Bill Moyers has long been one of my very favorite journalists – in a time when our nation is in great need of good journalists with integrity. His
career in journalism spans more than four decades, following stints in government as
Deputy Director of the Peace Corps in the Kennedy administration, and Special Assistant to the President and White House Press Secretary in the Johnson administration.
I am currently reading his new book,
Moyers on Democracy, which consists largely of speeches he has given throughout his career. As I was recently reading Chapter 5 (of 28 chapters), a eulogy to long time civil rights activist
Bill Coffin, it amazed me how much Moyers’ eulogy spoke to the grave problems that we as a nation face today. Moyers is too young to have been one of our Founding Fathers, but the things that he has to say about our democracy are so prescient that I feel he should be considered as a much needed modern update to our Founding Fathers. What Moyers adds to what they said about our democracy is informed by more than two centuries of historical experience and nearly half a century of
personal experience. In this post I’ll discuss what I consider to be some Moyers’ most prescient contributions to our national dialogue on this subject, starting with his April 2006
eulogy to Bill Coffin.
On the need for grass roots activismI fault Hillary Clinton for many things regarding how she has run her campaign for President. But one thing I don’t fault her for is her emphasis on Lyndon Johnson’s crucial role in the Civil Rights movement. Many people took that as a slight to Martin Luther King’s role. But the truth of the matter is that both Johnson and King played crucial, heroic, and complimentary roles in the Civil Rights movement. Emphasizing one should not be seen as a slight to the other. Bill Moyers addressed this issue in his eulogy to Bill Coffin, long before the Democratic primary battle between Clinton and Obama heated up:
I once heard Lyndon Johnson urge Martin Luther King to hold off on his marching in the South to give the president time to neutralize the old guard in Congress and create a consensus for finally ending institutionalized racism in America. Martin Luther King listened, and the he answered (Moyers paraphrases): “Mr. President, the gods of the South will never be appeased. They will never have a change of heart. They will never repent of their sins… The time has passed for consensus, the time has come to break the grip of history and change the course of America.”
When the discussion was over Dr. King had carried the day. The president said, “Dr. King, you go on out there now and make it possible for me to do the right thing.” Lyndon Johnson had seen the light. For him to do the right thing someone had to subpoena America’s conscience and send it marching from the ground up against the citadels of power and privilege.
On the need for economic and social justiceIn Moyers’ eulogy to Coffin, he relates a conversation that they had two years previously, as they discussed how democracy in our country had reached a fork in the road:
Take one fork and the road leads to an America where military power serves empire rather than freedom; where we lose from within what we are trying to defend from without… where true believers in the gods of the market turn the law of the jungle into the law of the land; where in the name of patriotism we keep our hand over our heart pledging allegiance to the flag while our leaders pick our pockets and plunder our trust; where elites insulate themselves from the consequences of their own actions. Take the other fork and the road leads to the America whose promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” includes everyone.
Moyers pursued the same theme in a recent article appearing in
The Nation, “
A New Story for America”. In that article, he notes how Ronald Reagan put our country on the road to fascism (though he doesn’t use that word) by convincing many or most Americans that “big government” destroys our freedom and that we must therefore shrink government and give business unlimited “freedom” to do as they please.
Moyers notes, in response to Reagan’s plea for more corporate “freedom”, that “we too (meaning Democrats) have a story of freedom to tell” – if they can muster the courage to tell it. With regard to Reagan’s idea of “freedom”, Moyers says:
But what it meant in politics a century later, and still means today, is the freedom to accumulate wealth without social or democratic responsibilities and the license to buy the political system right from under everyone else, so that democracy no longer has the ability to hold capitalism accountable for the good of the whole… {It} has taken us down a terribly mistaken road toward a political order where government ends up servicing the powerful and taking from everyone else…
Nor does it assure the availability of economic opportunity… Yet it has been used to shield private power from democratic accountability, in no small part because conservative rhetoric has succeeded in denigrating government even as conservative politicians plunder it… But government is … often the only way we preserve our freedom from private power and its incursions.
On the potential value of angerGiven the current political climate, perhaps this isn’t the best time to defend anger. Barack Obama has in recent weeks been widely pilloried (very unfairly in my opinion) for anger demonstrated by a couple of men associated with his now former church, and those associations have threatened to derail his campaign. It is especially ironic that Obama would be pilloried for this, since he is one of the
least angry prominent politicians on the national scene today. I realize that anger, in politics or elsewhere, can be very destructive. In fact, my psychologist cousin wrote an excellent and
best selling book several decades ago about the destructive effects of anger.
