For WIDER GRAPHICS: https://theweathercontinues.blogspot.com/2025/11/cia-news-director-at-whqr-public-media.html
Ben Schachtman answers the Proust Questionnaire
WHQR
Published September 17, 2025 at 10:26 AM EDT
https://www.whqr.org/inside-whqr/2025-09-17/ben-schachtman-answers-the-proust-questionnaire?
Meet News Director Ben Schachtman!
Q: What is your idea of perfect happiness?
A: When you’re exactly where you want to be, with who you want to be with – could be at the beach when just the right amount of breeze kicks up, a few songs into the set when the rhythm section is really synched up, the first drink on the first day of a vacation in a new city, or prepping mise en place in the kitchen with the music up and the doors and windows open.
Q: What is your greatest fear?
A: That ignorance, apathy, and cruelty win out over curiosity, passion, and kindness. And running into a spiderweb.
Q: Which living person do you most admire?
A: I don’t think I have a singular hero or anything like that. I admire people who try to live well, and do good, folks who stick up for the little guy, and anyone who takes their craft, whatever it is, seriously — without becoming a bore.
Q: What is your greatest extravagance?
A: Good food, good wine, and good whiskey.
Q: What do you consider the most overrated virtue?
A: Temperance. (Sorry, Plato.)
Q: On what occasion do you lie?
A: I try not to. But sometimes, a lie can be a kindness. Also, when you’re planning a surprise.
Q: Which words or phrases do you most overuse?
A: You can guess a certain four-letter one. Also, “fair enough” and “here’s the thing.”
Q: What or who is the greatest love of your life?
A: My wife and best friend, Casey.
Q: When and where were you happiest?
A: [See above examples, I’d say.]
Q: Which talent would you most like to have?
A: Omnilingualism.
Q: If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?
A: I stupidly hurt my back many years ago, and I’d like to have not done that. I’d like to have more patience.
Q: What do you consider your greatest achievement?
A: Definitely building a lasting marriage. A runner up would be my journalism career. I’ve rather proud of some of my puns, too.
Q: If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?
A: A housecat.
Q: Where would you most like to live?
A: A cabin on a lake, someplace where there are still four seasons.
Q: What is your most treasured possession?
A: I’m more for experiences than things. But I’m awfully fond of my guitar gear. And my stand mixer.
Q: What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
A: Wronging someone with no way to atone for it, or being someone who cannot celebrate someone else’s joy. Also, that genetic condition where cilantro tastes like soap.
Q: What is your favorite occupation?
A: Writer.
Q: What is your most marked characteristic?
A: My beard? And maybe a dark and sometimes weird sense of humor.
Q: What do you most value in your friends?
A: Honesty and humor.
Q: Who are your favorite writers?
A: I grew up on world-builders: Isaac Asimov, C.S. Lewis, Larry Niven. I played hooky once, hiding on the catwalk in the school auditorium, to read Robert Heinlein’s Have Space Suit Will Travel.
Later I found the classic essayists: Menken. Didion. Baldwin. It was perhaps the most lasting epiphany of my life that you could write things and make someone, separated by time and space and even culture, feel something. They made me understand that, yes, words have meaning. But also style.
In fiction there are too many too count. Jennifer Egan has some of the cleanest, most touching prose I’ve ever read. Toni Morrison just offers more and more every time you go back to her work, I think. Vonnegut should go without saying, but I’ll say it here anyway. Stephen Graham Jones is one of the most inventive and interesting writers I know. I could go on (and I will, if you let me).
Q: Who is your hero of fiction?
A: Richard Russo’s Sully from Nobody’s Fool (and Paul Newman’s take on the role in the film version is pretty great). Like many of Russo’s characters, Sully is someone so immediately real and flawed. Empire Falls, which won Russo the Pulitzer, is probably the better book, but Nobody’s Fool is funnier, saltier and earthier. It’s worldbuilding without alien tripods or lightspeed jumps or Biblical allegory.
Q: Which historical figure do you most identify with?
A: I think ‘historical figure’ feels a little grandiose to me. But, maybe some hardscrabble reporter from the Brooklyn Eagle in the Tammany Hall days.
Q: Who are your heroes in real life?
A: People who give a shit, and show up.
Q: What is it that you most dislike?
A: Laziness.
Q: What is your greatest regret?
A: I wish I’d been a better friend, and a better big brother, growing up. Also, spent too much money on Scotch before I realized bourbon is better.
Q: How would you like to die?
A: Laughing.
Q: What is your motto?
A: Do what you can, with what you have, where you are, while you can.
