Bill Moyers passed away at age 91 on June 26. He started his career in print journalism at age 16 and ended it in TV journalism (PBS/CBS) in 1985. In between, he served in government (an Associate Director at the Peace Corps and in Lyndon Johnson’s Administration as a political strategist and Press Secretary.) He was instrumental in helping to create Medicare and the Public Broadcasting System. In his memory I’ve compiled a few quotes that I’ve come across over the last few days. All quotes, except the last, are by Moyers. (I apologize for not providing references to my sources.)
1. Politics
Ninety-six percent of the people believe it’s important that we reduce the influence of money [in politics]. Yet 91 percent think it’s not likely that its influence will be lessened. Think about that: People know what’s right to do yet don’t think it can or will be done. When the public loses faith in democracy’s ability to solve the problems it has created for itself, the game’s almost over. And I think we are this close to losing democracy to the mercenary class.
The historian Plutarch warned us long ago of what happens when there is no brake on the power of great wealth to subvert the electorate. “The abuse of buying and selling votes,” he wrote of Rome, “crept in and money began to play an important part in determining elections. Later on, this process of corruption spread in the law courts and to the army, and finally, when even the sword became enslaved by the power of gold, the republic was subjected to the rule of emperors.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have the Roberts Court that consistently privileges the donor class.
We don’t have emperors yet, but we do have a Senate in which, as a study by the political scientist Larry Bartels reveals, “Senators appear to be considerably more responsive to the opinions of affluent constituents than to the opinions of middle-class constituents, while the opinions of constituents in the bottom third of the income distribution have no apparent statistical effect on their senators’ roll call votes.”
We don’t have emperors yet, but we have a House of Representatives controlled by the far right that is now nourished by streams of “dark money” unleashed thanks to the gift bestowed on the rich by the Supreme Court in the Citizens United case.
We don’t have emperors yet, but one of our two major parties is now dominated by radicals engaged in a crusade of voter suppression aimed at the elderly, the young, minorities and the poor; while the other party, once the champion of everyday working people, has been so enfeebled by its own collaboration with the donor class that it offers only token resistance to the forces that have demoralized everyday Americans.
In one way or another, this is the oldest story in America: the struggle to determine whether “we, the people” is a moral compact embedded in a political contract or merely a charade masquerading as piety and manipulated by the powerful and privileged to sustain their own way of life at the expense of others.
2. Journalism
A free and independent press? Bah, humbug….Who will show us how corruption is not just episodic but systemic? That capitalism has democracy by the throat because democracy no longer has any balls?
News is what people want to keep hidden and everything else is publicity.
The only way we’re going to keep this democracy that we have got going is to have a feisty, free and robust core of journalists continuing to do their work day in and day out.
The framers of our nation never imagined what could happen if big government, big publishing, and big broadcasters ever saw eye to eye in putting the public’s need for news second to their own interests — and to the ideology of market economics. The greatest moments in the history of the press came not when journalists made common cause with the state but when they stood fearlessly independent of it.
I’m going out telling the story that I think is the biggest story or our time: how the right wing media has become a partisan propaganda arm of the Republican National Committee. We have an ideological press that’s interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that’s interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don’t have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people.
The mission of public broadcasting was to create an alternative channel that would be free not only of commercials, but free of commercial values, abroad casting system that would serve the life of the mind, that would encourage the imagination, that would sponsor the performing arts, documentaries, travel. It was to be an alternative to the commercial broadcasting at that time. And I think the most important thing that we can do is to continue to treat Americans as citizens, not just consumers. If you look out and see an audience of consumers, you want to sell them something. If you look out and see an audience of citizens, you want to share something with them. And there is a difference. And I think public broadcasting, public radio and public television has to be - have to be locked to the commitment to seeing America as a society of citizens, not as consumers. And somehow, if we accept that as our basic operative assumption, we'll find a way to serving that public in the years to come.
