204: 81 Words
This episode appears to contain dynamically inserted ads. Transcript timestamps may be approximate.
So for weeks and months and years people write to their legislators and lobbyists make massive campaign contributions to try to swing the votes and there are stories on the TV and the tutorials and the newspapers and people talk about it and then they ignore it and then they talk about it some more and then there are votes and there are compromises and more votes and finally the President signs a bill into law and when he does it, there are special pens that he uses. It's the pens that I want to talk about. He uses more than one and then he gives the pens away. And people save these pens for years, pens, they didn't do anything. You know what I'm talking about here? The pen that Lyndon Johnson used to sign the Voting Rights Act, that pen did not give anybody the right to vote. It took the entire political machinery of a huge country to do that. But okay, let's say that you end up with one of these pens. I'm guessing that from time to time what you do is that you take out the pen and you stare at it and you think a thought that goes along the lines of this pen was right there. This pen has done something more important than I will ever do. Which is of course a distressing thought because after all it is just a pen and you are a human being but put that aside. It's just uncanny. I think that's the word. It's uncanny when something's so small for a moment for the length of time that it takes to sign a name can carry the entire weight of history of a nation. Today's radio program is about something small like that. That was at the epicenter of a massive social change in our country for a brief moment. From W.B.E.C. Chicago, it's his American life. I'm out of class. Today we are devoting our entire show to this one killer story. I've had something very small. Something small that helped change something very, very large. A story of doctors, of science, of homosexuals, of lucky coincidence, and political action. And of the sheer power of good old fashioned face to face schmoozing. Elise Spiegel tells the story. This is the story of a definition. Three single sentences composed of 81 words. It's the story of how this particular definition became another definition. Nine sentences composed of 237 words. Now, according to some parties, this change, from 81 words to 237 words, liberated an entire category of humanity. According to other parties, it undermined the basic family unit, compromised the scientific authority of psychiatry, and "tampered with the basic code and concept of life." Now, I should tell you that I know this story not because I read it in a book or learned it in any class, but because it's one of those stories that my family uses to explain itself. Like most family stories, or anyway, like most stories told in my family, the version I heard growing up was an exaggeration. The relevant family member cast as a conquering hero. The actual story, the story I hope to tell you, is of course much more complicated. But I'm getting ahead of myself. [Music] June 23rd, 1980, at the home of the seagulls in Woodstock, New York. My grandfather, John P. Spiegel, used to say that he was a fish. It's true, most of my memories of him are memories of a body floating face down in the water. Slack, communing with his brothers and sisters of the sea. He was a strange man, a doctor of psychiatry who spent months in the desert studying exotic tribes, smoking their drugs, sleeping under the stars, living, he said, like a native. This tape, the tape that you hear running under my voice, was recorded for my cousin Zoe's 12th birthday. She had gotten a tape recorder as a present, and it asked my grandfather if she could interview him. Zoe was a smart kid, but still, only a graduate of the seventh grade, and so my grandfather politely declined. He decided there was only one person present, with the intelligence and experience necessary to interview Dr. John P. Spiegel.
Transcription truncated.