So it was in that spirit that I tuned in to the final episode of Bill Moyers Journal on Friday night. He is not being forced out, he said: he is in his mid 70s and he’s got things to do. Good for him, I think, but really, what a terrible thing for the rest of us. I was trying to think of why exactly I am so fond of Bill Moyers, and I came up with a few reasons. I think he’s intelligent. I think he doesn’t have to shout at people on the air to make a point. I think he doesn’t resort to the cheap sort of sentimentality of churches and uniforms that have become standard because he’s better than that. I think he has people on who are happy to call people criminals regardless of how much financial power they have. I think he has good taste in people. And I think, finally, that he reminds me an awful lot of my father, who died, strangely enough, right about the same time I reconfigured my Friday night routine. I guess I do have daddy issues after all.
And on Friday evening, daddy delivered: the subject of Bill Moyers’ final show was populism. Not in the snide, patronizing way, but like this: the populist movement is one of the finer monuments to this country’s ability to think and act independently of the brainwashing that seems to go hand in hand with financial power. It’s the populists, let’s not forget, who we can thank for granting women the right to vote and the direct election of senators, among many other accomplishments. Started in the 1870s in Texas, the people who came to be known as populists began to talk to one another about how they could work together, pool resources for the benefit of the many rather than the few. What a bunch of simple-minded dumbshits. They were disempowered by the marketing team, ultimately, and they continue to be shut down today – Bill Moyers showed a montage of the comments made about populists on national news shows, and it was even more snide than I recalled. But there are little pockets of it that persevere, and they were the guests for Bill Moyers’ final show: There is a group in Iowa, there’s John Hightower, and there’s Barry Lopez, an author who lives in Oregon, who believes people have an incredible amount of personal power, which he’s discovered by concentrating on the spiritual interior of the language. Before bidding us farewell, Bill Moyers confessed that he has a bias: he thinks the populists, not the banks and their PR people, have the right idea. He thinks their courage and conviction will move us forward more reliably than the people whose power and motivation is linked directly to their net worth. He confessed that he admires many of them for their “finely honed outrage.” Which is the perfect way to describe what I admire about Bill Moyers, and what I’ll miss most about sharing Friday nights with him.
