With StoryCorps founder David Isay. © StoryCorps
Stephen Colbert, the satirist and television host set to take over David Letterman’s late-night program, looked out a porthole of the U.S.S. Intrepid last night, in silence, taking in the lapping water and lights of the piers. It seemed to me an utterly reasonable response after he’d hosted a gala for StoryCorps focusing on its Military Voices Initiative.
At the gala, Colbert navigated through excerpts of seven stories, accompanied by photographs of the narrators or animations. There was the national guardsman who bonded with a shy boy in Baghdad by playing rock, paper, scissors; the corporal whose face was burned by a bomb in Afghanistan; the veteran who, by chance, met a nurse who had cared for his dying son in Iraq.
I could have used a few minutes in front of a porthole. Instead, I got to interrupt Colbert’s contemplative stance for a one-on-one moment.
“I’m so grateful to be reminded of how important it is to know how other people suffer,” Colbert said. “We want to be happy all the time. But happiness is not as good as being loved and loving. And these are loving experiences. People need human connection.”
Did he have any advice for drawing out these kinds of stories — a way of asking a question? “I’ve got a lot more to learn from the people in these booths who are just talking to each other in honest ways,” Colbert said. “What I do is construct. What they do is really true.”
So go listen.
Source: Bloomberg.
After several short speeches, Stephen Colbert jogged onstage. He said, “This is the second time that I have hosted, so clearly the story of last year’s gala was, Stephen Colbert did a damn fine job.” He said that we would be hearing stories from StoryCorps’s collection. “So brace yourselves, because this is the only moment of the entire evening that you won’t be openly weeping in joy and/or shared sorrow,” he said. The first story was from the Army captain Drew Pham.
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When the story ended, Colbert thanked Cliburn and then introduced Isay. “Before he came along, this type of glimpse into other people’s lives—to get that, you needed a pair of binoculars, a strong tree branch, and a good defense attorney,” Colbert said. “Here he is, the founder of StoryCorps and NPR shock jock Dave Isay.” Isay thanked several storytellers who were present: Zachariah Fike, an Army National Guard captain, who finds and returns lost or stolen military medals; Tracy Johnson, the first married gay spouse ever to lose a husband or wife, and her mother-in-law, Sandra Johnson. “What’s important about the Military Voices Initiative is that it enables us to hear the stories that would otherwise go unheard,” Colbert said. “The fact is, two million Americans were sent to fight in Iraq and Afghanistan. Twenty-five per cent of them have P.T.S.D. or Traumatic Brain Injury. Which makes for half a million mentally wounded American veterans.” He quoted the journalist David Finkel, who wrote of a group of veterans that “every one of them came home broken in various degrees, even the ones who are fine.”
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Later, in a well-appointed room on an upper level of the Intrepid, Colbert sat on a beige leather couch under a series of portholes. “I’m a fake-news person, and I’ve been a fake-news person for a long time,” he told me. “When I was at ‘The Daily Show,’ more than once, I would say to my producer, ‘This is a very interesting story! Where’d you hear about this?’ And they’d say, ‘Well, Dave Isay did a story about this on NPR.’ So we would kind of ski in his wake.” Colbert was impressed by Isay’s work—how personal, accurate, and kind it was. The StoryCorps project inspired Colbert to record his own mother talking about her childhood in the Adirondacks.
Colbert and Isay met at a Peabody Awards ceremony a few years ago. “I kind of fanned at him, gushed at him, and said how much I’d stolen from him over the years,” he said. “He asked me to host this last year, and I was happy to.”
“What a privilege it is that this thing exists,” he said. “Especially in our society, where we have been at war for so long, and less than one per cent of the population has gone and fought in the war. We are not asked to be engaged. Or, rather, we are asked in lip-service ways, to say, ‘Thank you for your service.’ ” StoryCorps, he said, gives everyone an opportunity to learn something of “the intimate sacrifice these people have made.” He said that one of the things he’s learned in getting to know veterans is that “listening to their stories, and just talking to them about their experience, is one of the most appreciated things that you can do. And, of course, this does it in such a poignant and concentrated way.
“I think StoryCorps is a real treasure. It’s such a clean idea, you know? Such a natural, clean idea. And I’m so happy somebody thought of it.”
Full Article: The New Yorker.
Stephen Colbert Lauds 'Military Voices' at StoryCorps Gala