The recent turmoil at the Voice of America, created by Trump’s attempts last year to politicize that global example of a free press, reminded me of an incident that occurred one evening during the twenty-five years I spent as the manager of Blues Alley, the Georgetown jazz club in Washington, D.C.
After the first show one night in the early 1990s, a server told me that a gentleman sitting at one of her tables was crying. The show wasn’t that bad, I thought, as I walked over to the table. There sat an elderly man, dressed in a suit, hands clasped together in front of his mouth as if praying, and yes, sobbing. “Sir, is there anything wrong? Is there anything I can do?” I asked. In a heavily accented voice, the man looked up at me, and now smiling, explained that he was from Warsaw, Poland. He said he was a former dissident and now a member of Solidarity, who had spent years as a political prisoner during the Cold War.
He related how one of the few joys the men in his cellblock had was the occasional live big band jazz concerts which Willis Conover and the Voice of America broadcast from Blues Alley in the 1970s, picked up on a transistor radio secreted into the prison by a relative. “And here I am now, all these years later, a free man, sitting in this room, enjoying a concert from the very stage I once heard music from as a prisoner.” As I wiped a tear from my eye and pulled up a chair to hear more of his story, I couldn’t help but feel proud of our nation’s “soft power”, and appreciate what a difference it can make when properly funded and deployed.
By - Ralph F. Camilli
The Voice of America #VOA is an American international broadcaster funded by the United States Congress. It is the largest and oldest #USA-funded international broadcaster. VOA produces digital, TV, and radio content in 47 languages which it distributes to affiliate stations around the globe. It is programmed for foreign audiences, so VOA content has an influence on international public opinion. https://www.voanews.com/listen/schedule/voa-global-english