Bill Moyers
American journalist, broadcaster, and a former White House Press Secretary.
All my life I've prayed the Lord's Prayer, but I've never prayed, "Give me this day my daily bread." It is always, "Give us this day our daily bread." Bread and life are shared realities. They do not happen in isolation. Civilization is an unnatural act. We have to make it happen, you and I, together with all the other strangers.
A free press is one where it's okay to state the conclusion you're led to by the evidence. One reason I'm in hot water is because my colleagues and I at NOW didn't play by the conventional rules of Beltway journalism. Those rules divide the world into Democrats & Republicans, liberals & conservatives, and allow journalists to pretend they have done their job if instead of reporting the truth behind the news, they merely give each side an opportunity to spin the news.
The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly "veneration of wealth" are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined.
People who don't believe in government are likely to defile government.
Conservatives-- or better, pro-corporate apologists-- hijacked the vocabulary of Jeffersonian liberalism and turned words like "progress," "opportunity," and "individualism" into tools for making the plunder of America sound like divine right... This "degenerate and unlovely age," as one historian calls it, exists in the mind of Karl Rove-- the reputed brain of George W. Bush-- as the seminal age of inspiration for politics and governance of America today.
The corporate right and the political right declared class warfare on working people a quarter of a century ago and they've won... Take the paradox of Rush Limbaugh, ensconced in a Palm Beach mansion massaging the resentments across the country of white-knuckled wage earners, who are barely making ends meet in no small part because of the corporate and ideological forces for whom Rush has been a hero.
Reagan's story of freedom superficially alludes to the Founding Fathers, but its substance comes from the Gilded Age, devised by apologists for the robber barons. It is posed abstractly as the freedom of the individual from government control—a Jeffersonian ideal at the roots of our Bill of Rights, to be sure. 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 license to buy the political system right out from everyone else.
Here is the crisis of the times as I see it: We talk about problems, issues, policies, but we don't talk about what democracy means—what it bestows on us—the revolutionary idea that it isn't just about the means of governance but the means of dignifying people so they become fully free to claim their moral and political agency.
In those days, affirmative action was for whites only. I might still be working for the grocery store in the small Texas town where I grew up were it not for affirmative action for Southern white boys.
In uniform patriotism can salute one flag only, embrace but the first circle of life—one's own land and tribe. In war that is necessary, in peace it is not enough.
No wonder scoundrels find refuge in patriotism; it offers them immunity from criticism.
Bullies—political bullies, economic bullies, and religious bullies—cannot be appeased; they have to be opposed with courage, clarity, and conviction. This is never easy. These true believers don't fight fair. Robert's Rules of Order is not one of their holy texts.
In tracking down and eliminating terrorists, we need to change our metaphor from a "war on terror"—exactly what, pray tell, is that?—to the mind-set of Interpol tracking down master criminals through intense global cooperation among nations, or the FBI stalking the Mafia, or local police determined to quell street gangs without leveling the entire neighborhood in the process.
For the life of me I cannot fathom why we expect so much from teachers and provide them so little in return. In 1940, the average pay of a male teacher was actually 3.6 percent more than what other college-educated men earned. Today it is 60 percent lower. Women teachers now earn 16 percent less than other college-educated women. This bewilders me. [...] There was no Plato without Socrates, and no John Coltrane without Miles Davis.
On the eve of the election last month my wife Judith and I were driving home late in the afternoon and turned on the radio for the traffic and weather. What we instantly got was a freak show of political pornography: lies, distortions, and half-truths — half-truths being perhaps the blackest of all lies. They paraded before us as informed opinion.
[Martin Luther] King subpoened the nation's conscience. He was killed for it.
Like those populists of that earlier era, millions of Americans have awakened to a sobering reality: they live in a plutocracy, where they are disposable. Then, the remedy was a popular insurgency that ignited the spark of democracy. Now we have come to another parting of the ways, and once again the fate and character of our country are up for grabs. [...] Democracy only works when we claim it as our own.
Jesus would not be crucified today. The prophets would not be stoned. Socrates would not drink the hemlock. They would instead be banned from the Sunday talk shows and op-ed pages by the sentries of establishment thinking who guard against dissent with the one weapon of mass destruction most cleverly designed to obliterate democracy: the rubber stamp.
Journalists who make mistakes get sued for libel; historians who make mistakes get to publish a revised edition.
As every volunteer testifies, the Peace Corps is more than a program or mission. It is a way of being in the world. This is a conservative notion because it holds dear the ground of one's own being—the culture and customs that gave meaning to a particular life. But it is a liberal notion for respecting the ground revered by others. This double helix in America's DNA may yet be the source of a new political and patriotism that could save us from toxic self-absorption.