Portion below; whole thing here: http://news.independent.co.uk/people/profiles/article3076965.ece
Terkel, as unembedded a reporter as ever lived, once described himself as "a guerrilla journalist. I know my terrain. Like the colonials against the British. Like the Vietnamese against us." In the time I spend with him, the only living reporter he commends with enthusiasm is Robert Fisk. He has no interest in celebrity for its own sake, and becomes especially waspish when discussing politicians.
"You try to shame them," he complains, "but they are shameless." He dismissed Ronald Reagan as "a mean-spirited prick" and castigated Margaret Thatcher for legitimising the basest of human instincts. ("It's dog eat dog," he said, in a classic Radio 4 documentary Under American Eyes, in 1987. "But we're not dogs; that's the problem.") He caricatures Tony Blair as Jeeves to George W Bush's Bertie Wooster, and speaks of Gordon Brown in terms of one of the dour agency butlers who torment Wooster when his regular man is on leave. When he wrote his 1995 book, Coming of Age, about people over 70, somebody suggested he call it Mellowing. "I said: 'Mellowing? A lot of these people are god-damn furious... they're doing what Dylan Thomas told them to: raging against the dying of the light. Did my mother mellow as she got older? Sure as hell, no. She got worse.'"
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