While commenting on the blog, The Big Question, I was doing quite well. In my comments, I made strong baseline hits, over time, making good points. Then Bill Prendergast would come along with a comment that just hit a homerun so far out of the park, that the Republican commentators would quietly leave the field. I really wanted to meet this person. I was lucky enough to get this interview.

I am hoping to do a series on everyday heroes. This is my first interview. I met with Bill Prendergast, and had a delightful time. This is Bill writing up answers to the interview, so we both know it is exactly correct.

Bill Prendergast is a liberal writer and a blogger living in Stillwater, Minnesota. He currently contributes articles to several liberal and progressive blogs, including the “Dump Michele Bachmann” blog. Prendergast has written one book (a crime thriller called “Forbidden Hollywood”) and produced and written plays for the stage. He’s also a retired attorney.

1) How did you get started writing about politics?

I was a newspaper columnist for a couple of years on a Stillwater daily. Then my fourth editor fired me for writing a column identifying the conservatives in our local “non-partisan” school board race. (The paper printed the column and the conservatives were defeated in the election that year. But I was banished forever.)

2) Do you have a special mission?

I once read an interview with a contemporary poet. The interviewer asked the poet: “Why do you write poetry?” The poet replied: “Why do I breathe?”

Now, my immediate reaction to think the poet’s answer rude, patronizing and arrogant. But then my reaction deepened and became more thoughtful: this poet had raised a valid point: why does he breathe? Why does any contemporary poet breathe? And even if they do—should they?

It was to answer these questions, and so many others, that I entered “the writing game.”

3) What do you consider your best piece of writing?

Well, I think my answers to these interview questions will stand the test of time. But my most sustained and ambitious piece of writing was a stage play called “The Sphincter,” which we produced in New Orleans a couple of years ago after Katrina.

It is the story of a man whose asshole escapes his body and learns to talk. It runs away and is elected Governor of Texas. A short time later, his talking asshole is elected President of the United States; it launches an irrelevant pre-emptive strike to conquer an oil-producing nation. The asshole’s former owner is mortified that his asshole is now more powerful and successful than he ever was, and so he sets out to either retrieve it or get some financial compensation via the courts.

The play was staged in Le Petit Theatre in the French Quarter and once drew an audience of nearly thirty people.

4) Do you have a short version of your political philosophy?

I am a liberal.

5) Who are your heroes and why?

FDR: The greatest president of the twentieth century, as Lincoln was the greatest of the 19th.

Mahatma Gandhi: Yeah, he was “Mr. Peaceful Non-Violence Activist;” yeah, yeah, Ben Kingsley got an Oscar, yeah, yeah, blah blah blah. But Gandhi was also a master politician, a great political card player who played his cards just right. “Oooo, I’m gonna starve myself to death if you guys don’t come around, and if I die, the next guy who leads these hundreds of millions *ISN’T* going to be non-violent…” He did a fantastic job playing that hand; independence and the foundation of a democracy for a billion disparate people—without sponsoring violent revolution. You can’t buy or breed wisdom and successful political instincts like that.

H.L. Mencken: The funniest and most incisive writer on American politics. (I don’t care about him as a man of letters.) His personal political views were actually kind of banal and dense. But the way he laced into the mediocre, the vain and the deluded…there’s something we can all learn from there.

I have many, many other heroes. My heroes are legion; my mother and father are numbered with Beethoven and Jesus Christ. Also, there is a band in Belize that plays this incredible Caribbean version of that old disco song, “Shame Shame Shame.” They are my heroes, too, but I don’t know their names. “Shame/ shame/ shame/ it’s a shame on you/ if you can’t dance, too/ I said, shame-shame-shame-shame-shame-shame, it’s a shame on you/ if you can’t dance, too/ etc.”

6) Why do you write in to the Internet under your real name?

Because I can. There are good reasons for sincere and well-intentioned people to blog anonymously: they might have legitimate fears about facing reprisals in the workplace or from their neighbors for expressing their political beliefs. I’m not afraid of that, but I can sympathize with someone who would be.

Unfortunately, there are people who use “the alias/anonymity” thing the way that the Ku Klux Klan uses a hood. They use an alias to insult, lie, make threats—do things they’d never dream of doing in person or if they had to sign their real name.

