another kind of gift. My father was not a person of faith. Culturally and ethnically jewish. As he approached the, he became more vulnerable. He became enthralled by the search. He didnt know where it came from. He was uncomfortable with some of the things i write about my childhood and about him. My mothers alcoholism. He all of a sudden as he gets closer to death is enthralled in the search. As he felt more vulnerable i would read to him from psalms. Unusual vocabulary for both of us. On the wednesday before he died i was with him. I said dad im going to go now. I hope to see you again but if you die before i return i want you to know that my heart is full. We had been estranged at various times. At different points. I am just so happy that you are my father. I took his hand and i prayed with them him into your hand i sold my my soul i place. He said thats beautiful. I said i will see you soon or i will see you in the world to come. He died the next day. That moment accomplish something that mere words cannot accomplish. My beauty of my father, the beauty of my parting with my father reaffirms the importance of the search. Charlie rose i urge everybody now because of cameras to go and record conversations with your parents to let them know that their life lives through you. That you have it to show the descendents yet to be born. Your story is embedded in them. Not only in the dna but in the sense of who i am. David gregory our parents are the authors of our story. Even the tough parts. Charlie rose the search for who i am and how i relate to something larger than i am is a journey that has to be beneficial to you. You will find some connection to that there is a lot more out there than just you. You have context, peoples and places. David gregory you also have something larger to aspire to. I havent figured everything out. There is something aspirational that keeps me reaching higher to be better. That part of my life, that seeking was not a part of my life until about 10 years ago. I feel that i am better for it. Charlie rose the book is called hows your faith . Charlie rose marlon james is here. He is the author of the book that was awarded the booker prize for fiction. The story revolves around the attempted assassination of bob marley in 1976. Michiko cap economy called the dizzyingly complex. It is or even optioned by hbo for a Television Series adaptation. Marlon james thank you for having me. Charlie rose you came here looking for a teaching job . Marlon james when i moved to minneapolis i just finished my second novel and that is said in the 18th century. I was haunted by that story from way back in 1991 when i was still in college. Timothy white wrote the definitive biography of bob marley. He wrote a really curious postscript when he went back to the assassination attempt. That was the first time i read anybody talk about these men and what had happened to them. As a novelist i am attracted by mysteries. I am never going to solve them but i like playing around with them. It took me over 20 years to get back to it. The spark was from then. I wrote two novels. One was in the 1950s in jamaica. It was about to preachers fighting for this village. One was an alcoholic that is possibly demon possessed. The second novel was kind of a slave narratives about six women who plan a slave rebellion in secret, an allfemale rebellion. Charlie rose you said you thought about killing yourself when you were only 16 . Marlon james. jamaica has a very acute homophobia. Nothing had to happen to you for you still to have this feeling of. Charlie rose you have gay characters here. You didnt come out until you were 44. You knew he were 16. Marlon james i knew before i was 16. I think a large part of it was finding avenues to disappear in. For a long time that was the church. That was a great place to disappear in if you dont want to be yourself. That knocked off 10 years. Before i knew it i blinked and i was 40. There was always some way to kind of escape it. Charlie rose you are influenced by dickens. Who else . Marlon james Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie. Rushdie because, the story is set in church. One of his novels was shame. I would have these really big bibles and i would slip his book inside the bible. I am laughing because i am reading the Salman Rushdie novel. When i first read that book i was so appalled by it. I was a dickens guide, a victorian. The idea of messing with narrative like that never occurred to me. In reading like that, it gave me permission to write in a certain way. The same thing with Toni Morrison and song of solomon. I grew up in a very british, colonial education. Disillusionment, change of the geography. I was looking for bigger answers than the church could give. The church can be very, a lot of praise and worship not a lot of intellectual stimulation. It is hard to begin jamaica be gay in jamaica. I was a celibate christian. Thinking that i was sustaining myself that way. Not anything that ever confronted in jamaica. My standards for moving when i left was that i just wanted to be somewhere else. Not necessarily a lot a knock on jamaica. I adore my country. It took years of coming into myself and wanting more out of life. What do i want, who am i . I am in all of i am in awe of coates. His article ons reparations was the best thing that has been said about it. People dont realize the acute nature of race in jamaica. Our racial mess is a whole different kind of mess. We are far more subtle with ours is more endemic. We have a very british racism. We might not have had to desegregate our schools and at the same time we didnt have to if everybodys trying to bleach their skins and get their families lighter and lighter. Charlie rose do you get up and write at a certain time of day . Marlon james it is been different for each book. For one book i got up at 5 00 in the morning and were up till 9 00. I would stop to regardless of where i was. I try to write a character a day. That is white ended up being the kind of book that is. It is the first novel i wrote what i had to let go of my idea of what a novel should be. My last novel despite being written in the slave language still adheres to the classic idea of a novel. Multiple characters. Stories that sometimes just peter out. The novel doesnt and it just stops. Which is weird for a 700 page novel. I had to let go of all that. I will leave in in into my editor takes it out. Thats how i got there. I ended up taking up more than he did. Even after he approved it, i took 10,000 words out. I dont did i tried to distinguish