CAPITOL IDEAS: The Living Hell of Bill Moyers
Bethel, Tom
CAPITOL IDEAS TOM BETHEL!. The Living Hell of Bill Moyers N A WAY YOU WOULDN'T EXPECT, Bill Moyers resembles Lenin. Maxim Gorky (sycophantic Soviet author who died in 1936) told us that Lenin...
...If he had found a utopia, you know he would tell us about it every week...
...Inequality yields it automatically...
...Galileo, the heretic...
...Now I have a diagnosis...
...I like to think journalists are paid for candor...
...He is bitter about creation itself...
...Comfortable for rich people...
...MARCH 2004 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 39...
...He was merely being candid, he explained...
...His discontent extends far beyond the nation's borders...
...He can't change it and he won't...
...I listen to him, too...
...The rise of Islam, a counterpoise to the modern decline of Christianity, should concentrate our minds on this important subject...
...Do we never see good in the world...
...Moyers and comrades are not atheists...
...He could have, but chose not to do the job right...
...If you expect Moyers to express appreciation of the country that has given him so much, you will have a long wait...
...I suppose Keillor is a liberal of sorts, but his faculty of appreciation, his love of traditional hymns, TOM BETS",.._ and the contentment he derives from describing the world, show conservative tendencies...
...Instead, the rich are "taking from the poor...
...Nations who worship such a God, it turns out, are themselves governable only by a tyrannical ruler...
...Like Lenin, he doesn't want to pat heads when we are living in this hell...
...He sounded like a man stranded in a desert that once seemed to be a friendly oasis...
...John Kerry, too, I suspect...
...But the heretical movements of old never gained anything like the political control that their modern counterparts achieved in the twentieth century...
...I don't think so...
...And maybe that's what disturbs Bill Moyers...
...Like Lenin, Moyers thinks we are living in a hell...
...things like the bribing of Congress, the desecration of the environment, corporate tax havens...
...There was an interesting moment last May when he responded to viewers...
...The spectrum of tolerated opinion there is narrow, and there's something to be said for broadening it...
...But the socialist dream didn't work out and he knows that...
...He became a trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation...
...Any chance of a right-wing Moyers equivalent...
...He is a Baptist of sorts, although antagonistic to any sign of traditional religion...
...Didn't happen...
...Sometimes, on Fridays, I watch the PBS program "Now with Bill Moyers...
...They don't mind that company...
...I liked Dorothy Rabinowitz's recent comment on Kerry (Moyers interviewed her): "When you listen to Kerry you listen to someone who'sdescribing a nation in such devastated despair that you cannot believe it...
...Igor Shafarevich wrote a book identifying the "socialist phenomenon" as a powerful return of the old gnostic heresies...
...A great gulf separates him from those, like Moyers, who want to change the world, not describe it...
...Comfortable for some, maybe...
...The rich declared class war, and spent what it took to win"—a typically extreme Moyers statement...
...Ever since he has kept on moving to the left...
...Telling it like it is...
...Inequality was supposed to have been cured by "democracy...
...Allah, as Muslims view him, is omnipotent, above logic and reason, unrestrained by natural law...
...Moyers said in his reply...
...We need to know "what could kill us, whether it's too many lies or too much pollu38 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR MARCH 2004 tion...
...God (not, as normally said, the devil) is in the details, and Keillor lovingly recites those details week after week...
...Heretic" itself has become a term of sly praise...
...He seems to think of democracy as a substitute for socialism, as though all wealth naturally belongs to a common pool and a proper democracy would share it out equitably...
...And I disagree with just about all of his opinions...
...We're talking heresy here...
...So he was the bearer of uncomfortable truths...
...There really is a lot of injustice, of course—especially outside America...
...Yet he is a profoundly alienated man...
...Some appear on Moyers's program—his comrade from Texas, Molly Ivins, for example...
...It made him want to say "sweet silly things," and to pat the heads of people who didn't seem to realize they were "living in a filthy hell...
...Tom Bethell is a senior editor of The American Spectator...
...You have to be both well off and well educated to reach that mental state...
...People are subject to his arbitrary and tyrannical rule and can do little more than plead for mercy...
...But the socialist dream didn't work out and he knows that...
...That is his basic message...
...Do we delight in the dark side of human experience, you ask...
...beautiful for its snowy fields and the gray skeletons of trees...
...or Barbara Ehrenreich, or New York Times columnist Bob Herbert...
...Moyers is well to the left of normal PBS fare, but I don't mind that...
...We know the litany...
...The same ideas obsessively recur: equality, the abolition of property, the destruction of the family, the overthrow of traditional faith...
...Now he controls millions of dollars in foundation money (bequeathed by rich businessmen), has access to taxpayer-subsidized airwaves, and his wife on the payroll...
...My guess is that democracy is about as likely to establish the rule of law in Araby as it is to achieve the egalitarian communalism of Moyers's dreams...
...The contrast with Garrison Keillor's "Prairie Home Companion" struck me the other day...
...Some had been writing in, evidently a bit concerned about his state of mind...
...He can decree at any moment that evil is good and that two and two make five...
...His discontent is guaranteed because he defines injustice so broadly...
...Why did God have to make us so unequal, with different sexes, abilities, talents...
...No doubt the failure of welfare also rankles with him...
...Anyway, I do watch the program, and sometimes even take notes, as though I were his shrink...
...Maxim Gorky (sycophantic Soviet author who died in 1936) told us that Lenin enjoyed Beethoven's Appassionata sonata, but couldn't bear to listen to music very often...
...BILL MOYERS, who will be 70 in June, grew up in east Texas and by the age of 30 was press secretary to the President of the United States...
...But there is no point in trying to tell Moyers things like that...
...Then he would launch into another tirade...
...His predictability is remarkable—he could say so many things, yet he keeps on saying the same things...
...What has happened to the word equality...
...One hesitates to use the word because the heretics themselves gained a good measure of social control and almost succeeded in running orthodoxy out the back door...
...One day it occurred to me that Moyers's bitterness is much more fundamental than perhaps even he realizes...
...After the last election he said that George Bush believed he had a mandate to use "the power of the state to force pregnant women to give up control over their own lives," and to use "the taxing power to transfer wealth from working people to the rich...
...That was why he kept coming back to "what ails America...
...The rich buy the laws and loopholes they want from Congress...
...In a recent broadcast from Iowa I was amazed to hear him saying with heartfelt appreciation: "Our town is an alabaster city, in the winter it is, when the roofs are covered with snow...
...The moral of the story is that what people believe about God is more important than we usually imagine...
...God just doesn't give a fig about justice...
...Lots of people in America are saddled with this unremitting, burning sense of grievance...
...The whole world is filled with injustice...
...The Living Hell of Bill Moyers N A WAY YOU WOULDN'T EXPECT, Bill Moyers resembles Lenin...
...This grievance is at the core of the leftist worldview: disapproval of God...
...Imagine that from Moyers...
...You know what his response would be...
...He worked for LBJ when the Great Society was forming...
...Keillor's willingness to dwell on our blessings is striking and perhaps the secret of his success...
...he wondered recently...
...Maybe Barbra Streisand...
...Their influence may be waning now...
...You don't hear it in the political lexicon any more...
...Now, America is a comfortable place to live, perhaps the most comfortable ever, in the history of the world...
Vol. 37 • March 2004 • No. 2
