Thinking of Bill Moyers, Next Steps, and a Vietnam War-ending Anniversary

April 30th, 2010 - by: danny

NO NEWS DISSECTED TODAY

MY TIMES, THEY ARE A CHANGING

We all know nothing lasts forever. I usually write about the news of others. Today, I am offering some notes from my own mind and heart.

First, I salute our colleague, our friend, our mentor and role model, Bill Moyers, who airs his last Journal program tonight on PBS.

Bill Moyers Journal . Last Guest on the Journal

Full transcript here.

Throughout his long career, from his days in Texas through his stint at the Johnson White House, to his role as Publisher of Newsday, to his commentaries on CBS, to his amazing track record as documentary filmmaker and talk show host, Bill has demonstrated a range of probing intellectual interests, and a deep and unwavering commitment to democratic discourse.

He went from a being a servant of power to a critic of power, from an insider to an outsider in traditional TV terms, from the networks to public broadcasting, to become an engaged citizen-journalist and then a patron and supporter of media reform lobbying, campaign finance reform and so much more.

Bill is admired by his colleagues but also tolerated by a far more centrist and often cowardly crew of comfortably sinecured public TV executives because he became an institution, one of public media’s few revered legends in part because he was damn good on the air as an issue-raiser and, also, as a fundraiser for just about every public TV station as well as for his own work which attracted, it seemed, unlimited foundation support and even a corporate sponsor who stayed with him over the years.

Bill knows how to work the system and the room. His southern twang, charm and charisma has kept audiences coming back, week after week, year after year, even when he was relegated to a Friday night public affairs ghetto air slot.

He resigned at age 76, but the PBS Gods used the opportunity praise him to the skies while quietly killing the excellent magazine show NOW which he created. Why? Do we really need another show hosted by a corporate editor who just turned an issue of Newsweek into an uncritical praise poem for a resurgent America?

Bill is now firmly in the pantheon of TV greats – still alive, praise the lord, and right up there with Edward R. Murrow, Cronkite and so many more.

Long live!

PBS.org: The Journal travels to Iowa where one group, Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement (CCI), has been helping ordinary citizens fight for change for more than three decades. “We are the government.”

Full transcript here.

The other two interviews can be viewed by clicking on the links below:

• Bill Moyers sits down with populist Jim Hightower to look at the history and legacy of people’s movements and discuss how ordinary people can reclaim political power. More about Jim Hightower and American populism.

• Acclaimed author Barry Lopez joins Bill Moyers to discuss nature, spirit and the human condition. Lopez is an essayist, author and short-story writer, whose many books include ARCTIC DREAMS, winner of the National Book Award and OF WOLVES AND MEN, a National Book Award finalist. More Barry Lopez.

PBS.org: The JOURNAL on-air will be coming to an end on April 30th but the conversation continues online and on our blog. We’ll be posting commentary, features and selections from the Moyers Digital Archive. Stay in touch even after we’re off the air at this address and through RSS feeds, podcasts, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and our newsletter. Sign up here. We look forward to hearing from you.

BILL AND ME

Bill was always friendly towards me, occasionally quoting me in his speeches and emailing back and forth, but I felt he was basically uncomfortable with my more independent approach. Perhaps it was my funkier style, outspoken criticisms of the PBS system, and activist proclivities.

When my dad was dying, he sent him copies of his series on death and dying and a beautiful personal letter. It so moved him that he wrote several drafts of letters to respond but none of them were quite right or said all he wanted to say. My dad had a religious devotion to his program. It was his church and, or, schul.

Moyers and I never worked together really, even though I tried. I understood his need to cover his back and to attract guests among the high and mightier.

I wish him and his thoughtful colleague and wife, Judith, every blessing as he transitions out of the public spotlight. My hunch his he will be back in public life sooner than later. The relentless “detached” advocate may soon come out of the closet as an up-front activist.

I can more easily reflect on Bill Moyer’s career than my own which seems to be trending down if not out, even as I am engaged in an effort to get my new, and possibly last, film PLUNDER The Crime Of Our Time out. Making it has been my hardest project so far – funding was almost impossible to come by but I couldn’t let it go because I am so pissed about how our economy has been wrecked.

It was a compulsion, and so far, I am pleased that the people who have seen it like it. I am grateful to Moyers for letting me use part of one of his interviews in it.

It’s also reassuring that so many people who were passive and silent on the issue are now speaking out and ventilating their anger. I was at the AFL-CIO rally yesterday afternoon and was heartened by all the people who were there to march on Wall Street. I think we may be at one of those moments when these issues become mass issues. Here’s one report. Typically, and predictably, the presence of the president of the AFL-CIO and thousands of workers in the streets did not rate prominent attention as news fit to print in the New York Times.

In that sense, my film is out at the right time. We gave out flyers about the movie, and found people receptive in the ranks of the union members there. My argument about the crisis as a crime story is already the conventional wisdom in that world. Later, i screened the film to an audience at the National Arts Club which included some Wall Streeters. A few came up to say they liked it, and that I knew my stuff.

