Interview with David Barsamian, Boulder, Colorado, 1996
from The Future of History: Interviews with David Barsamian
This interview with David Barsamian, published in The Future of History, was conducted on December 16, 1996. Typically, it touches upon a broad range of topics—the power of Langston Hughes’s poetry, the radicalizing influence of the black freedom struggle, the culture of conformity in academia—within the broader context of understanding the dynamics of social change. Howard also describes the origins and evolution of his legendary friendship with MIT professor Noam Chomsky. He says: “Like rock and roll groups. I was the warm-up. I had lots of emotional statements surrounding several facts. Noam would come on with one vaguely emotional statement and 7,000 facts. It seemed to me a good combination.” For nearly half a century, Chomsky and Zinn were the radical deans of American public intellectual life, in large part because they allowed themselves, in Howard’s words, to “be encouraged by historical examples of social change, by how surprising changes take place suddenly, when you least expect it, not because of a miracle from on high, but because people have labored patiently for a long time.” We could do worse than follow their example.
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DAVID BARSAMIAN: I was just looking at a book of poetry of Langston Hughes. You had an opportunity to meet while you were at Spelman College in Atlanta. Do you remember that?
Do I remember that? I’m the one who told you about that! I could have pretended to your audience that you just know all these things. But I told you that I met Langston Hughes, because I tell everybody I’ve met important people, whether I’ve met them or not. I actually did meet Langston Hughes. Not a serious meeting. It’s not like when you and I sit down together and have cappuccino at the Cafe Algiers in Cambridge. This wasn’t like that at all. I was teaching at Spelman. They invited him down to the Atlanta University Center. I was dispatched to pick him up at the airport, which I think I’ve told you is my claim to being a revolutionary. I pick people up at the airport. Sometimes even bring them back to the airport. So I picked him up at the airport and spent a little time with him, a great guy. I love his poetry. Class-conscious, simple, clear, strong. I quote it whenever I can.
DB: He was an ally of the anti-fascist forces in Spain as well. He went to Spain.
That’s right. There are pictures of him speaking in Spain. He suffered because of his left-wing connections. They put a lot of pressure on him and so he had a hard time. I think at one point in his life he relented and tried to move away from that to protect himself. He was vulnerable in many ways. His personal life made him vulnerable.
DB: Because he was gay?
Exactly, because he was gay. It’s bad enough in our time, but in that time to be gay, forget it.
DB: You’ve used “Ballad of the Landlord.”
“Ballad of the Landlord” is one of my favorite poems because it’s so ferociously class-conscious. Maybe you’d like to read it. Do you know that this is the poem that got Jonathan Kozol fired from his job here in Boston? I guess that’s what attracted me to the poem. I said, Any poem that can get anybody fired is worth paying attention to.
DB: Jonathan Kozol, a National Book Award winner and noted educator, was fired for reading the poem?
Yes, he got fired. College professors can be fired for what they do, but it’s always done very indirectly because universities are supposed to be places of free inquiry. But elementary schools and middle schools and high schools make no pretense. They are totalitarian places, and they don’t make any claim to anything else. After all, they say, these are very young minds. We mustn’t expose them to class conflict. We mustn’t make them think that the country is run by the rich. We mustn’t give them the idea that you should oppose your landlord and fight eviction, which is what happens in this poem.
DB: Do you want to read it?
I’ll tell you what. Let’s both read it. We’ll have a duet. You read one and I’ll read the other.
DB: “Ballad of the Landlord,” by Langston Hughes.
Landlord, landlord, my roof has sprung a leak.
Don’t you ’member I told you about it way last week?
Landlord, landlord, these steps is broken down.
When you come up yourself it’s a wonder you don’t fall down.
Ten bucks you say I owe you?
Ten bucks you say is due?
That’s ten bucks more’n I’ll pay you
Till you fix this house up new.
What? You’re gonna get eviction orders?
You’re gonna to cut off my heat?
You’re gonna to take my furniture
And throw it in the street?
Um-huh! You talking high and mighty.
Talk on till you get through.
You ain’t gonna to be able to say a word
If I land my fist on you.
Police! Police! come and get this man!
