Studs Terkel: Eternal Rebel ... Page 2

Well, that's the kind of people to whom I dedicate the book. It comes to a key part, why I say hope dies last and why Virginia and Clifford are a part of a prophetic minority, those that follow them are in this book. It’s because in 1965, this is years after they had been the 15, 20 people that used to march and get egged, tomatoed, and threatened. In 1965, two years after the Martin Luther King march in Washington, was the Selma Montgomery march. The march from Selma to Montgomery, to the mansion of Governor George Wallace. Two hundred thousand people showed up! It’s a fantastic momment, 200 thousand people suddenly everywhere showed up! And that night at the home of Clifford and Virginia Durr, I know the address, 2 Felder Street, and I knew it so well. The people were there, the home was always open to everybody, and these few people who were there in the beginning way back were there. And there was Governor George Wallace on TV, addressing the world saying “These damn communists came here,” excoriating some people, naming people in that room, among them Miles Horton of the Highlander Folk School. And Miles Horton made a toast and said “Isn't it wonderful, just a few years ago, do you remember it was just 10,12, 15 of us marching down the street. We knew each other by name. Now it’s 200 thousand and I didn't know a single person there, they didn’t know me from Adam. But wasn't it wonderful? Isn't it great?” And that's what I mean by a prophetic minority and that's why the book is dedicated to them. And from then on it becomes contemporary people doing it.

Do you think that’s starting to happen now, after all of the demonstrations against the war on Iraq?

Well, I think it’s there underneath. But people are afraid to speak out. Although more and more are! And letters to the editor. I read all kinds of stuff, a little item, a squib, can be of significance to me. And I asked the Tribune editor, (and the Tribune’s a conservative paper) and he says its about 50/50, pro or anti-Bush. Which is interesting, you find this in the letters. But, in any case, it’s the cynicism you see, especially among the young, I emphasize the young here. I have this hearing problem and make a joke about it, with my two hearing aids and the words don’t come out clearly. And so, this is what I’m leading up to, why the cards are stacked, the dice is loaded, but despite that, there are people like those in the book. Because when Bush triumphed . . . remember the attack on Iraq, the preemptive strike? Despite the United Nations, to hell with the United Nations! For three days it looked like a triumph. And we hear the word “embedded journalists.” They were embedded and we hear how great this is. Well, to my ears it comes out “in bed with the journalists!” You see, so here we have the media, the establishment media, TV, radio, cable, Fox, newspapers by and large. So that’s why the alternative media needs to come. The others are controlled by a few. We know that an Australian Neanderthal named Rupert Murdoch, is one of the most powerful media moguls in the country. So, that’s what the battle is, the cards are stacked, the dice is loaded, but still we roll them. And somehow we still deal them out! And I think there’s a hopeful minority, and I think it’s going to more and more to the majority. Hopefully.

One big problem though is access. The media companies are so big. And you go to the airport newsstand and the same publications are everywhere. There’s a lot of good independent media out there saying good things, but it’s hard for most people to find. And sometimes the fight for media diversity seems impossible to win because they’ve gotten so big and out of hand . . .

Now you’re coming to the subject of trivia. What’s emphasized mostly in the papers? Trivia! The Kobe Bryant case, Michael Jackson, Brittany Spears, trivia! You realize that trivia diminishes us, makes us more infantile too. And that of course is one of the allies of what I call regression, backwardness, and this administration plays upon that as well. It’s all connected. It’s all about whether we have self-esteem as human beings living in a democracy (we hope it is that you know) and being in danger by John Ashcroft. Our intelligence is being assaulted and our native sense of decency is being assaulted because we’ve wiped out a past! This has happened before in different guises and different gowns. And that’s what it’s about. But I still feel there’s hope, because in these people I’ve met, whom are in this book, Hope Dies Last, are examples of those who will not give up.

How do you teach people to see or look for hope?

