Word: hoffer
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Though it is strictly a local television channel, station KQED had the imagination and daring to begin a 13-interview series with Longshoreman-Philosopher Eric Hoffer five years before CBS discovered him. This fall KQED became the first U.S. station since 1960 to shoot a documentary inside Castro's Cuba. Its special on Duke Ellington, Love You Madly, was so lively that it was later played at the Edinburgh and Venice film festivals. Then there was the channel's Where's Jim Crow?, a weekly segment rooting out covert discrimination in the area. And, for a change...
Every once in a while, television interviewers have journalistic sense enough to put a good subject in front of a camera and just get out of the way. It worked so successfully last September with Eric Hoffer: The Passionate State of Mind that CBS rescheduled the 60-minute show for this week (Tuesday, 10 p.m.). Though Eric Sevareid is the reporter of record, the program is Hoffer, the shirtsleeved philosopher from the San Francisco waterfront, whose aphorisms and world views have sold 700,000 books (The True Believer, The Temper of Our Time) and have produced disciples from the University...
...Hoffer, 65, comes on with a muscular humanism that hymns ordinary people and the land that enthroned them. "The only new thing in history," he says, "is America. It's blasphemous to say that, you know, but it's true." And what is America's contribution? "The deproletarianization of the working man. He ceases to be a proletarian. He thinks he's as good as everybody else." Hoffer knows he is. "You can almost close your eyes," he says, "reach over the sidewalk and make a man President, and he'll turn...
...narcism. Buckley's a mental muscle-beacher who can't resist rippling his grey matter to dazzle bystanders. For sheer sophistic jabberwocky and an excruciating reciprocity of cleverness Buckley's ideal Firing Line partner would be Marshall McLuhan. But stack him against self-educated Dockhand Eric Hoffer, the man of passionately simple convictions, and Buckley would do a fast fade from brilliance. Because he evinces about as much commitment and attachment to an ideal as a first-time-out dude rancher does to the horse...
...England hills, the prairies glistening in the sun, the wide and rising plains, the great mountains, and the sea. He means that he loves an inner air, an inner light in which freedom lives and in which a man can draw the breath of self-respect." Eric Hoffer, the philosopher-longshoreman has a more prosaic but very pragmatic description: "The day-to-day competence of the workingman." He adds: "If I said I was loading ships for Mother America, even during a war, I would be laughed off the docks. In Russia, they can't build an outhouse without...