EDITOR'S NOTE
Rothschild, Matthew
EDITOR'S NOTE Matthew Rothschild Beyond the Gloom In the weeks and months after the elections that brought the Republicans to grimy power, many liberals and left-wingers and just plain decent...
...Whenever people start blaming the Rothschilds for the ills of this world, I can't help but take it personally...
...Who better to learn from than Terkel...
...This was not a contest that we entered here at The Progressive, as you know...
...That's what we need to do if we are ever to tap into the reservoir of good will that awaits us and can sustain us...
...Robertson, too, has it in for my namesakes and me...
...Paul, MN 55164...
...This the profound message of June Jordan's column (see page 17...
...Many well-meaning people had won records for holding their tongues for two years, fearful that criticizing Clinton would only serve to weaken the cause...
...Today, actually, I'm more hopeful than I was before the election, because the Republicans have finally crawled out from under their rocks, and their sliminess and their viciousness are there for all to see...
...Speaking of June Jordan, she was one of the recipients of the prestigious 1994 Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund's annual Writers' Award for publishing works of exceptional merit...
...I'm not related to the famous European family, but I am Jewish, and I squirm when I hear the con-spiracists on the hoof...
...He has interviewed some of the more interesting people of our day—including James Baldwin, John Henry Faulk, Dorothy Parker, Gore Vidal, Ma-halia Jackson, Tennessee Williams, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Pete Seeger, Maya Angelou, Simone de Beauvoir, Bertrand Russell, Leonard Bernstein, Eudora Welty, Margaret Mead, and John Kenneth Galbraith—and he gets them to talking in personal, immediate, and engaging ways...
...we've overcome many obstacles of bigotry and bullying...
...we survived a depression...
...I must have been asked dozens of times by friends and subscribers, "Aren't you depressed...
...I simply do not, cannot, will not believe that most Americans will buy the wholesale bigotry of the far right, or the retail revanchism of Newt Gingrich...
...She received an additional grant from the Fund to set up poetry-for-the-people workshops with the homeless in San Francisco...
...But I do not despair, for I believe there is a vast reservoir of good will in this country...
...Aren't you discouraged...
...This has already had a salutary effect...
...You see, I've inherited two radio programs—a half-hour weekly interview show called "Second Opinion," and a daily two-minute commentary called "Insight"—and I'm a novice at the medium...
...And I don't blame them...
...EDITOR'S NOTE Matthew Rothschild Beyond the Gloom In the weeks and months after the elections that brought the Republicans to grimy power, many liberals and left-wingers and just plain decent folks have felt despondent over the direction this country is going in...
...I don't know yet whether I've absorbed any tricks of the trade, but I do know that I've had a ball driving around and listening to Four Decades with Studs Terkel...
...After all, we made it through the Red Scares and the McCarthy period...
...The Chicago radio interviewer has compiled a greatest-hits collection, and I sent away for the tapes both to hear the shows and to pick up a tip or two from the master...
...No one else—no politician, and no hero on the horizon—can do it for us...
...To order your own set, send $25 plus $3.50 shipping and handling to Highbridge Audio, Box 64541, St...
...I read the recent cover story in The New York Times Magazine on the extreme right in Idaho, and it was, indeed, chilling...
...We need laughter, too, to make it through this stretch of gloom...
...The New York Review of Books had an equally disturbing piece exposing Pat Robertson for his anti-Semitism...
...The last, unforgettable line of that poem is: "we are the ones we've been waiting for...
...I've been riding around with Studs Terkel lately...
...There is much that's depressing, discouraging, and scary out there—the all-out assault on government, the scapegoating of welfare recipients, the hostility toward immigrants, the murderous violence by the anti-abortion fanatics, and a crude, homophobic, anti-Semitic nativism all sloshing around in the shallow septic tanks of the far right...
...And Studs is not afraid to ham it up...
...Maybe I'm naive, but I believe that shared democratic values and fundamental fellow-feeling will eventually do in the hate-mongers and their next of kin...
...It helps to take the long view...
...But now, thanks to Newt Gingrich and the disciples of Social Darwinism—their "new" ideas are only 120 years old—people are beginning to stir, to clamor, and to agitate...
...When I first read it, I heard an echo of a poem June wrote fifteen years ago, entitled "Poem for South African Women...
...Aren't you scared...
...His interviews with comedians—Woody Allen, Zero Mostel, and Mel Brooks—are worth the set in themselves...
...Studs, as everyone on the shows calls him, has a passion for humanity, an appreciation of culture, a fondness for dissenters, and a knack for humor, which all comes through in his distinctive throaty voice...
Vol. 59 • March 1995 • No. 3
