I was watching Keith Olbermann interview John Cusick (from several months ago) when D laughed and said, "such kindred spirits - they are so radical." I stopped and looked at her - what do you mean, I asked pointedly. Is it what they are saying or how they are saying it? I didn't really get a good answer to that as my manner - agressively pre-caffinated - created an awkward moment that continues at this writing. Aside from the (my) observation that the interview was measured low on the bombastic richter scale, it was the use of "radical" that got my hackles in a bunch. I can be a bitch, but I worry that people that talk about the "radical" idea of returning democracy - transparent governance by and for the good of the people and not by the corporations who have, in my view, taken ownership of the republic since the end of the second world war (see "Why We Fight" the next time you have 90 minutes for a historical perspective on the last 45 years or so). Is it now radical to suggest, as Naomi Klein did in The Shock Doctrine, that disaster has been leveraged by our leaders - and the corporations they serve - to establish a very different set of rules than those set out by our constitution. I could go on and one, but I think John does a pretty good job in a recent entry found on Huffington.
So my morning goes on, in an admittadly awkward silence, and I stumble across an article about the Bush team preparing for their end of term "scorched earth" executive rule priorities. This is one of those funny American things - like signing statements and executive pardons - where the executive branch gets the opportunity to establish a bunch of "rules" covering an incredibly broad range of areas that become defacto law. I'm not sure where the constitution covers this type of action - pretty sure a strict constitutional constructionalist would find them abhorant. And I'm thinking - because it is safer in the morning than speaking - WTF. Is there no end of it - haven't they done enough already? Really. Really.
Anyway, then I stumble on something that made me feel a little better, so that is where I will end it today. An old interview with Studs, talking in the run-up to the expansion of the war into Iraq.
Studs Terkel: He'll Never Be Silenced
Louis "Studs" Terkel was many things - oral historian, radio host, agitator, Bronx-born icon of Chicago, the "great listener" who was hard of hearing, Pulitzer Prize winner. But most of all he was an inspiration. He inspired every younger activist or independent journalist who ever met him. And who among us wasn't younger than Studs?
The self-described "guerilla journalist" died Friday at 96. He was almost 70 when I first met him, more than twice my age. But I couldn't keep up.
Whenever I did catch up with him, he never turned down a request for help - whether he was sick, under a book deadline, or in mourning over the death of his beloved wife Ida. If it was an issue of social justice or muckraking journalism, he (along with Ida) was ready to sign up and help out.
In 1986, when I launched the media watch group FAIR, Studs became a charter member of our advisory board. Along with I.F. Stone (whom he called "the north star of independent journalists"), Studs signed FAIR's first protest statement ever: a telegram to ABC News criticizing its exclusion of progressives.
Studs received generally favorable treatment from mainstream media. The respect was not mutual. He decried the elite media's coziness with the powerful, the timidity that subverted public television, and the censorial ways of corporate media bosses. He was outraged when GE/MSNBC muzzled Phil Donahue for questioning the Iraq invasion.
Studs wrote the following in his 1997 introduction to "Wizards of Media Oz," (a book by Norman Solomon and myself):
When I was young and easy, an old Wobbly rewarded me with a tattered copy of "The Brass Check" by Upton Sinclair. The title referred to the coin that young brothel women were handed by their tricks; they, in turn, cashed them in with their madam at the end of their day's labors.
Sinclair's game, however, was not the kept women; it was the kept press. The former recognized her work as demeaning; the latter served their publishers, if not tremulously, gladly. And righteously. Need we mention William Randolph Hearst and his derring-do reporters covering - or, in the words of San Simeon's master, furnishing - the Spanish-American War?
A century later, our press, especially the Respectables, have gone Hearst one better. They helped make the Gulf War yellow ribbon time. It was glory, glory all the way. Our most prestigious journals found the horrors visited by our smart bombs upon Iraqi women and kids news not fit to print. It is no secret that our media - TV and radio, owned by the same Big Boys, compounding the obscenity - played the role of bat boys to the sluggers of the Pentagon.
With his legacy of best-selling books and historic recorded interviews, Studs will no more be silenced by death than Wobbly songwriter Joe Hill was by a Utah firing squad. If Howard Zinn wrote "A People's History," Studs developed "A People's Journalism" - bringing the wisdom and stories of poor and working-class Americans to tape and the printed page.
In 1992, when South Central Los Angeles erupted in riot after white cops were acquitted in the videotaped beating of Rodney King, no one was caught more off-guard than mainstream media - who (as with Hurricane Katrina years later) suddenly discovered millions of desperate inner-city Americans. But Studs was not caught by surprise. Days before the riot, his quite prophetic book - "Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession" - was hitting the stores.
No matter his age, Studs always seemed a step ahead of everyone else. He was a premature anti-fascist in his youth. He was a premature, unrepentant anti-McCarthyite in 1950: "I was blacklisted - I signed many petitions that were for unfashionable causes and never retracted." With mainstream media largely enthralled by Ronald Reagan's "Morning in America" propaganda in 1986, he neatly sized up the era: "The only thing trickling down from the top is meanness."
My most treasured memory of Studs was the day we flew him from Chicago to New Jersey to be a special guest on the (short-lived) primetime MSNBC Phil Donahue show in mid-2002 - at a time the show was getting heat from MSNBC management not to appear liberal. I was a Donahue senior producer. This was years before Rachel Maddow and way before Olbermann began his dissent. With little critical journalism, Bush's approval rating stood at 70 percent.
Shedding his normal coat and tie, Phil decided to imitate his guest's fashion sense and wore the traditional Studs garb: red-and-white check shirt and red socks. The two looked like bookends in a "Saturday Night Live" skit - but, with Studs as the solo full-hour guest, it was not all fun and games.
"What have I got to lose? I'm 90 years old." Studs declared, in taking off after Bush. "We have a mindless boy right now with the most powerful job in the world. And that is perilous. We have an attorney general [Ashcroft] who is like the guy Arthur Miller described in "The Crucible" in Salem, Massachusetts, 300 years ago, who urges people to spy on other people, witchcraft and all."
As for the Democratic leadership in Congress. it "will be renowned for its gutlessness and its lack of principle and its cravenness."
As for corporate media, he proudly described his 1950s blacklisting over civil rights advocacy, how he refused to sign a loyalty oath for CBS, how the black gospel star Mahalia Jackson strongly defended him. "The cards are stacked. We know who runs the networks," he announced on a GE-owned news channel. "NBC is owned by General Electric. If Tom Brokaw said something about General Electric, he'd be out."
With Enron and corporate scandals in the news, Studs recalled the 1930s Depression: "Things don't repeat themselves exactly. But we've learned nothing from it. Unregulated, free, untrammeled, what's it called, 'free market,' fell on its ass again, as it did then. We've learned nothing."
The end of the show turned to the end of life, with Studs saying: "I've had a pretty good run of it. And so if I kick off at this moment, I do OK."
When Phil asked about busloads of fans coming to grieve, Studs responded: "I don't want them to grieve. I want them to celebrate."
PHIL: You won't slow down. You're going to be tap dancing all the way to the end, right? That's your plan?
STUDS: My plan - my epitaph is "Curiosity did not kill this cat."
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