I got a call from Curt Smith inviting me to come on his program to talk about community organizing. Cool. I can do that. I’m a community organizer. I agreed.
I’ve heard Smith’s show before and wondered about his rapid fire questions. I know he was a speechwriter for George H W Bush. Say what you will about Bush the First, but anybody who rises to that level kinda scares me (I watched the West Wing for a season- those Ivy League folks sure talk fast). However, I felt more at ease when I arrived at the studio and saw that he had his questions written out.
Yes, he reads his questions.
But that didn’t embolden me enough to ask him, “So, dude, did Bush really negotiate with the Iranians in Paris to hold the hostages captive until after the 1980 election?”
I was suspicious of the interview because Smith had mentioned that he was also bringing in a business person who was doing some organizing. All I could think of was some Unshackle Upstate type operative. And I’ve been sandbagged by enough reporters to know that sometimes they just want you to “do that radical thing” so that they can have other interviewees respond to you as a straw man. It always feels like a setup and I’ve learned to be cautious and to try to understand where they are going with the story and then try to figure out what I can bring to it to move our message through the fog.
When I got there Smith told me that he had looked at the Metro Justice website and wanted to talk about all our issues. I told him that it would be more interesting to talk about the phenomenon of grassroots organizing and social change rather than getting bogged down on specific public policy issues. I had written notes to myself with some really cool anecdotes about some of Metro Justice members’ ingenious strategies and some of our very cool tactics.
However, it was not to be. I sat on the stool across the console from Smith with Peter Iglinsky peeking over his reading glasses at the controls. Smith commenced his machine gun questioning (Iglinsky signaled the time to Smith by raising five fingers intermittently). The first time Smith interrupted my answer to ask me another question I had that whiplash feeling you get when someone rams into your bumper car at Sea Breeze. Sort of fun and sort of annoying. After Smith asks one of his questions he lets you uncoil a response for a minute or two and then raises his hand, as if to signal “It’s time for you to stop talking so that I can ask another question.”
We careened through campaign finance, corporate welfare, the anti war movement and a bizarre moment in which I was put on the spot to speak about the Wall Street bailout. Do I look like Al Sharpton or something? I can barely keep up with my workload, house repairs and my kids’ soccer games and track meets. I’m supposed to understand the details of Congress’ log rolling on Paulson’s wet kiss to Wall Street? What is there to say except that Congress told us to bend over- and you can’t say that on public radio.
Perhaps its understandable. There aren’t any popular movies, novels or television shows about community organizing. To the pundit class we are those folks that protest on the streets and shout militant slogans. We’re good for color when they need a caricature of “the left.”
We’ve created that baggage for ourselves out of necessity.
I’m still interested in talking about the many people that I work with and their struggles to counter the conservative corporate machine and push the system 15 degrees toward sanity. I still think it would make an interesting interview.
Tags: Curt Smith, Interview, Journalism, Organizing