He’s trying to ruin the government
And overturn the land!
Copper’s whistle! patrol bell! arrest
Precinct station.
Iron cell.
Headlines in press:
MAN THREATENS LANDLORD
TENANT HELD. NO BAIL.
JUDGE GIVES NEGRO 90
DAYS IN COUNTY JAIL.
What an incendiary poem. It’s a poem about civil disobedience. Challenging a law, but so obviously you being right and them being wrong. So you don’t want young kids to hear that. So if a teacher reads that to young kids, or has them read it, he’s got to go. So Jonathan Kozol went. But he had his revenge. He wrote this book (Death at an Early Age) which brought this to the attention of an awful lot of people.
DB: His subsequent books on education, Savage Inequalities and Amazing Grace, are very powerful works.
He’s a wonderfully eloquent and passionate person about poverty and inequality and racism. That connection between him and Langston Hughes was a good one.
DB: Perhaps Langston Hughes’s most famous poem is “Raisin In the Sun. A Dream Deferred.” Why don’t you read that?
I think I quote that. I shouldn’t say that, “I think I quote that.” We always say that in modesty. I know I quote that in A People’s History of the United States when I start talking about the movement of the 1960s and how much led up to it in black poetry and literature. Some of the people know that title “Raisin In the Sun” because there’s this famous play by Lorraine Hansberry and Sidney Poitier starred in this famous movie and on television and all that, but not a lot of people know that it came from Langston Hughes.
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
His language is so simple but so powerful. That image of all of that pent-up explosion. Richard Wright sort of did the same thing. Richard Wright always talked about that pent-up anger in the black population. In Black Boy, in which he talks about growing up in the South and what he went through and the humiliation and looking around him and seeing all the black people are toeing the line out of necessity, out of self-protection, but thinking, Something’s going to happen here.
DB: Speaking of something that’s going to happen here, Hughes asks, What happens to a dream deferred? Does it explode if that dream is not realized? In late October in Boulder you said that, “We can’t go on with the present polarization of wealth and poverty.”
I don’t know how long we can go on, but I know we can’t go on indefinitely. That growing gap between wealth and poverty is a recipe for trouble, for disaster, for conflict, for explosion. Here’s the Dow Jones average going up, up, up and there are the lives of people in the city. The Dow Jones average in the last fifteen years has gone up 400%. In the same period, the wages of working people, of 80% of the population, have gone down 15%. 400% up, 15% down. Now the richest 1% of the population owning 43%, 44% of the wealth. Up from the usual maybe 28%, 30%, 32%, which is bad enough and which has been a constant throughout American history. In fact it’s been so constant that when they did studies of the tax rolls in Boston in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, they concluded that 1% of the population owned 33% of the wealth. If you look at the statistics all through American history, you see that figure, a little more, a little less, around the same. Now it’s even worse and worse. So something’s got to give.
DB: Given that enormous growth in income and wealth, the inequality, if you were a member, let’s say, of the ruling class, I know you’re not, that’s why I say if——
DB: You’re just a historian, retired, professor emeritus. But let’s say if you were, wouldn’t this trend toward increasing polarization give you cause for concern? Because for you to keep your power and privilege you need stability. You don’t need unrest and upheaval.
That’s true. But there’s always this conflict within the ruling class. The people who know this from a long-term point of view say, Hey, we’d better do something about it. That’s why you see people up there in the ruling class, that’s your phrase, “ruling class.” I would never use a class-conscious phrase like that. But you used it, so I can use it. The ruling class. There have always been some members of the ruling class who wanted reforms, who wanted to ease things, who worried about a future explosion. These are the people who supported Roosevelt. They were members of the ruling class who supported Roosevelt and the New Deal reforms because they knew that they couldn’t let things go on the way they were, with the turmoil of the 1930s, that there was a revolution brewing. So there have always been people like that. I think of Felix Rohatyn, who’s this big banker. He says, Let’s not go on like this. This polarization of wealth is going too far. But on the other hand, there are all those other greedy ones. They want it now. They think of the short term. OK, maybe there’ll be rebellion against my grandchildren. It shows how their family values operate. They don’t care if the rebellion takes place against their grandchildren. But now I’m going to haul in as much as I can. And that’s what they’re doing.