between memory and history. Historical fiction, as a writer i reserve the right for invention. Fantasies and making things up. This was in many ways responding to gaps in history. There are things of that this novel talks about that we are never going to know. Such as the names of the men who tried to kill bob marley. I didnt even start to write a novel. I started to write a novella. I was reading jim thompson and ross mcdonalds, really classic short crime novels. I wanted to write a cool crime novel. It changed when i kept running into dead ends with these characters. The first character that i wrote in this novel is on page 458. I was still writing it in the way that i wrote my previous novel and i kept running into dead ends. A friend of mine said to me what you think it is just one persons story . That was the turning point. Charlie rose have you read as i lay dying . . Marlon james i read Frank Sinatra has a cold, this stunning essay by gay talese. I didnt even need marleys name for the book. I just said the singer. It turns into this bob marley has a cold kind of novel. There were lots of reasons why they wanted to kill him. He was becoming too influential in jamaica. In my grandmothers house, their pictures on the wall. The head of the political party, no pictures of the family. That is how much the calls of personality became ingrained. The idea that people in the ghettos in the slums of jamaica could think for themselves even to the point may be forming their own government was just unthinkable. The rightwing and the left wing both hated that. He was becoming too much of the unifier. There is a character in the book who says bad times are good times for somebody. He was disrupting that way too much. The idea that one side may have wanted to become a martyr. Marley, the only other person on that level. I cannot think of another artist who has summary forces working against him. Every day is a negotiation between some of the most dangerous man in the country and him. Probably days before he was smoking weed with. The attack on the house is as outrageous and attack as the attack on him. These killers violated that. Charlie rose you show violence and sex in a rather graphic and detailed way. Marlon james violence should be violent. There is a was a danger of sliding into a pornography of violence. Just like with sex. I tell my students to risk pornography. Get close to it. There is a is not just a matter of being visceral. Explicit violence or real violence may shock the reader but ultimately it doesnt turn him off from that narrative. If the response was, this is so bad that i stopped reading the book, that is different from i was shocked but i finished the book. It is a very very fine line but you always have to walk it. Charlie rose writing female characters. Marlon james i struggled with them early on. It was another writer, she read my my first novel and she said you have a clue about women. I said i am in civil jamaican man raised by woman. She said who do you read . Like a lot of male writers, i havent read any women. She was the one who made me read Toni Morrison. That changed my life. There is a scene in sula where she is on her deathbed and now finally confronts her. I have done this, i have seen this. I have all this great things that i have done. She says what you have to show for it . Then sula says showalter who. Show to who. That was the validating moment. Ill have to prove anything to anybody. Charlie rose you called winning the booker prize affirming. Marlon james it is the riskiest and loosest novel i have ever written. I still consider myself a victorian novelist. I still believe in the nuts and bolts to the point of annoying my students. Playing with narrative. Writing a chapter in blank verse. Writing a nine page sentence. This is the first time the novelist in my head came down to the page intact. To be awarded to that is a hell of a thing. It means that i can be myself as a novelist. Charlie rose will this affect caribbean literature . Marlon james there so many exciting voices. We dont just mean anglo. Cuban literature has been revolutionized. Literature coming out of puerto rico. Works from haiti. A novel from the virgin islands. Jamaica has a whole bunch of new writers coming up. I am leaving the 20th century behind for a little bit. I am going to africa in the 11th century. I was having this argument about a black hobbit. Were having a discussion we always have about diversity. If the shire was multiracial, nobody wouldve cared. The lord of the rings is european. I said you can do whatever you want with it. It maybe think about the rich mythical and historical tradition of africa and the great african empires. The huge folklore that is there. Monsters and witches. They even have their own vikings. It had nothing to do with scandinavia. I am not trying to write a historical novel. Im trying to do and invented worlds. To draw on that huge resource. And to be a total geek with it. I am influenced by film, almost more so than books. There are things that, the opening scene of touch of evil can do so much for a novel. Im influenced by the crime writers. Orson welles, alfred hitchcock, the visual language. Film has to get its residents from the actuality of the scene. I dont get to tell you a metaphor so you can appreciate it. Charlie rose thank you. It was a pleasure to have you here. Back in a moment. Albert hunt her 5000 word peas in National Geographic calls mary the most powerful woman in the world. We are so pleased to welcome her. Maureen orth Merry Christmas to you. Albert hunt tell us about these apparitions. Maureen orth there have been 2500 reported apparitions and sightings and appearances of mary. Only 16 of those have ever gotten vatican approval to be considered to meet the standards that they consider them to be real. It doesnt mean the others werent. Al hunt is always the poor and the crisis ridden. Maureen orth she speaks in their native languages. In rwanda she spoke in the language there. Sometimes it is reported that she appears so frequently over such a long. Of time that the three young women to whom she appeared in rwanda in 1982 to study calling her mama just started calling her mama. Al hunt what do Scientists Say about this . Do they say it is hocuspocus . Maureen orth some people think it is hocuspocus. Millions around the world believe in this. The Catholic Church itself, which isnt the only religion that believes in miracles, says that you are free to believe it or not. Al hunt you wouldnt instinctively associate rwanda with mary. That there who said they spent