Studs Terkel

LANDSCAPING

Illustration: Since our illustrator has left a few more illustrations, I will feature them in coming articles. Right now, and he is watching, I share with you a view of my back yard. You are looking at the left field foul line. They dying shrubbery in the foreground is in right field to confuse the fielders as your writer bats left handed. It has taken over a quarter of a century of hard work to get it to this state. I hope you appreciate the rustic functionality. If not, you are invited to get into the batters box (near the end on the clothesline) and I will personally throw 7 inch baseballs at you. Or perhaps our illustrator will relent. I certainly hope I don't have to vist him personally and throw seven inch baseballs at him.

This is another opportunity to introduce someone I admired for years. I first heard and then latter met him at the studios of what was then the finest community centered fine arts radio station in the country, WFMT, back when it was located in the Lasalle-Wacker building. He had a regular show, Monday through Friday at 10:00 am during which he interviewed Pete Seegar, Lord Richard Buckley, Miles Davis, Chicago gang leaders, Big Bill Broonzey, and an impressive list of classical performers and serious writers. That was back in the late 50s, and I understand his relationship with the station that gave us Mike Nichols went far back. However, this was in the very early days of FM radio and so not as accessible as any FM station today. It was the day of AM radio.

Since then, he has become very well known. His article speaks for itself. Personally, I find it a bit frightening as I was aware of the governmental atrocities he had listed and gone through, but was too young to have first-hand knowledge of them. Now I learn that he finds the government today frightening. Well, as the saying goes, if he is frightened, I'm frightened.

He is also a Law School Graduate from the University of Chicago when it still counted. :)

About his discussion on the petition signing, his official statement was "I never met a petition I didn't like."

That attempt to blackball him from the media happened when Mahalea Jackson had a special on CBS and wanted Studs to MC. The reason was that she knew he has interviewed and supported Martin Luther King and had helped her in her career. When they tried this, she refused to go on. Suddenly, Studs was no longer a "communist."

The only time I had heard him properly ridiculed was when he had Big Bill Broonzey on and asked him "When you sing the blues, why do you repeat the first line?"

The answer was "Oh thas so in if ya miss it the first time around yew kin git the next time."

Far from being chagrined, Studs just emitted his characteristic cackle.

Sometimes today he is heard on Democracy Now with Amy Goodman.

*ZNet | Repression*

*The Wiretap This Time *

*by Studs Terkel; NYT

; November

07, 2007*

EARLIER this month, the Senate Intelligence Committee and the

White House agreed to allow the executive branch to conduct

dragnet interceptions of the electronic communications of people

in the United States. They also agreed to "immunize" American

telephone companies from lawsuits charging that after 9/11 some

companies collaborated with the government to violate the

Constitution and existing federal law. I am a plaintiff in one

of those lawsuits, and I hope Congress thinks carefully before

denying me, and millions of other Americans, our day in court.

During my lifetime, there has been a sea change in the way that

politically active Americans view their relationship with

government. In 1920, during my youth, I recall the Palmer raids

in which more than 10,000 people were rounded up, most because

they were members of particular labor unions or belonged to

groups that advocated change in American domestic or foreign

policy. Unrestrained surveillance was used to further the

investigations leading to these detentions, and the Bureau of

Investigation - the forerunner to the F.B.I. - eventually

created a database on the activities of individuals. This

activity continued through the Red Scare of the period.

In the 1950s, during the sad period known as the McCarthy era,

one's political beliefs again served as a rationale for

government monitoring. Individual corporations and entire

industries were coerced by government leaders into informing on

individuals and barring their ability to earn a living.

I was among those blacklisted for my political beliefs. My

crime? I had signed petitions. Lots of them. I had signed on in

opposition to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes and in favor of rent

control and pacifism. Because the petitions were thought to be

Communist-inspired, I lost my ability to work in television and

radio after refusing to say that I had been "duped" into signing

my name to these causes.

By the 1960s, the inequities in civil rights and the debate over

the Vietnam war spurred social justice movements. The

government's response? More surveillance. In the name of

national security, the F.B.I. conducted warrantless wiretaps of

political activists, journalists, former White House staff

members and even a member of Congress.

Then things changed. In 1975, the hearings led by Senator Frank

Church of Idaho revealed the scope of government surveillance of

private citizens and lawful organizations. As Americans saw the

damage, they reached a consensus that this unrestrained

surveillance had a corrosive impact on us all.

In 1978, with broad public support, Congress passed the Foreign

Intelligence Surveillance Act, which placed national security

investigations, including wiretapping, under a system of

warrants approved by a special court. The law was not perfect,

but as a result of its enactment and a series of subsequent

federal laws, a generation of Americans has come to adulthood

protected by a legal structure and a social compact making clear

that government will not engage in unbridled, dragnet seizure of

electronic communications.

The Bush administration, however, tore apart that carefully

devised legal structure and social compact. To make matters

worse, after its intrusive programs were exposed, the White

House and the Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a bill that

legitimized blanket wiretapping without individual warrants. The

legislation directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment of the

Constitution, requiring the government to obtain a warrant

before reading the e-mail messages or listening to the telephone

calls of its citizens, and to state with particularity where it

intends to search and what it expects to find.

Compounding these wrongs, Congress is moving in a haphazard

fashion to provide a "get out of jail free card" to the

telephone companies that violated the rights of their

subscribers. Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is

forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time

of crisis. But it's impossible for Congress to know the

motivations of these companies or to know how the government

will use the private information it received from them.

And it is not as though the telecommunications companies did not

know that their actions were illegal. Judge Vaughn Walker of

federal district court in San Francisco, appointed by President

George H. W. Bush, noted that in an opinion in one of the

immunity provision lawsuits the "very action in question has

previously been held unlawful."

I have observed and written about American life for some time.

In truth, nothing much surprises me anymore. But I always feel

uplifted by this: Given the facts and an opportunity to act, the

body politic generally does the right thing. By revealing the

truth in a public forum, the American people will have the facts

to play their historic, heroic role in putting our nation back

on the path toward freedom. That is why we deserve our day in court.

Studs Terkel is the author of the forthcoming "Touch and Go: A

Memoir."