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ALUMNI UPDATES

Jerold Block ’74 Lives and Breathes Politics

By Justin Clark ’04J

Jerold Block '74

Jerold Block ’74 (aka Jack Clark) recording his “Blast The Right” podcast in his cozy, corner-of-the-living-room studio.

PHOTO: MONICA MAGANA

Jerold Block ’74, ’77L remembers the day in the late 1980s that his alter-ego, Jack Clark, was born. The Los Angeles activist had just come home after an afternoon passing out pamphlets criticizing U.S. foreign policy in Latin America when he discovered that someone painted a red hammer-and-sickle on his front door. Block, whose address was unlisted, had reason to be alarmed. Only a few weeks before and a few miles away, one of his fellow activists, a Salvadoran woman, had been kidnapped and tortured by unknown assailants for similar political activities.

“I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to unnecessarily put myself in physical danger,’” recalls Block. “I bought a baseball bat and decided to start using an alias.”

Two decades later, Block uses the alias to deliver one of the most popular grassroots progressive podcasts on the Internet. That’s according to Podcast Alley, podcasting’s equivalent of the Billboard charts. Though not yet two years old, Block’s weekly screed recently reached the No. 4 slot among its 31,000 competitors. Every Thursday, “Blast The Right” attacks right-wing figureheads such as Dick Cheney or Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly with such power, one wonders if Block ever needed that baseball bat.

In any case, Block has another weapon at his disposal: a firsthand knowledge of politics that stretches back to his days as a high school student in Massapequa, Long Island, where he helped organize his school’s first Vietnam War protest. Block says his political activities and wild, curly hair earned him membership in what his classmates called the “Greenwich Village clique” — named after the liberal NYC neighborhood — as well as the enmity of the football team. Against his parents’ wishes, Block chose Columbia, then known as a hotbed of activism.

Block says that after his high school experience, he found it ironic when he moved into his first-year residence hall room in Carman and saw a football team jersey hanging in his roommate’s closet.

“I was elated when I discovered my roommate and his team weren’t right wing idiots, though,” he says with a laugh. Any lingering doubts Block had vanished entirely when his roommate supplied the chain that secured the door of the campus building that Block and his fellow Vietnam War protesters had decided to occupy.

At Columbia, Block majored in political science and gravitated to campus political groups, which included some students whose names were soon to become famous. He founded a group, the Riverside Democrats, and joined the West Side Kids, a group founded by Jerrold Nadler ’69. Along the way, Block was recruited to former senator George McGovern’s presidential campaign and to Howard Samuels’ bid for New York state governor, where he worked closely as canvasser with former Clinton campaign manager-turned-Fox News commentator Dick Morris ’67. While neither candidate prevailed, Block says the experience taught him that behind every successful campaign are countless man-hours of often thankless labor.

“That was when volunteers meant something,” says Block. “It wasn’t so much about the TV back then, or even the radio. It was shoe leather that got people elected.”

Block says he was so busy in those years that his coursework often seemed like an afterthought. Nevertheless, one of his influences was anthropology professor Betty Denige, who was so impressed with Block’s writing that she encouraged him to switch from political science to anthropology. Block politely declined. “I don’t have any particular grasp of anthropology,” Block told her. “I’m just using ‘facts plus logic.’” Decades before his podcast began, Block had already coined its slogan.

The motto sums up Block’s preference for figures over rhetoric. “He’s really great at breaking down economic issues,” says Portland, Ore., podcast fan Matt Bors, who draws political cartoons for the Los Angeles Times and The Nation, “whereas Democrats and liberals usually talk about issues broadly and don’t get into the economics of wealth distribution.”

After Columbia, Block enter¬ed the Law School, whose rigors kept him from politics for several years. After a few years as a corporate lawyer in Washington, D.C., he moved to Los Angeles and became an entertainment attorney for a firm that represented clients such as The Rolling Stones. But soon Block found himself longing to return to his activist roots.

“When I turned 30 in 1982, I decided I didn’t want to be getting an ulcer over whether The Rolling Stones get another penny on every record,” he explains.

Block turned to what he considered more important matters. In the early ’80s, while researching a screenplay on World Hunger, he took a reality tour of South America that changed his life. “Once you’ve been to a Third World slum, if you have any heart at all, you’re changed forever,” he explains.

Block has pursued his activism almost continually since, except for a period in the late 1980s when he developed Multiple Chemical Sensitivity, a respiratory condition that now keeps him housebound. “When I go out, I get what feels like a brain fog,” he says of his condition, considered a disability by the government.

Locked inside, Block des¬paired that his activist career was over. But then the Internet came along, and with it podcasts. Despite his isolation — Block lives alone and seldom hosts guests on his program — his voice is one of the most popular on the left in the podcast world. Still, podcasting isn’t profitable yet, and Block wants to get his voice out to as broad an audience as possible. He is looking for a spot on a terrestrial radio show. His only problem, he says, is his voice. While contagiously passionate, it is a bit “Long Island nasal-ish,” he says.

“Some people write in to my program to say they really like my voice,” he says with a laugh. “But they’re almost always from New York.“


Justin Clark ’04J lives in Los Angeles and contributes to L.A. Weekly, Plenty and Nerve.com.

 

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