America Revisited

BBC World Service - The Documentary, America Revisited, America Revisited: The West

"[On camping in the desert] 'It's quiet. I read 30, 40 books a week. Sometimes I have phone service, sometimes I don't. I like the ones that I don't better'

'And did we mention the rattlesnakes?'

'I just catch em by hand'

'Why would you catch rattlesnake by hand?'

'When we were young and didn't have a lot of beer money, and we wanted to go to the pub or the bar, we'd get 2 or 3 rattlesnakes and put em in a barrel in the back of the pickup and we'd go in and make bets. And the bet is, you reach in that barrel with 2 or 3 and you get one out. And then you just put em in your shirt.

You tuck your shirt in real tight and you just push em all the way around. And that freaks people out. They can't bite you. They've got to have a certain amount of extension in order for their fangs to come out. And if your shirt's tucked in tight, they can't get their mouth open enough to bite you, and that gets little interesting...

I always try to give private industry the first shot at it. But with, they're proving that they're misusing it. Where you're getting a real problems with our medical, is the fact that our insurance companies. Let's say I go into a clinic and get some stitches and I say I'll just pay the bill. Well it's $800. I turn that in to the insurance and they pay it, all of a sudden it's $2,800"


BBC World Service - The Documentary, America Revisited, America Revisited: The East

"[On West Virginia] With its thickly forested mountain slopes, it's hard to believe that coal was once king here. In fact, it's so central to the state's psyche that there's even an image of a miner on the state flag...

'The comments that she had made in an earlier interview that she was gonna put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business was not taken very well in our area and we were told she was there as a friend and I told her she wasn't viewed as a friend'

'And I gather it made you a bit of a local hero'...

According to the state's largest emergency food provider, 1 in 6 West Virginians will visit a food panty, soup kitchen or shelter in 2016. It's a startling statistic...

Junior hails from a family of miners. He too worked in the industry It was either do that, join the military or deal drugs, he says...

Drug overdoses kill more Americans than car crashes or guns"


BBC World Service - The Documentary, America Revisited, America Revisited: The Discussion

"'Mass shootings have claimed... over a 100 times according to Time more lives on American soil than terrorist attacks in our country, and yet we are focused so predominantly on these outsiders, these terrorists, when really the biggest perpetrators of mass killings on American soil are white males shooting up cinemas and schools'

'Well, you know that's a bunch of garbage... We had over 3,000 shootings in Chicago and that wasn't all white males shooting theatres'"


BBC World Service - The Documentary, Change in America

"The other way that social media has changed the conversation is one that I don't think is a healthy development and this is how people can swarm and bully using social media. So I look at university campuses where you have what we call cry bullies these days. This very vocal group of people trying to define the parameters of what is acceptable conversation... you have a sort of a silent majority that just doesn't want to get into it. Doesn't want to talk about it and doesn't want to be socially ostracised...

'Cable TV. Where you have left wing shows, you have right wing shows feeding this kind of idea of my way is right, the other way is wrong. And we didn't have that as much 8 years ago and I think that's changing a lot'

'There's sort of a fascinating statistic that the more informed you are about news, in fact the more biased you are... we just hunt out facts that agree with us... This is the angriest I can remember anyone ever being and over the past few years I feel like I have watched the web really turn into a high percentage of give me something to hate'...

44% of prime aged males who are not in the labour force said that they took a painkiller the day before they were asked. And 2/3 of the 44% said we are talking prescription drugs...

Healthcare jobs have obviously taken the place of manufacturing jobs. They are the steady, good paying jobs that you wanna get if you wanna say raise a family in a pretty comfortable middle class life... it's a growth field and you'll never be out of work...

[On the flip side of energy independence] There is another argument that says actually it kinda helps to buy stuff. Because people listen to their consumers. And how much sort of animosity can you have when you are buying and selling products from one another?...

We don't want whatever we have. If you've got Jimmy Carter everyone wants someone who's gonna stand up and be more authoritative, and then you get Ronald Reagan in there and oh my god this is crazy... in the same way that the President gets blamed for how the economy goes, the American President gets blamed for how world security goes. Whatever happens, fundamentally it's felt we either did too much or should've done something to prevent it. But you know the reality is bad things are going to happen whatever the US does. The President cannot fix every problem"