DB: I’m saving the easy questions as we proceed into the interview. How does social change happen?
Thanks. I can deal with that in thirty seconds. You think I know? We know how it has happened, and we can sort of extrapolate from that, not that you can extrapolate mathematically, but you can sort of get suggestions from that. You see change happening when there has been an accumulation of grievance until it reaches a boiling point. Then something happens. When I say, look at historical situations and try to extrapolate from that, what happens in the South in the 1950s and 1960s? It’s not that suddenly black people were put back into slavery. It’s not as if there was some precipitating thing that suddenly pushed them back. They were, as the Southern white ruling class was eager to say, making progress. It was glacial progress, extremely slow. But they were making progress. But it’s not the absolute amount of progress that’s made that counts. It’s the amount of progress made against what the ideal should be in the minds of the people who are aggrieved. And the ideal in the minds of the black people was, We have to be equal. We have to be treated as equals. The progress that was being made in the South was so far from that. The recognition of that gap between what should be and what is, which existed for a long time but waited for a moment when a spark would be lit. The thing about sparks being lit is that you never know what spark is going to ignite and really result in a conflagration. After all, before the Montgomery bus boycott there had been other boycotts. Before the sit-ins of the 1960s, there had been between 1955 and 1960 sit-ins in sixteen different cities which nobody paid any attention to and which did not ignite a movement. But then in Greensboro, on February 1, 1960, these four college kids go in, sit in, and everything goes haywire. Then things are never the same. You never know, and this is I think an encouragement to people who do things, not knowing whether they will result in anything, and you do things again and again and nothing happens, that you have to do things, do things, do things, you have to light that match, light that match, light that match, not knowing how often it’s going to sputter and go out and at what point it’s going to take hold, at what point other people, seeing what happens, are going to be encouraged, provoked to do the same. That’s what happened in the civil rights movement and that’s what happens in other movements. Things take a long time. It requires patience, but not a passive patience, the patience of activism.
When I was in South Africa in 1982, I was invited there to give a lecture to the University of Capetown. At the time, apartheid defined the country, Mandela was in Robben Island, the African National Congress was outlawed, people were being banned. We know about books being banned, there, it was people who were banned. They couldn’t speak. They couldn’t go here or there. The secret police everywhere. Just before I arrived at the University of Capetown the secret police of South Africa had just broken into the offices of the student newspaper at the university and made off with all of their stuff. It was the kind of thing that happened all the time. The atmosphere was an atmosphere of terror. You would think perhaps, only seeing that, nothing is going to happen here, like you would think in the South in the early 1950s. You don’t see any sign of a civil rights revolution in the South in the early 1950s. But having come from that experience in the South, I became aware, just talking to people, going to meetings, going to a huge rally outside of Johannesburg, where everybody did everything illegal, where they sang the anthem of the African National Congress, raised the flags of the African National Congress, where banned people spoke. I suddenly was aware that underneath the surface of total control things were simmering, things were going on. I didn’t know when it would break through, but we saw it break through not long ago. Suddenly Mandela comes out of Robben Island and becomes president of the new South Africa. We should be encouraged. We shouldn’t be discouraged. We should be encouraged by historical examples of social change, by how surprising changes take place suddenly, when you least expect it, not because of a miracle from on high, but because people have labored patiently for a long time.
DB: Do you think it’s important to rethink the way we think about time? Everyone’s in a hurry. Well, this change you’re suggesting, Professor, I’m a very busy guy. I’ve got about fifteen minutes.
It’s true. We have to rethink the whole question of time. We have to get used to the idea that the great society—I’m sorry to use that phrase. All those phrases were OK: the Great Society, the New Frontier, the New Deal. They weren’t realized. We have to get accustomed to the idea that it may not come in our lifetime. We will see changes in our lifetime. Who knows what we will see? Think of Mandela, in prison for decades. Think of people in the South living in humiliation for a hundred years, waiting. I’m not saying it will take a hundred years or it will take decades. I don’t know how long it will take for important changes to take place. You never know. But when people get discouraged because they do something and nothing happens, they should really understand that the only way things will happen is if people get over the notion that they must see immediate success. If they get over that notion and persist, then they will see things happen before they even realize it.