7) Do you write with the same style in all places?

No. When I wrote for a local paper and when I wrote on the DailyKOS, I did political satire. I tried to write funny stuff with a mean edge that called attention to hypocrisy and abuse of power.

I got some attention for that, but that style is inappropriate for the “Dump Bachmann” blog. Congressional Representative Michele Bachmann (GOP, Minnesota’s Sixth District) is a stealth fundamentalist demagogue: rich pickings for the satirist, but “Dump Bachmann” is about reporting facts that the local media won’t report about this elected official. So I keep the “funny” stuff to a minimum when I’m writing pieces for Dump Bachmann.

8) How much feedback do you get? Is different from the "left" and "right" and “those not on the line” version of politics?

I found I was getting more feedback on DailyKOS than I was getting from my personal blog, so I decided to let my personal blog this year and limit my contributions to other people’s more successful websites.

I used to get a lot of letters from Stillwater conservatives when I wrote for the paper; I miss that because if you only write for a liberal audience you can’t get the information to the conservatives or undecideds. They desperately need that information, whether they know it or not; it doesn’t help to keep it “locked up” on liberal or progressive blogs because then it doesn’t get circulated to the people who most need it.

For example, the uninformed are not going to hear about the fact that McCain’s “anti-lobbying foundation” is actually run by lobbyists. The conservative media is not going to acquaint conservatives with that information, and the mainstream media doesn’t seem interested in pressing issues like that. Another example: most Minnesotans are still entirely unaware that Congresswoman Bachmann is the protégé of a national pseudo-religious political organization called the Council for National Policy. It’s true, and it’s the key to understanding her political agenda--but the local professional media here is loathe to report it.

This kind of stuff doesn’t enter public consciousness and inform our voting if it stays on the liberal and progressive blogs. Getting the most important and accurate stories into the mainstream media: that’s still the biggest barrier to taking the country back from the conservative movement.

9) What does good government look like?

The best example of good government in my lifetime was the presidential administration of Bill Clinton. The Clinton administration was able to promote peace and prosperity even in the face of an opposition congress that was trying to remove them via a procedural coup d’etat. That’s the triumph of substance over propaganda; that’s as close to “the way it’s supposed to go” as I’ve ever seen it.

10) I notice that you engage in conversation and debate with opposing viewpoints quite successfully. Does anyone actually seem to be persuaded? When and how do people change their minds?

People do change their minds. After 1965, American voters began a long, slow march away from liberalism to conservatism; tens of millions of Americans “changed their minds”. (Not that the liberal state ever went away. It never has because America is a liberal state and could not survive as a truly conservative state. That is the best kept secret of the American conservative movement and it explains decades of broken promises.)

People can change their minds again. They can be persuaded, if you’re patient and stick to the truths we’ve learned the hard way. Most of the people I encounter with opposing viewpoints are willing to at leaset modify their views in light of facts, if the facts are presented to them. When you’re dealing with rank-and-file conservatives, you’re generally dealing with people who are angry and scared; they’re easy prey for demagogues who feed the anger and the fear. Such people are unlikely to “convert to liberalism or progressivism,” but I’ve occasionally been surprised by the willingness of some rank-and-file conservatives to admit unfriendly facts into their universe.

I don’t hope for mass conversion of the 34% of the American electorate that presently identifies itself as “conservative.” The reason that I don’t expect that to happen is that conservatism isn’t a political worldview or an ideology. You can correct an errant political worldview or an ideology by pointing out facts that contradict it. Conservatives don’t admit such facts to the discussion because doing so would “explode” conservatism. So, I conclude: it’s not a political worldview or an ideology, it’s a movement without any real principles—a movement based on anger, paranoia, and chasing after never-never lands of the past and the future.

If you understand that, you won’t leave the table disappointed after disagreeing with a conservative. But you should never dismiss conservatism as “irrelevant” on the grounds that it “must be irrelevant because it’s irrational.” That’s a *huge* mistake, for liberals and progressives to do that. In my view, the conservative movement is still the strongest and most coherent political base in 21st century America—you may dismiss them as stupid angry paranoids and their demagogues, but you do so at your peril. Even after the trouncing they got in 2006, they are still the strongest and best organized political movement in America.