Chapotraphouse

For me, its a section from his speech entitled US Interventionism, the 3rd world, and the USSR, where he talks about what it means to read.

And I talked to a guy in Havana who says to me “Before all I used to see here in Havana, you call this drab and dull, we see it as a cleaner city. It’s true, the paint is peeling off the walls, but you don’t see kids begging in the streets anymore and you don’t see prostitutes, and always there was prostitutes.”Prostitution used to be one of the biggest industries. And today this man is going to night school. He said “I can read!" I can read! Do you know what it means to be able to read? Do you know what it means to be able not to read?

I remember when I gave my book to my father. I dedicated a book of mine to him, “Power and the Powerless” to my father, I said “To my father with my love,” I gave him a copy of the book, he opened it up and looked at it. He had only gone to the seventh grade, he was the son of an immigrant, a working-class Italian. And he opens the book and he starts looking through it, and he gets misty-eyed, very misty-eyed. And I thought it was because he was so touched that his son had dedicated a book to him. That wasn’t the reason. He looks up to me and he says ‘I can’t read this, kid” I said “That’s okay dad, neither can the students, that's not something... don’t worry about that. I wrote it for you, I mean it’s your book and you don’t have to read it. It’s a very complicated book, an academic book. He says, “I can’t read this book.” And the defeat. The defeat that man felt. That’s what illiteracy is about, that’s what the joy of literacy programs is. That’s why you got people in Nicaragua walking proud now for the first time. They were animals before, they weren’t allowed to read, they weren’t taught to read.

So, you compare a country to what it came from, with all its imperfections. And those who demand instant perfection the day after the revolution, they get up and say “Are there civil liberties for the fascists? Are they gonna be allowed their newspapers and their radio programs, are they gonna be able to keep all their farms? The passion that some of our liberals feel, the day after the revolution, the passion and concern they feel for the fascists, the civil rights and civil liberties of those fascists who are dumping and destroying and murdering people before. Now the revolution has gotta be perfect, it’s gotta be flawless.

Well that isn’t my criteria, my criteria is what happens to those people who couldn’t read? What happens to those babies that couldn’t eat, that died of hunger? And there? That’s why I support revolution. The revolution that feeds the children gets my support. Not blindly, not unqualified. And the Reaganite government that tries to stop that kind of process, that tries to keep those people in poverty and illiteracy and hunger, that gets my undiluted animosity and opposition.