And if you’re feeling down, there’s always Virgil: “A joy it will be one day, perhaps, to remember even this.”
>>> THE ABOVE WERE NOT PROUST'S QUESTIONS -- but in the same SPIRIT -- Proust changed his: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proust_Questionnaire
I have seen Stephen Colbert administer "The Colbert Questionert" six times -- and he AWAYS asks his guests the same questions:
BACK TO SCHACHTMAN: I agree with Ben on all of these -- especially how devoted he is to his wife!!! However, his HONESTY as a JOURNALIST DOES NOT APPLY TO HIS ATTITUDE TOWARD ME!!!
When Ben moved to Wilmington in 2016 (I had returned from my 2nd period of Political Exile in Mexico in 2015), I was impressed by his work for Port City Daily , called him, and we were to meet for a coffee or beer. He really wanted to hear how then District Attorney Benjamin R. David had been SCREWING ME and JAILING ME with FALSE CHARGES -- and Colin Powell's people had had to get me to Puerto Vallarta, Mexico the first time to escape the CIA's attempts to kill me in Georgia -- with help of my parents, siblings, and employer. The second time was because D.A. Ben David made an ILLEGAL DEAL that if I left the state for at least a year, he would UNDO THE SEVERAL FALSE CONVICTIONS HE GOT OF ME AND DROP THE UNTRIED FALSE CHARGES.
BY LAW HE HAD TO UNCONDITIONALLY UNDO THEM IMMEDIATELY WHEN HE ADMITTED HE KNEW THEY WERE FALSE.
But then Schachtman learned that ALL of Wilmington's News Media had decided that NONE OF THEM could report a THING BY OR ABOUT ME -- until at least one other of them had done so first ?!?!?
And it was Ben's good friend and the TOP CIA AGENT in Wilmington, Kevin Maurer, who headed City Desk at the Wilmington Star News in 2012, who contacted me and DEBRIEFED ME for the CIA -- pretending he was going to write a HUGE EXPOSE' of Ben David's CRIMES in the paper!!!
And of course MAYOR SAFFO -- who had Wilmington Police MURDER my friend Evan William Fish On Sept. 3, 2011 -- had SPECTRUM try to murder me on February 13, 2017:
But as CORRUPT as the Democrats are, they are NOT ABJECT RACISTS NOR ARE THEY TRAITORS TO THE CONSTITUTION LIKE THE REPUBLICANS ALL ARE !!!
I met Patricia Sinatra at the Saturday Water Street Market here in Wilmington, and when she heard I'd been Tennessee Williams's last assistant and was related to the Kenans of Chapel Hill, she sat me down for over three hours and told me all about how she had engineered the Sinatra's selling Frank's BankAmerica to the Kenans' NationsBank nearly 30 years ago now. The Kenan's reverted to the older name "Bank of America", and she was pleased that the Kenans ran it so profitably!!!
She lives in Ontario, California, but her son (only child), Danny is an actor who lived here then, and he had gotten into trouble with a Meth/Adderall Addiction. She asked me to friend Danny because he needed the influence of someone like me.
But that was also when D.A Ben David began charging and convicting me of FALSE CHARGES, and my landlord took advantage of my being so long in jail to evict me!!! So, I barely ever saw Danny, but he took a real shine to me and said he wanted to have sex with me -- but COULD NOT because of his vows to Phoebe.
Patricia also told me how Frank had gotten everything disconnected from the Mafia before he died so his heirs were not Mafia connected -- but also how Old Joe Kennedy -- without JFK knowing -- got Frank to get his Mafia Pals in Chicago to stuff the Ballot Boxes and STOLE the election from Nixon !!!
EVERYONE KNEW that something like that happened, but I heard it "from the horse's mouth" -- and when Pat learned I'd BLOGGED IT, she got FURIOUS and has remained angry with me ever since!!!
Danny and his family moved back to California a week before I arrived back in Wilmington after my SECOND period of Political Exile, and remaining with his GOTH WIFE, he could not resist Meth and spent three years in a California Prison, was "straight" again, but I see from the latest photo that Phoebe posted on Facebook that he is so wasted be walks with a cane!!!
Sean Hannity's long-term wife, Jill Rhodes, was my nemesis Christal Presley's college roommate at Virginia Tech. Not only did Christal work with my NAZI Mother to end DEMOCRACY while she lived in Atlanta and pretended to be my best friend, she told me that Jill Rhodes told her several times that Hannity was 100% GAY (although he sired their two children). In his TV show's early years, Hannity promoted MANY HOT, SHIRTLESS, CHEST-HAIRLESS BOY BANDS -- LOL!!!
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