G21: I know that you might be kind of a leftist social democrat politically, but they tell me that culturally you're a Tory. You have trouble reading many current writers of fiction, or listening to them?
Lionel Rolfe: I plead guilty. Most of the stuff I hear over the radio or television profoundly depresses me. Alleged new authors depress me. It's as if all the cultural predictions of 1984 [George Orwell] and Brave New World[Aldous Huxley] came true.

Our culture, since Reagan and the advent of television, helped turn a generation or two of people's brains into mush. The culture has been plummeting like a rock ever since, and oddly enough, it's the Republicans who push it. They talk against Hollywood, and about morality and all that, but they know nothing of the great parts of the human spirit.

They don't know the difference between swill and the best in the human spirit. The cultural decline of the last decade in particular is the direct result of the increasing monopolization of the media. Our movies are like Roman circuses, full of brutality and stupidity. Pop music is worse.

But I do think there are some hopeful signs with the Internet. The Internet is a vast improvement over television. At least with the Internet, people are actually reading and writing. Writing is thinking. Reading is thinking. Even if they are not doing good writing, they are exercising their writing "muscles." I am told that the Internet will remain relatively free of monopoly dominance for 30 or 40 years. After that, they will probably learn how to technologically control the Internet in some Orwellian way so we will get nothing but their swill.

I tie the decline of American culture to Reagan because I think there was a very conscious decision by the people around Reagan to stop education after the War in Vietnam.

Much of the opposition to the Vietnam war came from students who were studying things like political science and philosophy -- liberal arts subjects that threaten people with Reagan-type minds. People trying to learn what the larger picture of existence is all about.

Instead, they dumbed down education by endowing lots of "business chairs" and the like, or emphasizing narrow technological skills instead of learning science and philosophy in their broadest senses.

G21: At a certain age, everyone has a tendency to begin to think their particular era is a political and cultural wasteland. How do you feel about this tendency? What are your feelings about the present era? What makes it worse (or better) than previous ones? Were the sixties and early seventies better(or worse) culturally? Why?

Lionel Rolfe: I wanted to make sure that is not the case.

Yes, I look around me and it seems quite hopeless. I also know it's typical for older folks -- and I am now almost 60 -- to feel the youngsters are not worth a damn. They always have and always will, I guess.

Lionel Rolfe
Photo courtesy of Gary McCarthy

When I went into newspapering in the sixties, we were trying to change and improve the world. We were always trying to get stories past the editors. Nowadays young "journalists" are all trying to get out of newspapers and into television. They try hard not to upset their editors because the are "career oriented." They're ass lickers -- whereas I think the hallmark of a vibrant culture is when the writers and artists and musicians are a counter-culture. Corporate culture knows that you need the appearance of protest, so they allow that -- but only in style, not in substance.

G21: What creates the Zeitgeist for a particular era? How would you describe the Zeitgeist of 2001?

Lionel Rolfe: Well, one thing that encouraged me were the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Before that happened, there was nothing in the newspapers, including the so-called alternative papers, about what was going to be happening. The organizing was all being done on the Internet, silently and quietly as far as most of the world could tell. But suddenly there were thousands of protesters -- and they were mostly younger folks, not old farts like me.

That gave me hope and also made me change my attitude to the Internet. In fact, when I was shopping DEATH AND REDEMPTION around, I had a small academic publisher in England who was very interested in the book, and deadendstreet.com, the ebook publisher. Seattle convinced me that if you can mobilize people by the Internet, you can also get them to read on the Internet. I guess that sums up the potential.

But I think you have to understand something. My generation came of age worrying about preventing fascism in the United States. We had a very close taste of it in the McCarthyism of the fifties, and when Reagan came in, the underpinnings for that fascism -- in terms of the destruction of education and the culture -- was set into motion.

Sinclair Lewis wrote a book in the thirties called IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE and it was about what American fascism would look like. Now, under Bush and his gang of thugs, make no doubt -- fascism has arrived. We have seen the face of American fascism, and to regain our birthright, we have to fight it. I don't have an easy answer about how to do that, but I know it is what must be done.

G21: Try though to help us out. The readers of this magazine tend to be young and politically involved. Don't you have a lesson from all your experiences as an activist, journalist and author you could pass along?

Lionel Rolfe: I was 16 when I went to jail in Torrance, California, a notoriously lilly-white town where blacks were not allowed to buy homes. But it's easier to go to jail when you're young than later. As I got older, I ran afoul of "party discipline" and ended up seriously wondering if the communists I knew would run the society had they the power any better than the goons currently at the top.

I met and got to know some incredible people -- Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Dorothy Healey, Herbert Aptheker, who was very close with W.E.B. DuBois, and made a major contribution as an American historian writing about the slave rebellions, and Sidney Finkelstein, who had a very special understanding of music. I often met Al Richmond at Dorothy Healey's house, where I frequently hung out. He was the editor of the People's World, who had also been Woody Guthrie's editor when he wrote a column in the PW and the Worker.

So I say, I salute you, dear reader, who most likely comes of an earlier generation, and wish you luck because you will need it.

Take it from this old man, the real test of one's politics is over time. It's easy to be radical when you're young. It's harder to keep that commitment as you get older. Look at all the people who have burned out and moved in the opposite direction of their youth.

Most of us will never be disciplined enough to be saints, revolutionaries or even honest, committed writers all our lives. The passions inevitably subside, but just as love can burn all the deeper and truer, political passion should become something closer to wisdom as one gets older.

The biggest battle is to keep the mundanity of things from submerging you -- it's easy when you get married, have kids, get ill, etc., to get swamped by all the shit. Remember the "Magic Christian?" There is a tendency to swim in shit, and a lot of good people get sucked into swimming in shit.

Still, the struggle never stops -- even if you make a revolution. The Revolution is perpetual. One needs patience and perspective to make sense of things -- and even with these things you don't always succeed.

Let me tell you about this old violinist I knew, a lifelong communist, who was my mentor when I was a teenager. He introduced me to a lot of great writers, and he did a good job of answering my many questions about things. Shortly before he died at age 80, after the collapse of socialism in the Soviet Union, I asked him if he was discouraged.

"Of course, I'm discouraged. They blew it," he snorted. Then he relaxed. "They set us back a 100 years."

"How do you mean?"

"It will be another 100 years before the struggle regains what it lost when the Soviet Union collapsed. But socialism is not dead. It's inevitable. It is inevitable. Nothing has convinced me that isn't so."

I salute you, dear reader, who most likely comes of an earlier generation, and wish you luck because you will need it.

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