Posted on 01/08/2009 5:36:18 PM PST by nickcarraway
I've borrowed Woody Guthrie's 1942 song to report that this is my last column for the Voice. I'm not retiring; I've never forgotten my exchange on that decision with Duke Ellington. In those years, he and the band played over 200 one-nighters a year, with jumps from, say, Toronto to Dallas. On one of his rare nights off, Duke looked very beat, and I presumptuously said: "You don't have to keep going through this. With the standards you've written, you could retire on your ASCAP income."
Duke looked at me as if I'd lost all my marbles.
"Retire!" he crescendoed. "Retire to what?!"
I'm still writing. In 2009, the University Press of California will publish my I>At the Jazz Band Ball: 60 Years on the Jazz Scene, and, later in the year, a sequel to The War on the Bill of Rights and the Gathering Resistance will be out on Seven Stories Press with the title Is This America? And I'll be breaking categories elsewhere, including in my weekly syndicated United Media column, which reaches 250 papers, and my jazz and country music pieces in The Wall Street Journal.
I came here in 1958 because I wanted a place where I could write freely on anything I cared about. There was no pay at first, but the Voice turned out to be a hell of a resounding forum. My wife, Margot—later an editor here and a columnist far more controversial than I've been—called what this paper was creating "a community of consciousness." Though a small Village "alternative" newspaper, we were reaching many around the country who were turned off by almost any establishment you could think of.
Being here early on, I felt I'd finally been able to connect with what had first startled and excited me as I was reading my journalism mentor, George Seldes, the first press critic. When I was 15, I saw his four-page newsletter, "In Fact: An Antidote to Falsehoods in the Daily Press." He broke stories I'd never seen in any other paper, including The New York Times, stories that gave scientific data on how cigarette smoking caused cancer.
Seldes was also a labor man. You could find "In Fact" in some union halls, and for years, his name was blacked out of The New York Times because, in 1934, he testified about journalists' wages before the National Labor Relations Board just as the Newspaper Guild was trying to organize the Times.
"In Fact" reached a circulation of 176,000 and included newspaper reporters around the country who fed Seldes news that they couldn't get into their own papers.
Seldes was, to say the least, not an admirer of J. Edgar Hoover, and when "In Fact" died in 1950, one of the reasons was that FBI agents had gone into post offices around the nation and copied down the names of subscribers—and let them know they were known.
Seldes was also my hero when, after Senator Joseph McCarthy called him into a closed-door session to admit to his Bolshevism, the Great Red Hunter eventually came out of the room, looking unprecedentedly subdued as he told the waiting press that Seldes had been "cleared." George had intimidated Tailgunner Joe.
As a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, Seldes, because of his stories, was kicked out of Hitler's Germany, Mussolini's Italy, and Stalin's Russia. Years later, he and I corresponded for a while, and then I finally met him in 1985 when he was in New York promoting his book, The Great Thoughts, about a gallery of freethinkers through the centuries. Some of his other books include Never Tire of Protesting and Lords of the Press.
At 94, Seldes was no longer in the news business, but as I came into his hotel room around nine one morning, he was doing what I do every morning: tearing pages out of stacks of newspapers. Instead of saying, "Hello," he grabbed a handful of clips, gave them to me, and said, "You ought to look into these stories!" Then, smiling, he said, "I'm getting old, yes, but to hell with being mellow."
In 1995, he died at the age of 104 in Hartland Four Corners, Vermont.
My other main mentor, I.F. "Izzy" Stone, was inspired by "In Fact" to start "I.F. Stone's Weekly," where mainstream newspaper reporters also sent stories that they couldn't get into their own papers.
One of the lessons I learned from Izzy was to avoid press conferences: "You're not going to get the real story there," he'd say. Instead, I learned from him to find mid-level workers in bureaucracies whom reporters seldom thought to interview. That's how, years ago, I reported for the Voice on the accurate drop-out rate in the city's schools.
Because of the "Seldes and Stone Journalism School" (I've never been in one that actually grants degrees), I got to do at the Voice something that led the late Meg Greenfield, The Washington Post's editorial page editor—for whom I wrote a weekly "Sweet Land of Liberty" column for some 15 years—to say on my receiving the 1995 National Press Foundations Award for lifetime distinguished contributions to journalism: "Nat Hentoff is never chic. Never has been, as those of us who have known him over the centuries can attest. Never will be. Count on it. He is not tribal in his views and is terribly stubborn. He challenges icons and ideas that are treasured in the community he lives in. He puts on his skunk suit and heads off to the garden party, week after week, again and again."