DB: Was your job at Spelman College in Atlanta the first job you got when you got out of the university?
I call it my first “real” teaching job. I had a number of unreal teaching jobs. By unreal I mean I was teaching part-time at Upsala College in New Jersey.
DB: Now bankrupt, incidentally.
Because I taught there?
DB: This just happened. Literally, colleges are now going bankrupt.
I said patience. It took a while after I was there to reap the fruits of my being there and go bankrupt. I wouldn’t be surprised if every other place that I’ve touched goes bankrupt. I have written articles for a number of magazines. Those magazines are now defunct. I’m warning you about what will happen to Alternative Radio after this interview. You never know.
DB: I’ll take my chances.
I taught at Upsala College. How do you know about all these defunct places? Do you have a list? Anyway, I did teach there part-time. Maybe it’s defunct because it was very Lutheran. So strict. It was like being back in the time of Luther, back in the sixteenth century. But in any case, I had a part-time job there and a part-time job at Brooklyn College. But Spelman College was my first full-time teaching job. I immediately catapulted from graduate student at Columbia University to chair—I want you to take full cognizance of that—of a department. Four persons in the department. Like being head waiter in a two-waiter restaurant. Not just history. Four persons included everything: history, political science, sociology, philosophy. Four people doing all of that. We were re naissance people.
DB: What year was that?
That was in 1956 when my wife Roz and my two kids Myla and Jeff—mind if I mention their names? I want to give them air time—all trundled into our old Chevy, went down.
DB: I assume it was in terms of your socialization a rather radicalizing experience for you. I presume you lived in a black neighborhood near the college.
Actually, the first year we were there—we were there a total of seven—we lived in a white, working-class neighborhood on the edge of Atlanta, which was an interesting experience in itself. We weren’t far from Stone Mountain, which is a Ku Klux Klan gathering place. We were living in this first house we’d ever lived in. We had always lived in the slums in New York or in low-income housing projects. Here we were in a little house like the other little houses on this block of working-class white people. One of the first things that happened when we were there is we hear all this noise. We go outside. There was a main street about a block from our house. There was a parade of people with white hoods, KKK, marching to Stone Mountain.
We spent a year there. It was sort of inconvenient traveling back and forth. We moved to the Spelman College campus, which was surrounded by a black community. We lived essentially in the black community for the next six years. You say radicalizing experience? I guess so. Of course I like to think that I was a radical even before I came to Spelman College. But we all like to pretend that we were radical at the age of three, right? You might say I had been radicalized by working in the shipyards, but maybe a little more radicalized by being in a war. But probably that time at Spelman College was the most intense experience of learning in my life. I think it’s fair to say that. Talk about social change, I could see social change happening all around me and then writing about it, observing it, participating in it, seeing my Spelman College students so controlled in that old guard atmosphere of the old South in which students, especially young black women, were being trained to take their obedient places in the segregated society. Trained to pour tea and wear white gloves and march into and out of chapel and really to be kept inside this kind of nunnery. Then suddenly to see them break out of this when they look at television and watch the sit-ins taking place in Greensboro and Rock Hill, South Carolina, and Nashville and to see them gathering. Julian Bond across the street at Morehouse College meeting with Lonnie King, the football captain at Morehouse College, gathering people from Spelman and getting together and planning the first sit-ins in the spring of 1960 in Atlanta. My students literally leaping over that stone wall that surrounded the Spelman campus and doing what they weren’t supposed to do. Seeing this remarkable change in them, this growth of courage and getting arrested, going to jail. Marian Wright Edelman, my student at Spelman, going to jail. A photo of her appearing in the newspapers the next day showing this very studious Spelman student behind bars reading a book which she had brought along with her so she wouldn’t miss her class or homework. Seeing the South change in that time, seeing white Southerners change, seeing white Southerners get used to the idea that the South is going to change and accepting it.
DB: What I meant by radicalizing you, I was thinking in terms of being a witness to an oppressive mechanism, segregation, U.S.-style apartheid, Jim Crow, and then watching the resistance to it grow.