3. His Southern Baptist faith
I never go to the Bible for proof text. What we used to say in seminary was the proof of the issue - that if you were having an argument with somebody, you just open the Bible and say, here, see, it says this, I told you so. I never use it that way. I was fortunate to grow up in a Baptist church that was – emphasized thinking for yourself, what we call the priesthood of the believer, that you had to read the Bible and wrestle with its meanings and then bringing to bear the best teaching and the best scholarship - decide for yourself what it means.
So I've never been to the Bible for that kind of - as a life raft, as a life jacket, as a pill to pop when I'm feeling down, when I'm uncertain. It's the fact that it's so woven into my whole life and that I read these stories as mirrors, in a way, of our own individual journeys.
At last count there were twenty-seven varieties of Baptists in America. My particular crowd holds that while the Bible is our anchor, it is no icon; that revelation continues; that truth is not frozen in doctrine but emerges from experience and encounter; that the City of God, is a past, present, and future community whose inhabitants are not all alike and some of whom may even surprise us in being counted among the faithful. In Jesus Christ we see the power of the Living Word over tired practice and dead belief. In his relationship with women, the sick, the outcast, and the stranger-even with the hated tax collector-Jesus broke new ground. The literal observance of the law was not to quench the spirit of justice. "The sabbath was made for humankind, and not humankind for the sabbath" (Mark 2:27).
These beliefs do not make for lawless anarchy or the religion of lone rangers. They do not mean we can float safely on the little raft on our own faith while the community flounders. They are the ground of personhood. They aim for a community with moral integrity (despite our fallenness as human beings), the wholeness that flows from mutual obligation. Our religion is an adventure in freedom within boundaries of accountability.
Essential to our faith is the conviction that no government can be permitted to compromise any soul`s exercise of freedom. For any government to say, "This experience is more to be preferred by the state than that one," is the slippery slope to the subversion of all faith. Accordingly, we see the separation of church and state as the first line of constitutional defense in protecting that "one great thing in religion" against coercion–the individual`s own experience with God. Every generation must take up the challenge because the threat to religious liberty is as perennial as the seasons, as inevitable as the rising and setting of the sun.
In our time the threat has come not from a direct assault by government; it has come from within the Christian community. In the past 20 years reactionary Baptists forged an alliance to take over a major political party and promote an agenda of state–sanctioned prayer, public subsidies, and government privileges. Their first, and most successful, strategy was to seize control of the Southern Baptist Convention, whose pews they envisioned as precincts of power.
It was a remarkable coup, and it was made possible by exploiting an unsuspecting laity`s respect for the Bible. Most Baptists grow up believing the Bible to be the sufficient authority for our faith and practice; its witness to revelation we take as the starting point for our own spiritual growth over a lifetime of attempting to learn and to apply what the Scriptures tell us. There is always incipient in this belief the danger of idolatry, of exalting the Bible as holy instead of the God whose spirit moves within it. Rauschenbush, among others, warned against Baptists who would "use the Bible just as other denominations use their creed." He feared that just as in Catholicism only priests could consecrate the sacraments and forgive sins, so among Baptists an elect would declare: "You must believe everything which we tell you the Bible means and says." They would impose on everyone else "their little interpretation of the great Book as the creed to which all good Baptists must cleave."
4. Character
The only quote in this essay about Bill Moyers rather than by him.
The ancient Greeks had a word for a man like Moyers: parrhesia. Michel Foucault translates parrhesia as “free speech.” And the person engaging in free speech is called the parrhesiastes. The person who uses parrhesia, says Foucault, “is someone who says everything he has in mind: he does not hide anything, but opens his heart and mind completely to other people through his discourse.” Parrhesia has four characteristics: Truth, risk, criticism and duty. Moyers knew his calling was to be a truth-seeking, truth-telling parrhesiastes. And, across multiple platforms, he earned the accolades of the wreath of honor. Moyers was the true parrhesiastes. Moyers’ character and experiences remained true to his convictions. No forced manipulations. No faking the results. Straight-shooting, straight-talking truth-telling.
May he rest in peace. Pray for us.