America's storyteller

The one who closes the book is Kathy Kelly, the founder of Voices of the Wilderness [an antiwar activist group that often "bears witness" in war zones]. Kathy was teaching at a wonderful parochial school in Chicago, St. Ignatius. Then she decided that she's not gonna pay the taxes that go toward war. [Kelly voluntarily accepted a salary too low to be taxable, and the school donated the rest of her customary salary to charity.]

Kathy's a disciple of Dorothy Day, who was asked the same question Kathy was asked, the same question Virginia was asked: "Why are you doing this? You could be leading a nice, easy life!" Kathy's reply was: "I'm working toward a world where I hope it will be easier for people to behave decently." You can't beat that.

The story I love to tell is about Kathy and one of our GI's. She goes to a missile site, and you've seen a missile site. One of those banal little hills. She goes to Missouri, it's corn country, but there's no corn there because of those missile sites. Kathy being Kathy, she cuts through the damn barbed wire and she goes to the missile site and she puts up that sign from the Old Testament prophet Isaiah: "Beat your swords into plowshares and study war no more."

Then she calls up the authorities. She's violating the law! She weighs about 85 pounds, dripping wet. So here comes the big arsenal. The commander, maybe the brigadier general, calls out: "Will the personnel on the missile site get off with your hands raised! Kneel!" And she does, and they handcuff her. So here comes this kid, he's about 19 years old, off the truck, with his gun at her head. And he's trembling, because here's the enemy! All 85 pounds of her! He's scared of her; she's a terrorist!

She's kneeling, handcuffed, and she looks at the kid and says, "Do you know what I'm doing?" The kid, he's a country boy, says, "What?" She says, "I'm praying for corn to grow here." She had planted some seeds. She says, "Wouldn't you like the corn to grow here?" And he says, "Yes, ma'am." She says, "Will you pray with me for the corn to grow?" And he says, "Yes, ma'am."

So they pray for the corn to grow. And it's a broiling hot day. The kid looks at her -- she's still got the gun at her head -- and says, "Ma'am, are you thirsty?" She says, "Oh, God, yes I am." So he lays down the gun, which I assume is a violation, and he opens his canteen. "Ma'am, will you lean your head back a little?" And he pours the water into her mouth, as she describes it, like putting worms into a little bird's mouth.

When she goes to court, she sees him there and she winks at him, and he's trembling, because he thinks she's going to tell the story. So in the book she says, "I'm telling it to you, and I hope that if this boy reads this book, he'll forgive me for exposing him."

So this book is about people like Kathy and the Durrs, those today who imbue the rest of us with hope. One thing I forgot to put in -- you know, I work very improvisationally, in a jazz kind of way. There was an investigation at Leeds University in England where a psychologist or psychiatrist comes up with the idea that when people take part in a community action, something good happens to them physically. That it's good for your actual physical health when you take part in something, because you feel that you count, that you're somebody.

My favorite from the American Revolution, of course, is Thomas Paine, who was admired very much by Washington and others. He spoke about a whole new society, the United States of America. There never had been a society in which a cat could look at a king, you know -- and then tell the king to go bugger off. Here was a new society that would lift us like Archimedes' lever, that could lift the whole world.

This particular society would look at man in a new way, not with the perverse idea of being inhuman and the enemy, but as being kindred. Of course today it's precisely the opposite; this guy [Bush] sees the axis of evil everywhere. We, once the most admired country in the world, are now the most feared and -- let's face it -- hated.

If ever there were a time for these people, who I've admired for years, this is it. There was Tom Paine, there were the abolitionists. In the '60s there were the African-Americans who fought for civil rights, the kids against the war. Who were a minority, remember; the jocks beat the shit out of them at first and then joined them later. That's what I mean by a prophetic minority.

It's not a Pollyanna book. I am optimistic, but the word is "guardedly." Guardedly so. I mean, three of the bestselling books are Al Franken and Michael Moore and Molly Ivins, all at the same time. That's not bad. It's an indication to me that there's something underneath, that the people are way, way ahead of the political leaders and the pundits.

You say you hope I'm right. You hope. I hope too. I hope I'm right. I'm not saying I'm right.

I see now that this is the most personal of my books. And people are really affected by it. I'm also a ham actor, so I do this in bookstores all over the country. Like last night in Barnes & Noble [in New York]. And it was fantastic! The Bay Area cities: OK, I knew Berkeley was gonna be OK. But I didn't expect San Jose State to be the way it was. It was students, and it was astanding O -- I'm just saying that, because it was.

They're ready for something, provided it's said directly to them. If the Democratic Party loses this one to Bush, with wars and a forthcoming depression -- Hoover just had a depression -- if he wins and the Democratic Party, to use an old Poe phrase, deliquesces like fungi, then that's it. That's enough.

There's a poem by Brecht: "Who Built the Seven Gates of Thebes?" When you ask who built the pyramids, the automatic answer is: the pharaohs. But the pharaohs didn't lift a finger. I was told, by Mrs. O'Reilly at McKinley High School in Chicago, that Sir Francis Drake conquered the Spanish Armada. He did? By himself? Brecht in the poem says that when the armada sank, we read that King Philip of Spain wept. Here's the big one: "Were there no other tears?"

To me, history is those who shed those other tears. Those whose brains and whose brawn made the wheels go around. I hate to use the word "the people." The anonymous many. But they're it. I know that the Internet has all sorts of democratic possibilities: That's how Howard Dean came up so fast, isn't it? At the same time, there's a fear of so much in the hands of so few.

I was also going to talk about the perversion of our language: To go more "moderate" means to go more toward the center, and to go toward the center means to go toward the right. If you could see me now, I could do a demonstration: If our physical posture followed our political posture and the perversion of our language -- I'd have to act this out -- we'd walk around leaning to the right. That's the normal way of walking. And then, the guy who's walking straight: "Look at that leftist!" Or if the guy who's walking straight leans a little bit to the left: "He's a goddamn terrorist!"

I've given you a rambling account, I suppose, of why I undertook this particular book. I think I've got one more book in me, although I must be crazy. I mean, I'm 91 years old: the Titanic went down, and I came up.

I was a DJ in Chicago once, and I loved to play all different kinds of music: jazz, classical, whatever. I introduced Mahalia Jackson's music to a lot of people, and we were great friends. I mean, she would have become known without me, but she used to say that. So I'm doing a book on music, simply called "They All Sang."

It'll be not only singers: Alfred Brendel, Segovia, as well as Larry Adler. It'll be that kind of book. I did an interview once with a kid, 20 years old, named Bob Dylan. The legacy of Pete Seeger's family, an old musical family. So we'll see how that goes.

And then I'll check out. I'll tell you what, I'll give you my epitaph. It's a simple one: "Curiosity did not kill this cat."

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