A Little Light Reading

I am currently enjoying "The Studs Terkel Reader - My American Century," a collection of interviews from eight of Terkel's previously published works. Terkel, who passed away last October at the age of 96, spent a lifetime looking for the soul of America. His search involved interviewing not princes and potentates, nor the powerful and profligate, but everyday men and women he met doing everyday things and whose stories he chronicled in a series of oral histories.

I'm not very far into the book, which runs to well over 500 pages, but I've already struck gold. Passages containing truths and observations with implications for today's America abound. Two in particular, both over fourteen years old, speak to and expose the insidious nature of what passes for informed opinion today.

The first is found on page 4. It involves statements made in 1995 by Mark Koernke, a militiaman from Michigan after the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. in a nationwide shortwave broadcast reported on by James Ridgeway of The Village Voice, Koernke claimed that the bombing was a government plot. He then went on to say this:

"I did some basic math the other day, using the old-style math. You can get about four politicians for about 120 feet of rope. Remember when using this stuff always try to find a willow tree. The entertainment will last longer."

In response to Koernke's words, Terkel borrows a line from Edwin Markham's The Man With the Hoe and asks, "Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?"

Now in 2009, comments similar in tone to those made by Koernke pepper the daily broadcasts of the likes of Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly, and Sean Hannity and re-echo in televised interviews of prominent members of Congress, who embrace the ideology of the radical right-wing of the republican party. All too often, their opinions, presented as unassailable fact, air without challenge or caveat.

Rather than ignoring this proliferation of ignorance, I firmly believe that America would be better-served if those with lights still burning within their brains responded immediately to anyone making such comments with this modified version of Terkel's borrowed quote: "Whose breath blew out the light within your brain?"

The second passage, from page 32, requires little additional commentary by me, save to suggest that Terkel correctly identified how and why one's "brain-light" can sputter, blow out, and be replaced by ideas like those cited in the first:

During the Christmas bombings of North Vietnam, the St. Louis cabbie, weaving his way through traffic, was offering six-o'clock commentary.

"We gotta do it. We have no choice."

"Why?

"We can't be a pitiful, helpless giant. We gotta show 'em we're number one."

"Are you number one?"

A pause. "I'm number nuthin'." He recounts a litany of personal troubles, grievances, and disasters. His wife left him; his daughter is a roundheel; his boy is hooked on heroin; he loathes his job. For that matter, he's not so crazy about himself. Wearied by this turn of conversation, he addresses the rear-view mirror: "Did you hear Bob Hope last night? He said..."

Forfeiting their own life experience, their native intelligence, their personal pride, they allow more celebrated surrogates, whose imaginations may be no larger than theirs, to think for them, to speak for them, to be for them in the name of the greater good. Conditioned to being "nobody," they look toward "somebody" for the answer. It is not what American town meeting was all about.