It was here that I was able to practice, since 1958, what I learned from my non-chic mentors. And I'll be putting on my skunk suit at other garden parties, now that I've been excessed from the Voice.
I was in my twenties when I learned my most important lesson from Izzy Stone: "If you're in this business because you want to change the world, get another day job. If you are able to make a difference, it will come incrementally, and you might not even know about it. You have to get the story and keep on it because it has to be told."
Still, there was one time when I was stunned at meeting a reader changed by what I'd written. One of my sons, Tom, is a partner at Williams & Connolly, a highly prestigious Washington law firm founded by one of my idols in the law, Edward Bennett Williams. Tom, a specialist in intellectual property and defamation, among other areas of law, once invited me to a large gathering in New York of lawyers from around the country who are also experts in those fields. Several lawyers in their thirties, it seemed to me, came to our table, and one, speaking for the others, said to me: "We're here because of you. We were in high school when we started reading you in the Voice, and you made the law so exciting. That, as I've said, is why we're here."
Other Voice writers have had that effect on readers—the late Jack Newfield, for one—and some are still being skunks at garden parties: Tom Robbins and Wayne Barrett. Their calls get returned quickly.
Around the country, a lot of reporters are being excessed, and print newspapers may soon become collectors' items. But over the years, my advice to new and aspiring reporters is to remember what Tom Wicker, a first-class professional spelunker, then at The New York Times, said in a tribute to Izzy Stone: "He never lost his sense of rage."
Neither have I. See you somewhere else. Finally, I'm grateful for the comments on the phone and the Web. It's like hearing my obituaries while I'm still here.
Only if your "what God has made one" position only applies to the brain dead.
Nice try, though. Next, try comparing me to Hitler.
The slickest use of Godwin's I've ever seen. Nice way to stop a discussion.
That may be true, but I do believe there are conclusions to be drawn about making your living contributing to a publication that is not unlike the Daily Worker in ideology.
Neither was Terry Schiavo, so once again, you're missing the point.
We have become too prone to knee-jerk about labels. I'll take Nat Hentoff over Arlen Specter any day of the week. One has a moral base, and one is just an amoral hack.
That is your interpretation and your words, not mine. Please don't attribute them to me. I never said that, never implied that.
What I do believe is that you can judge people by those they associate with. It is one of the reasons I was shocked that our country got enough people together to vote for a man who associated with outright terrorists, racists, marxists and socialists.
Liberalism is the greatest threat to this country. That may be my opinion, but I believe that liberalism presents a greater danger to this country than Islamofascism, Communism, or any other "ism" there is out there. I believe liberalism is the rot in our society.
I too associate with liberals, and count some of my dearest friends, indeed blood relations who are even more liberal probably than this author. But I do believe there is a stratification of liberalism, and using the rule of threes, would classify them as follows:
First, one third of liberals are people who don't care about issues, don't think about issues, and aren't really concerned about issues other than what it does for them financially. These are people who vote for a Democrat because they have always voted for Democrats, and because their parents vote for Democrats. They think they will get a grant/tax break/opportunity/job whatever if they get a liberal in office, because that is what those liberals promise them.
Second, the middle third of liberals are those who really care. Those who seriously believe that there are injustices, wrongs, poverty, ignorance and disease. I disagree with those people on their outlook on the best way to deal with those issues. I know these people (Living in Massachusetts as I do) I love some of these people and I talk to these people. I am able to carry on frank and open conversations without animus. I respect these people, and some of them are the brightest and talented people I know. These people will talk to me, I can talk to them, we disagree but there is mutual respect. I don't step on their political or intellectual toes, and they don't step on mine. I don't doubt that these people love their country, but as Thomas Sowell puts it, they are not thinking past stage one. These are the same people who might have a plant infestation in a lake and bring in some kind of fish from South America that is known to eat that plant. They are then genuinely surprised when all the native fish disappear and the lake becomes a muddy swamp because the imported fish also eat nearly every other kind of plant in the lake.