Anybody who was in any way in the U.S. socially conscious knew vaguely that there was racial segregation. But to be right there and to witness it in action, to talk to my students about their early lives, about the first time they realized that they were black and being considered different and treated differently. To participate in sit-ins and to see the atmosphere around us in Rich’s Department Store suddenly change from friendly to hostile when four of us, two black and two white, my wife and I and two black students from Spelman, sit down in this lunch counter at Rich’s. Suddenly it’s as if a bomb had been dropped or plague had been visited on it. The people gathering around us and shouting and cursing. Getting an inkling, being white people, just an inkling, of what it is to be black and be subject all your life to the thought that if you step one foot out of line you’ll be surrounded by people who are threatening you. That’s a learning experience. Learning comes in layers. There’s something you think you know? You don’t know it until you see it very up close, penetrating you. So it was a learning experience.
I learned a lot about teaching, too. I learned that the most important thing about teaching is not what you do in the classroom but what you do outside of the classroom and what you do to bring the lessons of books and the writings of thinkers and the facts of history, what you do to make a connection between that and the world outside. To go outside the classroom yourself, to bring your students outside the classroom, or to have them bring you outside the classroom, because very often they do it first and you say, I can’t hang back. I’m their teacher. I have to be there with them. And to learn that the best kind of teaching is the one that makes this connection between social action and book learning.
DB: Why do you think so many of your colleagues, and I think this is a fair statement to make, really want to just busy themselves with their scholarship and turning out papers and attending conferences? I’m not saying that doesn’t have any value. But when it comes to “out there,” to being engaged with what’s happening in the streets, in society, they don’t feel it’s appropriate.
There’s a powerful drive in our society for safety and security. And everybody is vulnerable because we all are part of a hierarchy of power in which unless we’re at the very, very top, unless we’re billionaires, or the president of the U.S., or the boss, and very few of us are bosses, we are somewhere on some lower rung in the hierarchy of power, where somebody has power over us, somebody has the power to fire us, to withhold a raise, to punish us in some way. Here in this rich country, so prideful of the economic system, the most prominent, the most clear-cut thing you can say about this great economic success is that everybody is insecure. Everybody is nervous. Even if you’re doing well, you’re nervous. Something will happen to you. In fact, the people who are doing fairly well, the middle class, are more nervous than the people at the bottom, who know what to expect and have smaller expectations. There’s this nervousness, this insecurity, and this economic fear of saying the wrong thing, doing the wrong thing, stepping out of line. The academic world has its own special culture of conformity and being professional. All the professions have the cult of professionalism, even in your profession, radio broadcasters. Being professional means not being committed.
DB: Not having an agenda.
Right. There are people who might call you unprofessional, because sometimes I suspect you have an agenda. Sometimes I suspect you care about what’s going on in the world. Sometimes I suspect that the people you interview are the people whose ideas you want to broadcast. You’re not supposed to do that. It’s unprofessional. It’s unprofessional to be a teacher who goes out on picket lines, or who even invites students out on picket lines. It’s unprofessional to be a teacher who says to students, Look, instead of giving you a final exam, your assignment for the semester is to go out into the community and work with some organization that you believe in and then do a report on that instead of taking a final exam of multiple choice questions asking you who was President during the Mexican War. So that’s unprofessional. And you will stand out. You will stick out if the stuff you write is not written for scholarly journals but is written for everybody to read, because certainly, the stuff written for scholarly journals is not written for everybody to read. It’s deliberately written in such a way that not everybody can read it. Very few people can read it. So if you write stuff that the ordinary person can read, you’re suspect. They’ll say you’re not a scholar, you’re a journalist. Or you’re not a scholar, you’re a propagandist, because you have a point of view. They don’t have a point of view. Scholarly articles don’t have a point of view. Of course, they really do. They have an agenda. But they don’t say it. They may not even know they have an agenda. The agenda is obedience. The agenda is silence. The agenda is safety. The agenda is, Don’t rock the boat.
DB: One of the criticisms of Alternative Radio that I hear from program directors around the country is that it’s “not objective.” It’s not balanced. These are terms of abuse in order to actually limit the possibility of people actually hearing dissenting voices such as yours.
