• Home
  • About
    • Straight Up
    • Jan Herman
    • Contact
  • AJBlogs
  • ArtsJournal

Straight Up | Jan Herman

Arts, Media & Culture News with 'tude

91 YEARS YOUNG

December 3, 2003 by cmackie

Leave it to Studs Terkel to put things in perspective. “Colin Powell, we know, is the
African-American butler to the new Bertie Wooster,” he tells Salon in an interview about his latest book,
“Hope
Dies Last: Keeping Faith in Difficult Times.”
 Here’s the full
quotation and the context:


You notice I dedicate the book to a couple whom you may not know, Clifford
and Virginia Durr. They were a white couple living in Montgomery, Ala. She was the sister-in-law
of [Supreme Court Justice] Hugo Black. And he was a member of the FCC [Federal
Communications Commission], who wrote the “Blue Book” on the rights of listeners — air
belongs to the public! — for as much variety of programming as possible.

Contrast him today to the FCC kid who’s the son of Colin Powell, right? And Colin Powell,
we know, is the African-American butler to the new Bertie Wooster. Bertie was a little milder
than W., not quite so mean-spirited. He had a British butler, and Bush has one too. His name is
Tony Blair. But his American butler is very elegant, and Powell’s son [Michael] is the footman at
the head of the FCC. He lays out the red carpet for them. So now we have an FCC that says, “The
hell with regulation! Clear Channel, you can own 10,000 stations if you
want!”



Although “Hope Dies Last” has been described as a summation of his long career, Terkel
sounds at 91 like someone just starting out. “I thought, why not a book about all those who have
had hope, and have taken their beatings and paid their dues — but as a result of what they’ve done,
something has happened,” he says. The book is about “the prophetic minority …
people who we call activists. Who are imbued with a sort of hope and craziness, you know — who
some way or another hope our society, or the world, will be a more decent place to live in. They
imbue all the rest of us with hope.”


A man of his time as perhaps no other, Terkel cites Feb. 15, 2003, as a special day. “I
celebrate that day,” he says, “because 10 million people all over the world came out against the
preemptive strike [against Iraq]. And then there was silence, because for three days it looked like
W. was the liberator of Iraq. Then, well, we know what happened.”


He adds: “If ever there were a time for these people, who I’ve admired for years, this is it.
There was Tom Paine, there were the abolitionists. In the ’60s there were the African-Americans
who fought for civil rights, the kids against the war. Who were a minority, remember; the jocks
beat the shit out of them at first and then joined them later. That’s what I mean by a prophetic
minority.”

Share on email
Email
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on reddit
Reddit

Filed Under: main

Jan Herman

When not listening to Bach or Cuban jazz pianist Chucho Valdes, or dancing to salsa, I like to play jazz piano -- but only in the privacy of my own mind.
Another strange fact... Read More…

About

My Books

Several books of poems have been published in recent years by Moloko Print, Statdlichter Presse, Phantom Outlaw Editions, and Cold Turkey … [Read More...]

Straight Up

The agenda is just what it says: news of arts, media & culture delivered with attitude. Or as Rock Hudson once said in a movie: "Man is the only … [Read More...]

Contact me

We're cutting down on spam. Please fill in this form. … [Read More...]

Archives

Blogroll

Abstract City
AC Institute
ACKER AWARDS New York
All Things Allen Ginsberg
Antiwar.com
arkivmusic.com
Artbook&
Arts & Letters Daily

Befunky
Bellaart
Blogcritics
Booknotes
Bright Lights Film Journal

C-SPAN
Noam Chomsky
Consortium News
Cost of War
Council on Foreign Relations
Crooks and Liars
Cultural Daily

The Daily Howler
Dark Roasted Blend
DCReport
Deep L
Democracy Now!

Tim Ellis: Comedy
Eschaton

Film Threat
Robert Fisk
Flixnosh (David Elliott’s movie menu)
Fluxlist Europe

Good Reads
The Guardian
GUERNICA: A Magazine of Art & Politics

Herman (Literary) Archive, Northwestern Univ. Library
The Huffington Post

Inter Press Service News Agency
The Intercept
Internet Archive (WayBackMachine)
Internet Movie Database (IMDb)
Doug Ireland
IT: International Times, The Magazine of Resistance

Jacketmagazine
Clive James

Kanopy (stream free movies, via participating library or university)
Henry Kisor
Paul Krugman

Lannan Foundation
Los Angeles Times

Metacritic
Mimeo Mimeo
Moloko Print
Movie Geeks United (MGU)
MGU: The Kubrick Series

National Security Archive
The New York Times
NO!art

Osborne & Conant
The Overgrown Path

Poets House
Political Irony
Poynter

Quanta Magazine

Rain Taxi
The Raw Story
RealityStudio.org
Bill Reed
Rhizome
Rwanda Project

Salon
Senses of Cinema
Seven Stories Press
Slate
Stadtlichter Presse
Studs Terkel
The Synergic Theater

Talking Points Memo (TPM)
TalkLeft
The 3rd Page
Third Mind Books
Times Square Cam
The Tin Man
t r u t h o u t

Ubu Web

Vox

The Wall Street Journal
Wikigate
Wikipedia
The Washington Post
The Wayback Machine (Internet Archive)
World Catalogue
World Newspapers, Magazines & News Sites

The XD Agency

Share on email
Email
Share on facebook
Facebook
Share on twitter
Twitter
Share on reddit
Reddit
This blog published under a Creative Commons license

an ArtsJournal blog

Copyright © 2025 · Magazine Pro Theme on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in