It’s not a question of teaching, it’s a question of people just gathering and most of all thinking for themselves. People could call a meeting, about anything, peace, the environment, civil liberties, but it could be about stoplights, kid crossing the streets. It could be any issue that becomes a community issue. This happened with this woman in one of my other books. A local issue suddenly becomes a big one. This woman did nothing outside her family, has nine kids during the 60s, the campus kids and other kids protesting the Vietnam war give her a pain in the neck, but then bit by bit she got involved in a campaign to save the community. Because the mayor of the town and the cement lobby were going to put in an expressway and eliminate a whole block. And they say Who’s home is going to go first, and she says why does anyone’s home have to go first? Who needs the expressway? And that to a group called Citizens Action Program, and bit by bit she realized the same guys who are doing that, doing that are the same guys doing the war, and she became a strong anti-war person, it’s that kind of thin.

So we need to provide more places for people to get together?

But there are! It’s the questions themselves, even if they provide their own place. It can take any form you want, it could be on any issue there is. You’ll find there’s a confluence of similarity that goes on there.

I know you said you don’t use a computer. . .

Well, I use a typewriter, but I know the computer and all that is happening online, these are all strange words to me, I’m just learning the mysteries of the electric typewriter.

But I’m wondering, there’s a growing online community that interacts and discusses things and plots and ploys. I’m wondering what your thoughts are on that, because technology does put us in separate places while we could be with our neighbors in the same room . . .

Well, you see you’re raising a point that makes me wistful because I’m now 91, 92 and I’m still part of the 20th century. I haven’t quite accepted the 21st century. And as a result of which, because of my hearing difficulties as well and one thing or another, there’s a lot of which I am not up on, I am more primitive than anybody. I’m really a neanderthal. I know the possibilities of online and internet has helped create Howard Dean of course, as a classic example. So, even more so, in the broader sense, people connecting with one another, that’s a very important development, of which unfortunately I am not a part because I am mechanically inept to begin with, I goof up on a tape recorder. You know the only guy who’s used a tape recorder as much as I did was, you know who? Richard Nixon, he and I and the tape recorder. I call ourselves, Dick and me, neo-Cartesians, you know Descartes said I think therefore I am, cogito, ergo sum is the phrase. Well Dick Nixon and I can say, I tape therefore I am, or in Dick’s case, I tape therefore I am not.

In any event, this book is one I’m glad I wrote, because it is of this time and you will find people in it throughout, whether it be Straughton Lynd or other people you recognize like Tom Hayden others unknown, who are doing work in the community, generally speaking out, some of the 60s are in it, but most of those in it are going on now.

You see hope is any aspect of life and in this particular book it’s political. It has to be with the community. See a person alone can’t do the trick. You know John Wayne, “I’m going to fight General Motors, I don’t need a union! I don’t need a union!” Well, he’s out of his mind of course. And so that’s what it’s about. The community, the sense of community, the neighborhood, the city, the country, and it’s the world eventually. And we have to come back to Thomas Paine, because I think we’ve pretty well covered it. That book Common Sense, the pamphlet, written around the same time as the Declaration of Independence, sold 100,000 copies to a population of three million people. You know what that means today? It would have been a best seller of five million books! In other words, those people reading those books were part of the prophetic minority when it was a good and growing one, and it was a thoughtful one! It wasn’t just action, it was thought behind the action. And that’s what it’s about and that’s what I hope the book is about.

There was a review of the book, said it the book was an action book. That if you act, you do something, at this moment specifically, especially the young, on November 7th 2004, you go to the polling place because that day you vote on your future. Your personal individual future. Quite frankly it’s that important of a day to vote. And if you stay home and don’t vote, you’re saying George W. Bush is my man. You’re voting for him and don’t deny that. Thomas Paine didn’t write Common Sense for you to sit home and not vote on that day.

I’m fascinated by the idea of living journalism, which is touched on in the book. Sometimes I think we need different ways of presenting news and information to people, especially young people. . .

