Like so much else in corporate-run America, its news media have become utterly cookie-cutter and formula-bound. Mostly blonde airheads posing as anchors and reporters, commiserating meaninglessly with echo-chamber megaphones given mostly to the shopping list of the morning's talking points manufactured by the headquarters of xenophobia, worldwide plunder and self-assured malice (in the shape of Roger Ailes, Rupert Murdoch and similar corporate honchos).
Against the backdrop of such thoughtless cheerleading of war and naked aggression, one evening I witnessed a nonagenarian (approaching 91, I believe) Studs Terkel (ST) speaking to Phil Donahue (who had one of the few TV talk shows worth watching at the time). Years earlier, I had read ST's American Dreams Lost and Found, and even if that work highlighted the ironies and realizations in ordinary American lives, I had not known the extent of progressive and humanitarian views that ST held. It was truly reassuring to find an accomplished American who held sensible, rational and caring views, and spoke relentlessly against war, and tyranny and fraud in government. I eventually came to learn a great deal more about ST's distinguished career as a radio personality in Chicago, and his steadfast support for blue collar workers and labor unions.
My overall state of despondence vis-????-vis the savage ignorance that had permeated statecraft in this country since the Reagan years, received a rejuvenating jolt when ST, in describing the occupant of the White House at the time, used the fable of The Wanton Boy. The wanton boy of the fable was a heartless, spoiled brat who took great pleasure in stoning to death frogs in a pond. Even when one of the frogs pleaded with him to stop his wanton killing ("to you this is a sport, but to us it is nothing but pain and death," the frog told the savage), the wanton boy only doubled up in merriment, and continued his killing spree. Finally, I thought, someone had summed up the dimwitted executioner perfectly. I recall writing an essay wherein I described (rather presciently, when I look back now) the Bushco regime, personality by personality, along the lines of the Allies' favorite evil guys from WWII. This essay was prompted by the Bushco regime's criminal invasion of Iraq on March 19, 2003, and, interestingly, an early part of it generated highly negative reactions from the readership at an Indian website that, I found later, was dominated by staunchly pro-American, right-wing Indians enamored by the imperial instruments of capitalism and the free-market, and joined by a common hatred of Muslims (originating from experiences within the Indian subcontinent).
ST's career was built essentially upon the art of the interview, and several of his books bear testament to his ability to give voice to the invisible in society- the factory workers, the farm hands, day-laborers- in other words, the lives and views of the other-half, the have-nots upon whose backs are built, to this day, the shining monoliths of imperial oligarchy, industry, and right-wing ideology. Among his major works, Hard Times (1970) portrayed the plight of the poor during the Great Depression; The Good War (1984) was actually a tongue-in-cheek indictment of all wars via material collected through his interviews during and after WWII. In The Great Divide (1988) and Race (1992), ST discussed the persistent problems of racism and bigotry in America- problems he witnessed as being alive and well even towards the end of his long life.
Through all their understandably gloomy outtakes on life in a heartless, profit-driven and violent world, both ST and Howard Zinn (HZ) remained optimistic and upbeat. Their last books (ST's, P.S. Further Thoughts from a Lifetime of Listening, 2008, written in the last and 96th year of his life, and HZ's, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, 2006, written in his 84th year) ennoble the efforts of all great thinkers and campaigners struggling to place decency and humanity above all the sectarian and gluttonous actions of the powerful. And the hopefulness their swan songs leave behind are higher by far than any of the meaningless utterances of hope and other blasphemy in the political lives of convenience represented by Barack Obama and other politicians of whatever shade or orientation.
It was when I was a graduate student at the University of Iowa (UI) in the early 1980s that I learned about Kurt Vonnegut (KV, 1922-2007), and that he was once associated with that distinctly literary city. One time, while searching for a place to rent, a friend and I actually stumbled upon an old brick Victorian that turned out to be a one-time residence of the accomplished author. At the time, I knew little about Vonnegut other than simply name recognition. It turns out that KV spent several years as a faculty member in UI's renowned Writers' Workshop. What sets Vonnegut apart from the other sentinels in this essay (Gore Vidal is in the same category) is that he was foremost an author and a novelist; at the same time, like Rabindranath Tagore and Harold Pinter, he was also a powerful and persuasive political commentator whose humanity and human sensibility went beyond his literary works. For me it was especially re-assuring to find that KV held liberal and progressive political views, and by the time the post-Reagan shift to narrow zealotry and vicious war-mongering had become decisively the American modus operandi, his disdain for American foreign policy (as well as Washington's coddling of Wall Street and the Military Industrial Complex) became quite pronounced in print and also the airwaves.
With the globally destructive rampage of the Bushco regime in full throttle, KV became both outraged and despondent (as did a great many thinking and caring human beings of worldwide prominence on all inhabited continents). As his biography in Wikipedia notes: ".with his columns for In These Times, he began an attack on the Bush administration and the Iraq war. "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas." In These Times quoted him as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected." 3,4 Clearly, Kurt Vonnegut had understood perfectly the audacious war crimes, both at home and abroad, being committed by the Bushco regime, and the xenophobic, war-hungry U.S., in general. KV felt alienated from the surreal, hateful and utterly insensitive country that he lived in, and he expressed his sense of hopelessness in one of his very last books, A Man Without a Country. Imagine a highly honorable and accomplished thinker and citizen of a land becoming thus disillusioned and frustrated with the land of his birth. But then, I feel, KV is in very good company. Henry David Thoreau and Mark Twain, two genuinely great Americans, felt exactly the same way many years earlier. Vonnegut had written his account of the savagery of war (an essential Western tool for domination and conquest) decades earlier when he witnessed the barbarous acts of the Allies and the Axis (with the exception of Japan, every party to the bloodfest being of Western origin) in WWII. Slaughterhouse Five laid out his disdain for imperial conquests, political lies accompanied by racism and bigotry, and the deadly alliance of corporations with government.
I was struck by Gore Vidal's (GV, 1925-) obvious brilliance, wit and intelligence during the 1980s when he appeared on several occasions in the late night talk shows, such as the one hosted by Johnny Carson. Long before watching him on TV in the U.S., I had read some of his literary works, such as Myra Breckinridge and Myron as a student back in India in the 1970s. At the time, I was insufficiently informed about American society and politics. As a result, these works did not leave any significant impression upon me. I did not realize Harry Blackmun and William Rehnquist were real-life Supreme Court justices, and that the latter was a vicious right-wing ideologue who would later help purloin the election of 2000 for the Texas executioner. Now, in the early 1980s, I watched GV speak on TV, and was impressed by his intellect and erudition. Here was someone, I realized, who was an heir to America's Royal Family, being related to Jackie O, and who could quite readily have chosen to become one of that country's political overlords. Yet, he had chosen to be distinct and notably separate from the prevailing political establishment. I could see that he understood the frightening farce that was American politics, on the (so-called) left and on the right. It was subsequent to those early encounters that I became far more familiar with GV's political writings, and his incisive dissection of American political barbarity, and corporate criminality, both within and around the world.
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