Fighting for truth, the grandest prize

Silver-haired veterans of the Movement gathered at Agrodolce Osteria in Berkeley on Sunday, March 26, for a fundraiser for Julie Thompson and

Brogan De Paor’s documentary-inthe-making, “Robert Scheer, Above the Fold.” Scheer, of course, is a journalist and educator who has fought for a progressive agenda on social and political fronts for more than 40 years. The filmmakers having interviewed him for an activist video archive, Thompson and De Paor were so taken with his recollections and insight that they decided to focus on him for a full-length documentary.

The gang included John Burton (first to pony up $1,000 during the fundraising part of the afternoon), actor/activist Mike Farrell (who served as emcee), journalist

Reese Erlich, Anne Weills, Dan Siegel, The Chronicle’s David Talbot and documentarian Stephen Talbot, Steve Wasserman of Heyday Books (which will publish “Ransoming Pagan Babies,” a 548page book of Warren Hinckle’s work, on March 20) and the UC journalism school’s Deirdre English, former editor of Mother Jones magazine.

Farrell led off the occasion by praising Scheer, and others followed suit. “I’m not the story,” said Scheer, proclaiming himself so used to being a journalist that getting attention is “extremely awkward for me.” A collage of clips from the movie was prefaced by the journalist with a heartfelt disclaimer: about the “weirdest f— beard” he was sporting in 1970 (to pass as a French archaeologist in Vietnam).

The surprise guest was former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich, a political ally and pal of Scheer’s who had flown from Washington to praise him for his “fearlessness, intellectual integrity, ability to get under the story, to really understand what’s being communicated.”

Born in 1936, Scheer is still teaching and writing, and despite his protestations, after all these years of work, a little basking isn’t inappropriate. As to the mind-set that had made his journalistic success possible, he quoted the poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti: “Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”

P.S.: Which brings to mind the 98th birthday of Ferlinghetti, celebrated last weekend with a party organized by art curator Kate Eilertsen and Michael Muscardini, founder of Muscardini Cellars in Kentwood. Rena Bransten reports that the walls of the winery were hung with 11 paintings by Ferlinghetti, and the guest list of around 20 included novelist Michael Ondaatje, poet Agneta Falk and man about North Beach Tony Dingman. The cake read “Poeta XCVIII.”

Bassem Youssef — whose book is “Revolution for Dummies,” whose movie is “Tickling Giants” and who is at Cal Performances on Tuesday, April 4 — is most efficiently described as “the Egyptian Jon Stewart.” Youssef, a physician turned news commentator, began broadcasting in Egypt after the Arab Spring; he continued until he was forced off the air in 2014, after which he and his family moved to Pleasanton, where they knew people. “It’s a really beautiful, boring white neighborhood,” he said in a phone conversation the other day. Eventually, the Youssefs moved to Los Angeles “because there is where the media is.”

Was he always aware, while doing his show — which had an audience of 30 million — there was a line he couldn’t cross? “The line was trying as much as possible not to criticize the religion or the institution of the army because these are basically untouchable. Trying to expose the hypocrisy of the media, and the people in power that try to abuse either religion or the concept of the military . ... If you attack a military leader, you are attacking the religion,” and vice versa.

Can he compare the Egyptian resistance to what’s happening here now, or do our complaints feel puny? “Lots of people draw parallels,” he said. He thinks Americans should take the situation “seriously because it is not a threshold that Americans are used to.” The U.S. has never before had a president who has “broken the law, has had contact with foreign powers, not released tax reports, openly practiced nepotism ... a politician who does not understand the concept of public service. In the Middle East, we’re used to that. But to us ... this is a disintegration. This is extremely disturbing. I think people are rightly disturbed, and they should fight against that.”

PUBLIC EAVESDROPPING “I’d like a hot chocolate please, but don’t make it too chocolaty or too hot.” Women to barista, overheard in Berkeley by Miltiades Mandros