Nevertheless, none of this means that anger can’t also have a constructive purpose when used in appropriate circumstances; and I have felt that Reverent Jeremiah Wright got a bum rap with respect to his anger that has been so widely displayed on U-tube and our national news in recent weeks. Here is what Moyers had to say about Bill Coffin and anger in his eulogy to Coffin:
“People in high places make me really angry”, he (Coffin) said, “because they are so callous. When you see uncaring people in high places, everybody should be mad as hell”…
There burned in his soul a sacred rage – that volatile mix of grief and anger and love that produced … a holy flame. If you lessen your anger at the structures of power, he said, you lower your love for the victims of power.
Yes indeed! Reading those words of Moyers helped put into words for me why I have often admired “angry” people like Jeremiah Wright. In character with Moyers’ sincere belief in those words, he was one of the very few, if not the only, journalist to give Wright an opportunity to explain the context of some of his controversial words to a national audience. With regard to his “chickens coming home to roost” speech, this is what Wright explained in his
interview with Moyers:
We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard-working fathers…
The stuff we have done overseas has now been brought back into our own front yards! America's chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism.
Is that hate? I doubt it. My own personal opinion of the matter is that sometimes the truth is divisive, but that it is often necessary to talk about the truth despite its divisiveness. What this speech is to me, more than anything else, is an anti-terrorism speech. But unlike the hypocritical anti-terrorism speeches of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, Wright’s anti-terrorism speech is sincere and gets to the heart of the matter.
On how a deregulated press co-opted by money and a corrupt government brings us fascismFor as long as I can remember, our national news media has favored wealth and power over ordinary Americans, giving conservatives a major advantage over liberals/progressives in election after election. This serious threat to our democracy took a major leap forward with the passage of the
Telecommunications Act of 1996. By substantially deregulating the telecommunications industry, that act led to the consolidation of our national news media into corporate hands such as we haven’t seen since the
Federal Communications Act of 1934 first recognized the need for broadcast news to serve a public purpose.
In a
keynote address to the National Conference on Media Reform, Bill Moyers describes how these developments have threatened the protections offered us by our First Amendment, which is based on the assumption of a separation of our government from an independent and free press. A free and independent press, of course, is supposed to protect us from government abuses. Moyers explains
What would happen, however, if the contending giants of big government and big publishing and broadcasting ever joined hands, ever saw eye to eye in putting the public's need for news second to free-market economics? That's exactly what's happening now under the ideological banner of "deregulation". Giant media conglomerates that our founders could not possibly have envisioned are finding common cause with an imperial state in a betrothal certain to produce not the sons and daughters of liberty but the very kind of bastards that issued from the old arranged marriage of church and state.
Consider the situation. Never has there been an administration so disciplined in secrecy, so precisely in lockstep in keeping information from the people at large and -- in defiance of the Constitution -- from their representatives in Congress. Never has the powerful media oligopoly ... been so unabashed in reaching like Caesar for still more wealth and power. Never have hand and glove fitted together so comfortably to manipulate free political debate, sow contempt for the idea of government itself, and trivialize the peoples' need to know.
On the need to hold our leaders accountableMost important, Moyers has no allusions that the wealthy and powerful will give up their powers over us of their own free will. He addresses this issue in Coffin’s eulogy:
Like Martin Luther King, Bill Coffin knew the heart of power is hard, knew it arranged the rules for its own advantage, knew that before justice could roll down… the dam of oppression, deception, and corruption had first to be broken, cracked open by the moral power of people demanding the right thing be done.
So, how are we to confront power in the face of a President and Vice President who have committed so many crimes against our Constitution and the laws of our nation, including:
lying to the American people and to Congress in order to justify a preemptive war of aggression; the abuse and torture of its prisoners, in
violation of international law, our Constitution, and the laws of our land;
warrantless spying on hundreds of thousands of Americans, in violation of the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution and our Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (
FISA); the use of presidential “
signing statements” to nullify over 800 laws duly passed by Congress; the
firing of several federal prosecutors in order to promote a partisan political agenda that involved among other things the illegal disenfranchising of hundreds of thousands of American citizens; repeated and willful
violations of the
Whistleblower Protection Act in order to promote their corrupt political agenda; and many many more?
In July of 2007,
Moyers hosted John Nichols and Bruce Fein on his show to talk about impeachment. Nichols had the following to say about the consequences of failing to hold Bush and Cheney accountable for their many crimes:
If George Bush and Dick Cheney are not appropriately held to account this Administration will hand off a toolbox with more powers than any President has ever had, more powers than the founders could have imagined…. Whoever gets it, one of the things we know about power is that people don't give away the tools.
With that in mind, Moyers has summed up the challenge we now face:
The freedom and rights we treasure were not sent from heaven and do not grow on trees… Our moral, political and religious duty is to make sure that this nation, which was conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal, is in good hands on our watch.
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