This business of “balance” is very funny. What is balance? The MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour is balanced, right? They have people on the far right balanced by people on the not-so-far right balanced by people in the middle balanced by one person two degrees to the left of the middle. That’s balanced. If you said to MacNeil/Lehrer, Why don’t you have Noam Chomsky on as a regular commentator to balance all the Assistant Secretaries of State and the Secretaries of Defense and the Congressmen, just one person to balance hundreds of others? They would say, No, that’s not what we mean by balance.
The fact is, things are already unbalanced. The pretense is that things are balanced and you want to keep them that way. But of course they’re already so far out of balance, we would have to put an enormous amount of left-wing weight onto the scales in order even to make the scales move slightly towards balance.
DB: You just mentioned that MIT professor Noam Chomsky. When did you first meet Chomsky?
I first met Noam—do you mind if I call him Noam? I call you David.
DB: Very familiar.
Very familiar. Unprofessional. I first met Noam, I had moved not long before to Boston from the South. It was the summer of 1965. I had vaguely heard of him from somebody who talked about him as a linguist. I knew there was a guy named Chomsky at MIT and that he was brilliant in the field of linguistics. That’s all I knew about him. I didn’t know that he had any interest in politics. This is a funny thing to say. If somebody said today about Noam Chomsky, Oh, I didn’t know that he was interested in politics, well! And then, something was happening. I moved out of the South but I was still in touch with things in the region. A lot of people were being arrested in Jackson, Mississippi, black people, SNCC people, and being held in the big compound because there were too many of them to fit into the jails. It was decided to send a delegation of people from the Boston area down to take a look at things and make a report. Bob Zellner, one of the original SNCC people, one of the few white people in SNCC, a white Southerner from Alabama, a fantastic person, organized this and asked me to come. I said OK. I found myself on a plane going south sitting next to a guy who introduced himself as Noam Chomsky. A very immodest statement, don’t you think, for him to say, I’m Noam Chomsky? So we talked all the way down. Then we talked while we were there and we talked on the way back. We became friends. I became aware of the fact that he was a guy who wasn’t just interested in linguistics—although he had a slight interest in linguistics—but he was very, very deeply concerned about what was going on in the country and the world and it occurred to me, talking to him, that he was very smart. So from then on, and then of course with the Vietnam War escalating just about that time, the two of us found ourselves on the same platform again and again at the same rallies. So we got to know one another.
DB: You’ve said that you were often the opening act for Chomsky.
Like rock and roll groups. I was the warm-up. I had a lot of emotional statements surrounding several facts. Noam would come on with one vaguely emotional statement and 7,000 facts. It seemed to me a good combination.
DB: As you know, he’s not a flamboyant, charismatic speaker. He would be the first to acknowledge that. What accounts for the enormous crowds that he attracts, not just in the U.S. but all around the world?
You say, Not just in the U.S. He attracts bigger crowds in Canada and in Europe and now lately in Latin America. I just talked to him today. He just returned from Latin America. Everywhere he goes there are huge crowds. Everywhere I go to speak, five hundred people show up. They inform me quietly, Noam Chomsky was here two weeks ago. Two thousand people came to hear him. Is this a message they’re trying to give me? I’m inadequate? The reason so many people turn out to hear him is one, they’ve heard about him. I guess he’s famous. It’s interesting that he should be famous, because all the organs of power in the U.S. are trying their best not to make him famous, to shut him up, not to publish him, not to pay attention to him, not to put him on national radio or TV. But his message has been so powerful and so outrageously true and so backed up by information and so very often ahead of everybody else. Look, he was the first one in this country to talk about East Timor. Now the East Timor rebels get the Nobel Prize. As I go around the country, wherever I go Noam has already spoken or is about to speak there. Plus he speaks at a lot of places where I don’t speak. I have run into so many people all over who say that they went to hear him speak and it had an amazing effect on them, as you say, without him being flamboyant. Just the power of what he says, the information that piles up, so devastating and so obviously true, and with such documentation. It amounts to a powerful indictment of our society, of our economic system, of our political system, of the hypocrisy, of the failure of the press to report what is going on in the world. To me it’s a very encouraging thing that wherever Noam speaks huge crowds turn out. It shows me that there is an enormous population in this country that is hungry for information that they don’t get in the major media.
