PBS高端访谈:音乐人卡哈内引发的火车政治（在线收听）

Judy Woodruff: Songwriter Gabriel Kahane wrote his latest album, "Book of Travelers," while riding a train across the United States following the 2016 presidential election. In tonight's Brief But Spectacular episode, in the wake of this week's midterm elections, he offers a solution to better understanding those whose political views differ from our own.

Gabriel Kahane: So, I had written maybe a dozen-and-a-half songs leading up to the 2016 election. I began to feel that I needed to leave behind the digital world. I bought a series of train tickets for this kind of circuitous, looping trip around the continental U.S., which amounted to 8,980 miles. And I decided that, regardless of the outcome of the election, I was going to leave the morning after, just to talk to strangers, leave my phone at home, leave the Internet behind, and try to have a kind of unmediated encounter with a side of America that I didn't really know. I set some ground rules for myself when I was on the train. One of the things that I was really interested in doing wasn't arguing with people. And I think that that is sort of one of the fundamental problems that we face right now, is this idea we all sort of have contempt for the other side. We say, well, I just can't engage with that person. And there were some cases where I failed, and I would then go back to my sleeper car and write in my journal: You argued. You said you weren't going to do that. The Amtrak dining car is an incredibly unusual space. I was having meals with somewhere between six and nine strangers a day. The dining car creates this atmosphere of social adjacencies, ways in which people encounter one another that they wouldn't in their regular lives, and particularly not in their digital lives. I met an incredible array of people. I met truck drivers, software engineers. I met three siblings in their 60s who are in a family band. Trains in America are inefficient in a way that few other train systems are. In that inefficiency, there's a space in which to kind of reconnect with a slower pace of life, a slower pace of thought. And one of the things that I thought about quite a bit on this trip when I was looking out at mountains in Montana, looking at the plains in North Dakota, was the way that we have grown to believe that something that is more efficient is necessarily better. As we become more blindly enamored of things that are efficient, without kind of interrogating what is being lost, I think that we send ourselves into both a more divided space, but also a space that's less able to grapple with complex truth. There are no simple solutions to the kinds of intractable problems that we face as a country, whether we're talking about systemic racism, automation, the hollowing out of manufacturing jobs. All of these are incredibly complicated problems, in an era where our attention spans are shorter, where we're constantly looking at a screen, but not taking time to think about someone else's experience. And I think there's a real consequence to not having that space to just sit silently and think, what is it to be in this other person's body? And that you know, that's something which I think is a cause for grave concern. My name is Gabriel Kahane, and this is my Brief But Spectacular take on why trains in America are the road to radical empathy.

Judy Woodruff: Now we know. And you can find additional Brief But Spectacular episodes on our Web site. That's PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief.

朱迪·伍德拉夫：作曲家加布里埃尔·卡哈内创作的最后一个专辑名为《旅行者的列车》。当时他正乘坐火车游历美国，那时刚刚举行完2016年的总统大选。今晚的《简短而精彩》播出之际也正值本周中期选举结束之后，加布里埃尔·卡哈内为我们更好地理解与普通人政见不同的人是怎样的。

加布里埃尔·卡哈内：在2016年大选开始前，我写了大概有18首歌。我开始觉得我需要将数码世界抛诸脑后。我买了很多张火车票，就是为了以这种间接迂回的方式游历美国大陆，总里程达8980英里。然后我决定，无论大选结果怎样，第二天早上我一定要离开，我要跟陌生人对话，我要把手机丢在家里，也不上网。我要试着接触我未曾见过的美国。我坐火车的时候给自己设定了几个基本原则。我尤其喜欢做的一件事情并不是跟人理论。我觉得我们现在面临的基本问题之一，就是总是轻视自己的对立面。我们总是会说，我跟那个人对付不来。有些时候，我也有这样的时候。这时候，我就会走回我的卧铺车厢，然后在日志中写下这样的话：你理论过了，你也说过你不会再做这样的事了。美国货车上的餐车是一个很不可思议的地方。每天，我都会和大概6-9个人一起用餐。餐车会给人营造一种社交连接的感觉，让人们可以遇到一些平时生活中不会遇到的人，甚至在网络世界里也不会遇到的人。我见过很多人，比如卡车司机、软件工程师等等。我见过60岁的三胞胎组成了家庭乐队。从某种方面来说，美国货车的效率很低，与其他的火车系统无法相提并论。但正是在这样一种低效之下，反而多出了一个空间，让我们可以与慢节奏的生活重新连接，从而得以进行慢节奏的思考。当我在旅途中望着蒙大拿州群山、看着北达科他州平原的时候，我思索了一件事情：越长大，我们越觉得：效率越高的事情就越好。而随着我们越来越迷恋高效的事情，我们就会越不会去想是否在过程中失去了什么。我觉得这样的做法让我们把自己困在了一个分隔的空间里，无法去思考复杂的现实。我们的国家面临着很多棘手的问题，这些问题没有简单的解决方案。比如，如何处理已经根植于很多人心中的种族主义、自动化技术、制造业的空洞化，等等。这些都是很复杂的问题，毕竟在当前的时代里，我们的注意广度变得更短了。因为我们总是盯着电脑屏幕，而不会花时间去思考某个人的个人经历。我觉得如果没有空间能静坐下来思考其他人的想法，是会有严重后果的。我觉得这个是一个值得深深担忧的问题。我是加布里埃尔·卡哈内，这就是我本期带来的《简短而精彩》，这是我在美国乘坐火车时候换位思考的感受。

朱迪·伍德拉夫：感谢您的分享。观众朋友们可以在我们的官网上看到其他期的视频，网址是PBS.org/NewsHour/Brief。