The last third are liberals who are ideological in nature and are interested in power and nothing else. This third can be further divided into those who drink their own Kool-Aid and fervently believe it with a religious ferocity, and the other part of them who don't believe and don't care, but think they can lay their hands on the machinery of life and bend it to their will. That machinery may be the socialistic implementation of a planned economy, or the legislative machinery of banning trans fats in restaurants because they know better than you do what is good for you. Your rights and desires don't matter. These people hate our country for what it is and what it stands for, and want to transform it into something else.
This last third, are in my opinion, the type of liberals who have inhabited the Village Voice since 1955. I do believe that people CAN and SHOULD be judged by their associations, and this person earned a lifetime income drawing readers to this publication and keeping it afloat. So, if I erred in judging this person by his association with scumbags like I.F. Stone and a rag like the Village Voice, both of which are (hopefully soon to be speaking of both of them in the past tense) or were dedicated towards tearing down the fabric of our society in any way possible, then yes, I am guilty.
You and I may disagree on whether his close, no-skintight association with a leftist, anti-American publication like the Village Voice is cause to damn him, and I have read enough of your posts of Free Republic to appreciate your point of view on MANY issues, but I am tired of laying down and ceding the battle to liberals in the fight for the life of this country. If someone has spent a LIFETIME contributing to the financial well-being of a political party, organization or media outlet that wants nothing less than the destruction of this country, then I feel justified in judging them on it.
In this case, I am willing to admit that it is possible I placed him in the wrong "third" of liberals, but I maintain that those credentials he would present justify that.
Thank you for your civil response.
I find it hard to believe that a man who spent 50 years at the Village Voice and was a close friend of I.F. Stone did not share the views of both the paper and the reprehensible shill for the Communists, I.F. Stone.
But I am willing to admit that he was a good music critic, and will also entertain the possibility that as he grew older, his outlook on issues changed.
Even if he did continue to draw his pay from the Village Voice, which DID and DOES overlook the actions of dictators and tyrants around the world in order to portray our President, government and way of life as just as evil in a perverse morally equivalent world they inhabit.
Thank you for your discussion, too. It’s much to Nat’s credit that for years, maybe decades, there were people at the Voice who wouldn’t speak to him :o)
Well, I guess then that I have to change my perspective on him, then.
Anyone who is shunned by people at the Village Voice has got to be doing something “right” in my eyes.
As one of my heroes once said, “I would rather be right than consistent!”
Yeah, he was persona non grata among the pervs at the Voice. They thought his abortion view was anti-woman and all that. And he resigned from the ACLU over their abortion stand, among other reasons.
Well, I stand corrected and educated.
As do I, for the inescapable fact that he has earned such respect, by his intellectual honesty. While I often disagree with him, I will always respect him...
the infowarrior
>>Not only do they not read, they don’t think for themselves. They just follow the herd...
I think a few years in the wilderness might change that. At least I hope so.
Hentoff was a champion of civil rights - true civil rights (i.e. equal treatment before the law), not quotas or set asides.
He was a co-author (with Daniel Moynihan) of Beyond the Melting Pot, the book that single-handedly turned urban policy away from large-scale welfare-state projects and toward piecemeal solutions. It was a neoconservative manifesto of sorts.
He has had great friendships with many conservatives. IIRC, he actually supported WFB in his run for mayor in 1965, simply because Buckley was an iconoclast, and the sole intellectual in the race.
Your abortionists analogy would have some merit if an unborn baby could chose his or her mother AND could exchange vows with the mother of his or her choosing AND could have the option of drawing a living will. Mrs. Schiavo chose her husband and exchanged vows with him. Because there was no formal living will making her wishes clear, it only made sense that the person to speak for her was the one she chose herself.
Sorry, my mistake. Since a living will doesn't require the testator to be declared brain dead, whether Mrs. Schiavo was declared brain dead is irrelevant.
So entering into marriage means your spouse can decide to kill you--actively destroying a living being? That's news to me, and I'd wager to most married people.
Your abortionists analogy would have some merit if an unborn baby could chose his or her mother AND could exchange vows with the mother of his or her choosing AND could have the option of drawing a living will.
See above.
Are you saying that a married couple have MORE rights to decide whether the other person lives or dies than does a person who has another person actually growing inside them? That a contract is more binding than is biology?