Another encouraging thing to me is the alternate radio and alternate media. I can’t tell you how many people have said to me, I know you think I’m buttering you up, yes, I guess I am buttering you up. Call it margarine, it’s the New Age. People say to me, Hey, I heard the talk you gave. And they mention some radio station somewhere that I never heard of and apparently you have this satellite that’s floating around. You bounce a talk by Noam Chomsky or by me or by Barbara Ehrenreich off these satellites and they go out to radio stations. You notice how technologically astute I am in my accurate description of exactly how this thing works? It bounces off the satellite, goes to these radio stations and then into people’s homes? Isn’t that how it works exactly?
DB: So despite what the pundits are telling us about the population being passive and quiescent, you think there’s an audience there for dissidence?
Absolutely. I talk very often to captive audiences. Not prisoners, I mean people who turn out to hear me talk, and I imagine this is even more true of the larger crowds that turn out to hear Noam. These are not the radicals of the community. Five hundred people come to hear me in Duluth, Minnesota. There are not five hundred radicals in Duluth, Minnesota, who have come to hear me tell them what they already know. I don’t know why they’re there. Maybe there’s not a lot to do in Duluth that night. That seems like an insult to Duluth. There are a few things to do. Who knows why? What I’m trying to say is they’re not people who are already aficionados of the left and of radical messages. They come maybe out of curiosity. Their interest has been piqued by an article in the newspaper or whatever and they come to hear me. Then I deliver what I believe is a radical message: this is what’s wrong with our economic system. It’s fundamental. This is what’s wrong with our political system. It’s fundamental. We need to redistribute the wealth in this country. We need to use it in a rational way. We need to take this enormous arms budget and not just cut it slightly but dismantle it because we have to make up our minds we’re not going to go to war anymore. We’re not going to militarily intervene anymore. If we’re not going to go to war anymore, then we have $250 billion. Then we don’t have to worry about Medicare, Social Security, child care, universal health care, education. We can have a better society. I say things which if you mentioned them to MacNeil/Lehrer they would say, That’s a little too much for our listeners. It’s not too much. I think this is what Noam does too. You tell people what makes common sense, it makes common sense that if you’re a very, very rich country nobody in the country should be hungry. Nobody should be homeless. Nobody should be without health care. The richest country in the world. Nobody should be without these things. We have the resources but they’re being wasted or given somewhere to somebody. It’s common sense. So there are people all over this country, millions of people, who would listen to such a message and say, yes, yes, yes. The problem is to organize these people into a movement.
DB: Mike Moore, the celebrated film director of Roger and Me and of TV Nation very effectively uses humor to convey political ideas, as do Molly Ivins and Jim Hightower and yourself. Do you feel that humor is a way to maybe hook a larger audience and to make left, progressive ideas more attractive?
I don’t like to think of it that way. I don’t go home and say, I think we’ve got to reach people, so I’ll try to get humorous. Rather, it’s a way of having a little fun with the world in a world that is not giving us a lot of fun, that’s giving us tragedy, pictures of hungry people and pictures of war. Maybe it’s something I learned from being in the South and being in the black community, to see how much humor there was among people who you might say have no right to laugh. There’s nothing to laugh about, and these people are laughing and having fun. Or people in the army, people at war. They’ve got to have humor. They’ve got to have fun. They need to laugh. We’ve got to have fun even while we’re dealing with serious things. We’ve got to represent in the present what we want in the future. I suppose that’s why we do that. It’s not a planned conspiracy.
DB: Have you noticed any changes in your profession, history? I hesitate to use the term “revisionist,” because it smacks of the Soviet era. But along the lines of A People’s History, your book, there’s James Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me. Have there been some changes in this area?