You’re talking now . . . See the book opens after the introduction with the New Deal, the Great American Depression, another traumatic moment of American history. During the New Deal, when free enterprise fell on its face, the government provided jobs, the WPA (Works Progess Administratin), and Roosevelt made Harry Hopkins as the head of it. They provided work for men digging ditches, the highways and building homes. But also they had arts projects, a federal theater project for actors, a federal music project for musicians, a federal arts project and writers project, and some of the best state guides come out of these federal projects. So the federal theater created a new kind of theater called living newspaper which today you call multi-media theater. It involved film, screen, acting dance, all of it, doing the issues of the day. In President Roosevelt’s second inaugural address in 1936 he said “I see one third of a nation ill fed, ill holed, ill housed, ill clothed . . . .” So the federal theater, the living newspaper, did a play called “One Third of a Nation”that dealt with the housing situation and they used dance, acting, narration, radio, and film and that’s what we’re talking about, it was a very exciting moment

Do you think something like that could work today?

Well, work can take many forms. I did a book called Working that dealt with the very nature of work itself and work as we know it. But work can also take on new dimensions. See with the machinery that I worry about at times, machinery that at the same time saved my life because I had a quintuple bypass years ago. So what saved me? I should have been dead, family history of angina . . . What saved me was not only the skilled hands of a surgeon but also the machinery. And I was saved by that, and I worry about it, condemn it, so I’m sort of an ungrateful rich. So, just as you speak of the internet and this new kind of machinery possibly for democracy, it also can be used in other way, same way as a few guys can take over the whole thing. But that’s the case of the media today anyway.

So, there are two ways. See we live in a moment, technology has taken a quantum leap. The technology of production, which we know has put a lot of people out of work, but you must have new jobs and new training for the new work. That’s what Luddites . . .way back there was a farmer named Ludd, end of the 18th century, who started a revolt against the machines, but what he wanted was jobs, to learn the new machines. So, I’m not a Luddite, I still use the tape recorder don’t I? Even though I goof up on it, I still use it. But you see, technology and the technology of destruction, there are two ways it can be used. We can knock ourselves off, we can knock off the whole world.

I’m going to end with Einstein. I love to quote Einstein, you know why? Because nobody dares contradict me! Now Einstein, the great mind of the 20th century, the great heart of the 20th century, is responsible ironically enough for the atom bomb. His equation led to others thinking about it and working on it. The Chicago Laboratory and Oppenheimer and Paul Tibbets, who’s in the book, he flew the plane the Enola Gay that knocked out Hiroshima, 70-thousand people just like that. And today of course that Hiroshima bomb was just a firecracker compared to what we have. So, we can knock off the whole world. Can the US knock off the whole world? Sure and ourselves as well! So we can blow ourselves up! When Einstein heard the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, he tore his hair. You see he was the one who advised President Roosevelt to go ahead with it, ‘cause they thought the Germans had it. But when he heard it was dropped on human beings, he thought it was going to be dropped on an uninhabited area, when he heard it was dropped, not once but twice, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, he tore his hair. And that’s when he said, I don’t know what the weapons of World War III will be. But I know what World War IV will be, stick and stones. We’ll blow ourselves up, and regress. Can you imagine a future. . . Now I’m dramatizing, but it’s not that far off frankly. It sounds crazy to say but we can blow the others up, they can blow us up, we can succeed. And Einstein says, and I follow him thoroughly, Our children’s children’s children will be coming out of caves. They’ll be coming out of caves with bullhide on back and club in hand. I’m not talking about our ancestors, our descendents! And they’ll come out in the black sun blinking, terrified, with club in hand, and out of tribal memory will come a word, a name Sh, Sh, Sh, Shakespeare. Who dat? Mo, Mo, Mo, Mozart. Da, Da Don Giovani. What’s that? So you see, that’s how it might be. I’m now speaking of the ultimate. The ultimate madness! And that’s what it’s about. So this book, Hope Dies Last, is the reply to that.

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