A personal hero, Studs Terkel, appeared on The Daily Show last night (Studs' name links to video of the interview). Studs always raises my spirits. He really does, I love the guy. Although I'm not sure how to interpret the royalty status he gets from various "liberal" media outlets. I sort of recall a slight upsurge of interest in I.F. Stone, just before he died. Like there was a combination of actual desire to pay tribute to and learn something new from an iconoclastic American treasure, along with a vague imprimatur of acceptability predicated on perceived harmlessness. Shit, that crazy old man's gonna croak anytime now, plus, who the fuck's gonna pay attention to a 2,000 year old man?
And what does the target audience of The Daily Show know about or give a shit about Studs Terkel, I wonder? What do 19-year-old kids think when they watch that interview? Does it just bounce off of them like any other boring & irrelevant crapstream about old people, or what?
As the senior citizens among us know, it's all denouement after age 22.
At least it seems to me like he's been getting a lot more mainstream media attention in the last several years, and I'd guess that it's probably partly because reaching a certain age -- in Studs' case, older than Christ OR the hills, put together -- he's excused for saying kooky things like telling the "President, so-called," to "BUGGER OFF!" But Studs didn't acquire some kind of senile "feistiness" at age 90 or something, like some cantankerous coot in the neighborhood who hobbles out of the house and steals your baseballs when they go onto his lawn, screeching, "Bugger off, you kids! Bugger off!" Check the record, man, he was always a big-mouthed cranky socialist. Labor movement, McCarthy hassles, Mahalia Jackson, blah blah blah ... anyone who might even stumble on this blog accidentally already knows everything about Studs. Or else, if they don't, they know how to work a Google, so if they didn't know everything about Studs, they must not care, because they coulda found out by now. Yep, good old Google-brand Internet search engine. Really there's no reason for any of us to talk to one another ever again, is there?
2 comments:
> there's no reason for any of us to talk to one another ever again, is there?
No, but that wont stop anyone, sadly.
Anyway, dewd, "the kids" like to say "bugger off" nowadays. With their "pointer fingers" in the air.
I got nuthin. I just liked the name.
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