The Patriarch

Among the list of sponsors of the World Can't Wait (to Drive Out the Bush Regime) rallies, marches, and meetings occurring in 80 U.S. cities on October 5, there is one name particularly noteworthy for its novelty, as well as its owner's remarkable longevity and moral authority.

Studs Terkel, now 94, will be agitating for regime change in D.C., in Chicago on October 5. No stranger to protest, Terkel has participated in every significant American movement for social change and liberation since the early days of the Great Depression, when he decided to abandon his youthful plan to become a lawyer and instead went to work for Roosevelt's Works Progress Administration (WPA).

He was blacklisted during the McCarthy era and in the front line of protest against the Vietnam War.

His first book, "Giants of Jazz," came out in 1956 (I read it in about 1960). But his most famous work is 1970's "Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression."

Born in New York, but raised in Chicago from a very early age, Terkel grew up in a hard-working Jewish family on the South Side. His father, a tailor, and mother, a seamstress, ran a boarding house as a sideline for a time, and Studs credits his juvenile fascination with the odd collection of guests at the evening dinner table for his lifelong curiosity about what makes people tick.

Somewhere in his youth friends tagged him with the nickname because they thought he resembled Chicago novelist James T. Farrell's fictional protagonist, Studs Lonigan, a brawling, working-class Irish wastrel and quick-buck artist. Presumably Studs's friends slapped this inappropriate moniker on him because they thought he was tough. In fact, he turned out to be a great deal tougher than Lonigan, who died young, ground down by an abrasive world. By contrast, Terkel has shown amazing elasticity throughout his long life, and astonished his doctors by surviving, then thriving after open heart surgery last year, at age 93.

He'll need a ride to the Chicago protests next Thursday because he's never learned to drive.

Earlier this year he joined other Chicago-area plaintiffs in filing a suit in federal district court against AT&T to stop them from giving customer phone records to the National Security Agency without a court order. He's obviously not done yet.

On the subject of the upcoming protests, Studs Terkel offers us a sort of prose poem, also posted at the World Can't Wait site:

It’s time we assert ourselves,
And said to these outrageous liars
Who offended our sense of decency
And native intelligence

It’s time to BUGGER OFF!
Get lost!
And let’s unite on behalf of peace and sanity
and all that makes life rich and worthwhile.

Tom Paine was perhaps the most eloquent visionary
of the American Revolution.

His book, "Common Sense," sold a couple of hundred thousand copies.
The population was hardly four or five million,
which means, of course, people read it.
It was a best seller for years.

He says, in that,
"Let us not let them confuse reason with treason.
Enough of that nonsense."

OUT!
VAMOOSE,
Bush administration!

What I’m saying, really, is:
The World Can’t Wait!
Drive Out the Bush Regime!