time with mary. And that she also foresaw the terrible genocide of the 1990s. Maureen orth mary was a kind of a brown color. She is breathtakingly beautiful, she is always young and has this beautiful voice. She emanates such radiance of light and love that people are awestruck. She first appeared in this Girls Boarding School in 1982. There were many other people but also reported apparitions the church decided that this is were the ones that they would officially recognize. Too many witnesses, some of whom i also interviewed. The girls really started crying and they would have these public apparitions and thousands of people, and gather and it was like a oneway telephone conversation. They could hear with the girls were saying but not was coming back. The girls started crying and said dont show me. She was predicting the rivers of blood that happened 12 years later. Al hunt you went to lourdes. There are millions who go there. You went with some moroccan afghan wounded war veterans. Maureen orth it was incredible experience for may. Me. The military gathers there, so that the french and germans could get together after world war ii and focus on peace and focus on justice and human rights rather than war. Mary would be the unifying figure. I was there with a group of Wounded Warriors that went through the archdiocese of the military. 40 of them were noncatholic. They had a lot of traumatic brain injuries. It was this sense of peace that they got from being in that place. It was a very humbling experience. Al hunt were you bathed in the spring waters there . Maureen orth there are volunteers there who help you out of your clothes. There is a picture of the virgin mary. You walk down the steps and you get into the water. I have always tried to be the very objective reporter. After i was walking out of the water, i got this very calm sense of peace and tranquility. Al hunt there was nothing that surprised me more in this terrific article then that she is celebrated by muslims and their more mary citations in the koran that there on the bible. Maureen orth she is known as the holiest woman ever to be born. There is a fascinating nativity birth narratives about how the baby jesus was born. The angel appeared in the koran and tells her how can that be . If god says is going to be, it is going to be. She is vilified to be pregnant without a man. She goes off into the desert to have a baby by yourself. She is so humiliated she says i would rather die than have to go back like this. As the baby jesus comes out he talks like a man. There is a palm tree and the dates are going to fall. The water comes all around her. She brings the baby back to her community so she can be accepted. It is fascinating to me to see, when i was in cairo, i met muslim women who have a great deal of love and veneration of mary. Some women go into coptic churches and really create her there. Pray to her there. Al hunt there really are not that many references in the gospels to marry. We dont know a lot about her. Maureen orth she is only mentioned four times really in the bible. She speaks very little. She speaks with the angel appeared. She speaks in the song of mary. She speaks at the time of christs first miracle. She tells the servants to do. The idea that she can intercede with god. In the catholic religion, youre not supposed to pray to her. You pray to god she can intercede for you. Al hunt for the first 10 centuries she was depicted as rather imperial. Then she became the mother, more compassionate. Maureen orth when christianity was declared by constantine, only until about the fifth century that she was declared the god bearer. As time went on, monasteries were springing up all over europe. Children of younger and younger ages were being put into these convents and monasteries. They didnt have their mother with them. This is when mary become much more of a core maternal figure because there was not a mother present area. The figure of god is so distance for some people that the figure of mary is much more comfort and joy. Al hunt can we separate the virgin mary from the mother mary . Maureen orth she is no longer the same as a young innocent virgin who is being told she is going to bear christ. The mary that is at the cross. Theres a great deal of wisdom and love in miracles. Al hunt during christmas we dont want to be political. Im going to quote something. The lord has cast down the mighty from their thrones and has lifted up the lowly. The rich he has sent away empty. She makes Bernie Sanders lookalike ted cruz. Maureen orth pope francis takes a tremendous amount of his teaching from that. Blessed are the meek. The fact that she is in the koran, i dont understand why we not using this as a bridge to the muslim religion to discuss what we have in common. Were supposed to try to come together. Al hunt Many Political figures would be as surprised as i was that the muslims have the feeling that they have towards mary. Maureen orth the reach goes all across centuries. And geography. I went into the university in cairo and i knew that there was a benedictine priest who has thousands of volumes about mary in a nearby library. Will use the books about mary to study. Al hunt some people say this is a beautiful story, but miracles. Give me a break. Do you believe in miracles . Maureen orth i have come to see a lot of things. Tie started as a skeptical reporter. I am writing for a scientific magazine. I didnt want to be any kind of a pushover. I have seen some things and influences on people that i have to think cannot be explained by rational means. Al hunt did you change your view of the church . Maureen orth it has deepened my own sense of spirituality. The church is an extremely imperfect institution that always needs renewing. He decide to do it from within or you dont. I really do feel that you have to be a member of the church to care about mary. That is one of the most interesting things that i learned in my reporting. The women in rwanda said mary never once mentioned a religion. It is not about what kind of religion you are. She just asks you to love her as much as she loves us. Al hunt thank you so much for being with us. It is noon here in hong kong. Shares tumbling after investigators lincoln eighth fatality to takata airbags. Inda criticized their ceo 2009, before regulators launched their investigation. Opec has issued an outlook saying demand for oil will fall until the end of the decade, the cartel expecting competition from rival suppliers will make prices rise. Crude rose for the fourth day, heading for his best week in two