1. What caused you to become an activist and when was this?I wouldn't really call myself an activist. That's a term of honor, it should be reserved for people out there on the streets, doing the hard work of organizing, building networks, unions, soup kitchens, halfway houses, health centers -- infrastructures for dissent and change, for justice and mercy. I'm just a commentator; at best, a synthesizer of the efforts of countless other people. I see my role as simply using the very limited talents I have, on the rather obscure platforms that I have, to try to "inoculate the world with disillusionment," as Henry Miller put it. To try to dig out a few shards of reality from the slag-heap of lies, corruption and ruin that the powerful have heaped upon us all.
To be absolutely honest, I wish I didn't have to deal with it. There are a great many other things that I find more interesting and meaningful than politics. But it's been forced on me by the times we live in. I don't mind a reasonable amount of corruption, chicanery, power games, hypocrisy. That's human nature, it's always there and always will be. I'm no idealist. I don't seek a perfect world. But when the corruption and abuse of power spike up to toxic levels, you can't just sit back and watch. If you've got the slightest bit of love or regard for your country, for your people – or just people in general, for the whole millennia-long project of human enlightenment -- then you've got to speak out when forces and factions try to drag us back down into the mud.
But although today the toxic spike is at all-time high, this right-wing tide has been rising for almost 30 years now – and I've been trying to speak out against it for almost that long. I could see it coming, could feel it in the air, way back in the Seventies. I used to watch these TV preachers late at night, back when everyone thought they were a joke -- Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, the whole sick crew. I didn't think they were a joke. I could tell they were introducing a new kind of poison into American society, a new kind of hate and intolerance and blind zealotry, demonizing their opponents, giving no quarter, no compromise, and telling the most outrageous lies and distortions to serve their purposes. I could see they were striking a chord with too many people, they were deliberately stirring up old fears and prejudices that, if left alone, would have eventually died off as any kind of active force in society. But they brought it all back, juiced it back to life like Frankenstein's monster. I saw too that they were harnessing religious fervor to very specific, secular, right-wing political causes.
I saw the other side of this two-pronged assault on American democracy start to take hold in those same years too. The Young Americans for Freedom, the fanatical tax-cutters, the slanderers of the poor, the war junkies -- little weedy twerps who got all het up fantasizing about killing Commies and building arsenals of big, throbbing nukes or what have you. This was the beginning of that right-wing conveyor belt that has produced hard-hearted apparatchiks like John Roberts and all the other Grover Norquist clones that infest our government and culture now -- stunted souls, people who hate the very idea of a "common good."
continued:
http://www.bradblog.com/archives/00001861.htm
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