It can be said that many find Air America's Randi Rhodes' rhetoric hard on the ears; she is definitely a verbal bombthrower. She doesn't cloak her views. The original stand-up comic Mort Sahl, on the other hand, who is in in his late 70s, has always been a member of what he calls "the loyal oppositon." Even when he was writing material for JFK, he would still openly criticize him.
But both believe in the need to tell Americans what they might not like hearing.
QUESTION, Deborah White of About.com - Finally, Bill, what is your background, as an author and an activist? Also, your educational background.
ANSWER, Author Bill Katovsky - I got my B.A. in political science at the University of Michigan. I worked for a year at the Brookings Institute in D.C., before I moved west to Berkeley where I got my M.A. in political science at the University of California.
I spent my late 20s as editor and publisher of a sports magazine for triathletes, then I ran a lifestyle and cultural magazine for the SF Bay Area. Then, I returned to sports magazines publishing.
I have never been a political activist per se, but I decided to write my first book while watching the Iraq War unfold. Luckily, I found a publisher who agreed with my vision.
That book, "Embedded: The Media at War in Iraq, an Oral History," came out in September 2003. Along with my co-author, Timothy Carlson, we interviewed nearly 60 war reporters such as John Burns of the New York Times, Evan Wright of Rolling Stone, and John Roberts, then with CBS News.
The book later won a national award from Harvard. Yet, I felt that Embedded was really about assent. You know, covering a war pretty much on the terms of the U.S. military, especially because the journalists' safety was often dependent on the military.
This doesn't mean that all reporters were puppets, but their reportage was indeed biased. How could it not be?
Yet, it can't be disputed that covering war in a place like Iraq is hazardous. The death toll of reporters and their assistants and translators is around seventy -- which is more than in Vietnam. The majority of the reporters are brave, maybe some are vain-glory, but brave nonetheless.
Well, as I was trying to say, if my first book, "Embedded," was about assent, I wanted to explore its flip side--the other side of the coin. Dissent.
What happens when you go against the grain? What happens when you speak out against a war? When you criticize the White House? When you take other risks by coming forward to tell the truth?
Or, like the young Texan couple who showed up at a Fourth of July event where Bush was speaking, and were arrested for merely wearing anti-Bush T-shirts. They didn't raise their voices or yell insults at the president.
No, they just stood quietly amidst the crowd, that is, until some Republican aides asked them to leave and the crowed started booing this young, polite couple because they had the "audacity" to exercise their freedom of expression. The ACLU is now suing the U.S. government on the Ranks's behalf.
When the government muzzles legitimate voices of dissent--through arrests of peaceful protesters, censorship, wiretapping of journalists, political reprisals of whistleblowers--it marks more than a deviation from the rights guaranteed by the Constitution. It signals harm against our entire political system. Erosion by increments. In time, the damage becomes permanent. And that is what must be halted before it's too late.
It's stories like the Ranks, or Max Cleland, or Paul Hackett, that should get all of America to realize that democracy isn't something that is automatic in this country.
As Voltaire said, "It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong."
