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Remembering Studs Terkel“Studs could be cute, and damnably perverse. But the Pultizer Prize-winning author, pioneering radio personality, battler against Joe McCarthy and McCarthyism, raconteur, rabble-rouser and grand old man of the American left, who died Friday at age 96, never pulled his punches when it came to politics. . . .
“‘Information, news, ideas—that’s the juice that gets a democracy going. When a few corporations control all the juice, they decide how the democracy works. Or how it won’t work. I don’t worry that much about people doing the right thing if they have the facts about what their government is up to. But if they don’t get the facts, the whole thing falls apart,’ said the man who had spent most of his life interviewing Americans regarding their work, their ideals, their politics and, in his last years, their optimism about the prospect of making a better world.”
—John Nichols, political columnist, blogger and author, remembering Studs Terkel (1912-2008), who died Friday (See Nichols’s remembrance at TheNation.com.)
(Chris Walker/AP photo)
(Chris Walker/AP photo)
Studs was wonderful. But he wasn't so good at predicting. I remember dinner with him and Ida in the summer of 1972. He was dead certain that George McGovern was going to be the next president of the United States. I bet he did better this year.
ReplyDeleteThat's one of this year's best Words. Where are the new Studs Terkels and Molly Ivinses that need to be coming along to replace the originals? Nowhere in print, I fear. And while Stewart and Colbert and Tina Fey are great, they don't perform the essential service Studs is talking about....
ReplyDeleteann berry