I don’t remember exactly how I found out about Studs Terkel, but I do remember picking up his book, Hard Times, at the used book store. It’s an amazing book. Studs Terkel specializes in recording our collective oral history. I’m eager to read his latest book, Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Reflections on Death, Rebirth, and Hunger for a Faith, where he talks with people about death. As someone who thinks about death a lot this is right up my alley.
A while back he did an interview with Salon. I tried to read it there, but they have some sort of subscription thing now and you can only read the first few paragraphs of whatever it is you’re looking for. Thanks to the internet I was able to find the same interview elsewhere. It’s a good one, here it is.
There’s a recurring refrain in the book, you’ll spot it: “I’m not religious, I’m spiritual.” Now, it sounds like one of those New Age bromides, but it’s not. They want no middleman between themselves and God, whatever He, She or It is. And I find that fascinating. I find myself astonished by many of the responses. …
How did the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 change our perceptions of death?
Well that’s a good question. You see, I’d started the book long before that. Has it changed my perception of life and death, you mean? If anything, it’s italicized it. If anything, more than ever, [the Sept. 11 attacks were] a tragic, stupid event, a barbaric event that has made the book even more pertinent than it may have been before. And I find this ironic and tragic at the same time.
How can I put it? What has happened has made us more vulnerable. We are not the Fortress America. I think that’s the last thing Thomas Paine had in mind 200 years ago. Following “Common Sense” he wrote “Rights of Man,” and in that he spoke of this new society, this open society, and he said it could lift the world, lift it. I’m talking about 1791 he was writing it. He didn’t mean for us to be Fortress America. If we are Fortress America, then we are against “Them,” whoever “Them” is — the rest of the world, of course. So suddenly it’s happened. We are vulnerable and in this vulnerability, I hope we’re more human. You see, to err is human, to be vulnerable is human and so, in a sense, I’m looking now to find something hopeful that’s come out of this, ironically enough, that we ourselves may recognize what it is to be “the other.”
So you think the attacks should teach us all how to empathize?
You know, when we saw that picture of that little girl running, the Vietnam shot, that little terrified girl, napalm around her — remember that? That should be our little girl from now on. That’s the thing you see. That little girl should be considered our little girl.
Remember Einstein? I still lean on Einstein. I love to quote Einstein because no one dares contradict me. Einstein said shortly before he died, he was so overwhelmed, his own findings led to Hiroshima, subsequently — the irony — he tore his hair when he learned about Hiroshima. He never expected [the bomb] to be dropped on human beings, and then he said something along the lines of, “Everything in the world has changed with the split atom except one thing — the way we think.” We have to think anew. If we don’t think anew we’re in the soup.
And are people now thinking anew?
Remember, all my books have dealt with the extraordinary possibilities of ordinary Americans. And we saw it of course with the tenacity of the firefighters and the cops and the paramedics and everybody. So the ordinary American, I think, senses something deep down, inchoate though the feeling is, that our spokesmen, politicians or whoever they are, don’t understand at all.
Will the current campaign — this long War Against Terrorism we’ve embarked upon — become another Vietnam for the United States?
I don’t know. I wish to hell I knew because there’s no precedent for this. It won’t even be Vietnam because Vietnam was a country, where of course we had no business being to begin with. It was an obscene misadventure. Now, there are groups, there are fragments, we know that. Afghanistan is a fragmented land and it’s one warlord against another, and even the Northern Alliance, when it comes to human rights, have not been overwhelmingly great. I think we have to have this new move, a whole new Einsteinian approach. I return to him all the time.
Here is an interview with him on the radio show, The Connection. An excellent program.
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