I thought in a debate, analogies were supposed to be analogous to the situation at hand. Then, when you attempt to compare my ethics to those of an abortionist, I'm obviously going to respond by telling you how your comparison doesn't work. However, if your objective here is not to debate but to prove how clever you can be, by all means, you win. High fives all around. Emotion trumps reason in yet another Terri Schiavo discussion.
Are you saying that a married couple have MORE rights to decide whether the other person lives or dies than does a person who has another person actually growing inside them? That a contract is more binding than is biology?
Yippee, another strawman ("a contract is more binding than is biology?")! A marriage—remember, what God has joined together, let not man put asunder—is more binding than biology. Besides, as I said before, babies don't get to choose their mothers.
If marriage is just "a contract," homosexual 'marriage' is no problem, right?
Assuming debate is your reason for being here:
You are going to see a lot of deck chairs moved around. Helen Thomas will probably retire. The media is going to focus on cheerleading for a while and some of their existing pundits are poor cheerleaders. They want their best and brightest fawners covering the White House and the issues.
Yes, and mine was; you just don't like that it was.
Then, when you attempt to compare my ethics to those of an abortionist, I'm obviously going to respond by telling you how your comparison doesn't work.
No, you're just whining like you've been attacked instead of addressing the actual point of the analogy, intentionally warping the analogy so you can go "You've personally attacked me!" instead of addressing the point I actually made.
However, if your objective here is not to debate but to prove how clever you can be, by all means, you win. High fives all around. Emotion trumps reason in yet another Terri Schiavo discussion.
Wow, you've made the trifecta: Avoiding the actual point; playing the victim instead of sticking to the point; and below shouting "Strawman!" Save those high fives for yourself.
Yippee, another strawman ("a contract is more binding than is biology?")! A marriage—remember, what God has joined together, let not man put asunder—is more binding than biology. Besides, as I said before, babies don't get to choose their mothers.
Here's the point where you're attempting to warp that analogy. By refusing the simple, human connection everyone knows exists between mother and child, you're in the Hemlock Society arena of theory over reality. Plus, I'm an atheist, so arguments about God are menaingless to me, and a religious organization wasn't asked to make the choice in the Schiavo case--pay attention now--a GOVERNMENT organization was.
If marriage is just "a contract," homosexual 'marriage' is no problem, right?
If you want to take the side of the gays and argue that a society has no right to decide on what agreements get made within that society, go right ahead. YOU are the one who claim primacy of an agreement between two people endowed by an outside superior being--in your case, God, but in the case that matters in both cases (again, the Schiavo case was not decided over a religious belief but a legal one--you didn't know that?)the law/government.
So by my beliefs, legal marriage is not a right to kill anymore than the biological connection is; by yours, an agreement between two people (you keep saying she decided to marry him) is just fine and dandy since the "wife" in both cases goes into that contractual agreement willingly.
Assuming debate is your reason for being here: Should it be legal for a person to enter into a "living will" refusing food and water?
Yes--if that person isn't alive or is in a persistent vegitative state aka brain dead. THAT is the standard; the slippery slope argument is all about drawing that line and staying on this side of it, not having "yeah, but" exceptions.
Terry Schivo was not brain dead:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1928042/posts
http://michellemalkin.com/2007/11/19/memo-to-abc-nytimes-terri-schiavo-was-not-brain-dead/
If yes, ... ... why shouldn't her spouse be able to do the same for her, when she is unable? ... lacking a legal document, must it be assumed that the incapacitated person desires food and water? (If so, on what basis?)
See above, and stick to the discussion, and leave out the phony victim pose, please. It's only a flag that you've got nothing.
Perhaps our creator will soften your hard heart and make himself known to you. I pray that's his will.
This from the person who said I should be high-fiving myself?
your inability or unwillingness to check your emotions for the sake of a reasoned debate
Strawman, know thyself. Where is this "emotion"? In the links to evidence that Schiavo wasn't brain dead but brain damaged? When I pointed out that you are mixing the powers of God and the state as it pleases you without any logic? In drawing an inconvenient analogy?
Calling the other guy emotional is the last refuge of the guy who's out of bullets.
and the fact that you're a proud atheist make it all too clear that this is going nowhere.
So much for you lecturing me for a condescending attitude.
Set and match. Sorry you couldn't check your own emotions and had to stoop to the "you're an atheist, so I won't talk to you" non sequitur to wriggle out of a serious discussion you're clearly not equipped for. Have a nice day.
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