No question there have been changes. Obviously not enough to say, The teaching of history has changed. But obviously enough changes to alarm the right wing in this country, to alarm the American Legion, to alarm senators, to alarm Lynne Cheney, Robert Dole, William Bennett, Gertrude Himmelfarb, and to alarm all these people who are holding on to the old history. They’re alarmed because there have been changes. The story of Columbus has changed now, not in the majority of schools around the country, but in thousands. This is alarming. What? Young kids are going to begin to think of Columbus as not just an adventurer, but as a predator, a kidnapper, an enslaver, a torturer, a bad person and think maybe that conquest and expansion are not good things and that the search for gold is not something to be welcomed? Kids, be happy! Gold has been found! No, greed is no good. And maybe, let’s take a look at the Indian societies that Columbus came upon. How did they live? How did they treat one another? Columbus stories that are told in the schools don’t usually include stories of how the Indians were living on this continent.
Somebody sent me a letter reminding me of the work of William Brandon. He has done research for decades about Indians and their communities on this hemisphere before Columbus came and after. His research was in the French archives because he works in France. The reports came back from the French missionaries, the Jesuits, on how the Indians live. It’s an amazing story and one that would make anybody question capitalism, greed, competition, disparate wealth, hierarchy. To start to hint about that, telling a new kind of Columbus story, a new kind of Native American story, is subversive of the way things are. Also, the Reconstruction period is being told in a new way. Eric Foner’s book Reconstruction is marvelous. It’s a very different treatment of Reconstruction and the books on Reconstruction that existed when I was going to graduate school in the 1950s, where incidentally they did not put on my reading list W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, which you might say is an earlier version of Eric Foner’s book, at least a vital predecessor to it. So a lot of history teaching has changed. Not enough yet. We need to do a lot more. But just enough to frighten the keepers of the old.
DB: We had an opportunity in late October to visit the new maximum security prison in Florence, Colorado. It was a rather extraordinary trip.
Don’t deny the fact that you drove the getaway car. Also the get-there car. I didn’t have a car at my disposal, I was speaking in Boulder, and I had this old friend of mine in prison, in this maximum maximum, they call it “ad max” security federal prison in southern Colorado. It was good that we had a lot of fun on the way, because when we got there it was no fun. Grim. Frightening. Something out of some fantasy of totalitarianism. New. Technologically admirable. But holding these prisoners in such a tight grip. The man that I visited I’ve known for twenty-five years, and he is actually an extraordinary human being. There are some extraordinary human beings behind bars. Sure, there are mad killers and rapists. There are those. But there are also extraordinary people behind bars who shouldn’t be there. He is one of them. I could not shake hands with him when I visited. We were separated by this glass wall. We had to talk through these phones. So there’s no contact. It’s called a no-contact visit. Yet, although there is no contact, there’s all this between us, before he comes out to see me he is strip-searched by the guards. After he sees me he is strip-searched again by the guards. That’s humiliating, taking all his clothes off, inspecting all the cavities of his body. Assuming that I, Houdini-like, have managed to slip things through the glass to him which will enable him to escape from there. It was a nightmare. What was amazing was that not everybody commits suicide in a situation like that, that somebody like my friend Jimmy Barrett, and I think it’s because of his social consciousness, has the strength to withstand that. You talk about patience. Jimmy says: Patience. Things will change. I will get out of here and things will be different.
DB: I was wondering also about the larger societal message that a building like that sends. I was sitting in the lobby while you were inside talking to your friend. What do I see? An incredible building costing a lot of money, with tiled inlaid floors, high ceilings, huge glass windows, smiling photos of Clinton and Janet Reno and the prison warden and assistant warden. You see in the back “Florence ADX. First in Security.” While I was sitting there waiting for you I had a very mischievous thought that I’d like to connect the words “in” and “security” together. What struck me was that about the same time that we were there the New York Times, a well-known source of radical information, reported that kids in the New York City public school system, the largest one in the country, were meeting in gymnasiums, cafeterias, and locker rooms because of overcrowding. That contrast was startling.
I remember you pointing that out to me on our way back, which was not as fun-filled as our way there. Those ironies, those contrasts, are such as to make one think very, very hard about our society. To think that there are more young black people in prison than in college, or to think that the state of California spends more money on prisons than on schools. Or to think that it costs more to house one person in a prison than to send one person to Harvard, room and board, tuition and everything. Maybe we should have a prisoner exchange, Harvard students and prisoners, just for a little while, and see what happens.