I said there would be no news but I have to make an exception for one related news bulletin, just out last night, hooray:

AP: Goldman Sachs under criminal investigation by the US attorney’s office in Manhattan

“The Justice Department move was the latest in a dramatic series of turns in the Goldman saga, which has pitted the culture of Wall Street against angry lawmakers in an election year, in the wake of the financial crisis that plunged the country into the most severe recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s.” [More here Ã¢â€ â€™]

WHAT NOW?

For years now, I have been studying and exposing the bubble while been traveling in a far more isolated bubble of my own making, pursuing my passions with, alas, a smaller and smaller community of support.

I know I am far too driven, perhaps individualistic and work-oriented. Some call it prolific. I sometimes think of it as obsessive especially because I have not really built the kind of friendship networks and political community one needs to prosper spiritually as well as financially in this type of work.

LEARNING FROM THOREAU

My brother, Bill, who lives in Massachusetts, and writes regularly about one of our greatest Americans, Henry David Thoreau, author of Walden Pond and other great works including his treatise on civil disobedience. For years he drove right by Walden Pond on his way to teach High School history to generations of appreciative students.

Recently, when I told him I was going to be moving from my office as the company I co-created by in l987 is forced to scale back in these tough economic time, he sent me a quote from Thoreau who was reflecting about his own move more than a century ago.

He was leaving the pond that he loved and had made his home.

Bill writes:

“Thoreau takes nearly 300 pages to describe his beautiful, Edenic stay in the paradise along Walden’s shores. Then he stuns the reader by ending the next-to-last chapter this way:

“Thus was my first year’s life in the woods completed; and the second year was similar to it. I finally left Walden September 6th, 1847.”

But why would he suddenly choose to leave a incomparable paradise that he had described to us at such length?

He gives the answer in the “Conclusion:”

“I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one. It is remarkable how easily and insensibly we fall into a particular route, and make a beaten track for ourselves. I had not lived there a week before my feet wore a path from my door to the pond-side; and though it is five or six years since I trod it, it is still quite distinct. It is true, I fear, that others may have fallen into it, and so helped to keep it open. The surface of the earth is soft and impressible by the feet of men; and so with the paths which the mind travels. How worn and dusty, then, must be the highways of the world, how deep the ruts of tradition and conformity! I did not wish to take a cabin passage, but rather to go before the mast and on the deck of the world, for there I could best see the moonlight amid the mountains. I do not wish to go below now.”

“I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours …”

MY OWN WALDEN POND

In a sense, Globalvision may have have become my own Walden Pond, a comfortable world that nurtured me but also became a kind of parallel universe to retreat into as our media and political words became coarser and more driven by reactionary thinking, market logic, and a deep corruption of spirit and practice.

I have worked too hard to produce programming that was not seen as widely as I think it should have been, but, that’s how the cookie crumbles in our media culture.

Perhaps my critics are right—you can’t be good at everything. Quality suffers when you work with low budgets and small, often inexperienced teams.

You get what you pay for, especially, when you don’t have the money to pay.

I am proud or my books and films and videos and blogs, and articles and etc., but in some ways I have been my own worst enemy when it came to finding the audience I was hoping to reach. I know I overdo it. Too much information. Too much news. Too many stories. Maybe I am just too much. Just look at the length of my 3000 word plus daily blog. It’s been compared to the Dead Sea Scrolls.

I am sure I could have done it better, and I am not sure now how much longer I can or will do it.

The need to do more has often limited my ability to do my best. I have always been driven and in a rush, writing too often without proper editing, or even proofreading, often flinging work out there without adequate support from distributors or well-endowed publishers. I have always wanted to be timely, the duty, I guess, of a news junkie.

BLASTS FROM THE PAST

Next month, I will be joining a reunion of the kids I worked with on the Clinton News, our student newspaper back at DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx where I first discovered an affinity for journalism.

Those years, so long ago, were, I realize now, a turning point.

As are the events of today.

Did you know it was on this date back in 1975, that the Vietnam War, which activated and radicalized me as it so many, came to a crashing end with one side winning and the other fleeing? It was a Ho Chi Minh moment.

A brief overview of the history as presented, as i had been for years by our one-sided media offering no sense of why and how the Vietnamese victors–always labeled Communists — survived and triumphed. Today, Vietnam is our friend and trading partner. Peace out.

I cried and then cheered the liberation and reunification of that country which I visited and reported on even as the abuses at the end mirrored the abuses over so many years in a war whose lessons we have yet to learn and seem doomed to repeat. We called it the FALL of Saigon, they, the RISE.

Vietnam is still a reference point, which is probably why my past will never be past.

Goodbye Saigon by Billy Joel

“We had no homefront
We had no soft soap
They sent us playboy
They gave us bob hope
We dug in deep
And shot on sight
And prayed to Jesus Christ with all of our might.”
[full lyrics here]

May Day is just a day away. It’s also World Press Freedom Day!

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