Populist Grandad
Bill Moyers produced his last show and it will be interesting to see how PBS fills the slot. I doubt we've heard the last of him so I won't use the word legacy but to date he has been a fervent voice for that old populist vision that drives me nuts in it's partial approach to political economy.
Always bravely battling the "Special Interests",populists cling with a religious faith to a notion that fair rules and regulations can keep Capital in check. Despite all the decades of evidence to the contrary. They worship at the mythical totem of FDR and John Maynard Keynes and so are as anachronistic as some Wobblies I know. Combined with that grandfatherly demeanor he was the perfectly congenial face of "opposition" for Corporate sponsored Public Television. Always teetering on the edge of a radical critique, he could be counted on to pull back at just the moment it was needed most.
I work at times with his frustrating followers here where I live, true believers that STILL think the right candidate or legislation will beat back the "special interests" who "undermine sensible regulation." In the same sentence they mock the right wingers for believing in "shadowy international cabals" they put the blame for the worlds ills on equally vague "special interests". I mean, under bureaucratic-"democratic" capitalism, isn't everyone or thing a "special interest"? They think democracy is threatened rather than understanding that it is a formal, hollowed out shell,a theatrical production to keep them enthralled.
Much to his credit, Moyers brought plenty of leftists, even a Marxist or two, onto his show to explain it to him, but Bill always shied away from the deepest structural analysis at the last minute. He could not be shaken from his conviction that capitalism could be reformed incrementally by The People, good farmers and workers standing up to the Bankers for Johnson-style social programs.
We have to ask ourselves, how many Followers-Of-Bill enabled capitalism through the decades of imperialist war, "Free Trade" and outright intervention and oppression? How different might our circumstances be if the charismatic,grandfatherly figure had found the courage to admit he was wrong about parliamentary reform and localized, friendly, small town capitalism, that it was a dangerous fantasy for the weak hearted?
I just scared a moose off my wifes flowerbed. Spring has sprung.
posted by troutsky @ 7:07 AM
8 comments
8 Comments:
"The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said "This is mine," and found people naïve enough to believe him, that man was the true founder of civil society. From how many crimes, wars, and murders, from how many horrors and misfortunes might not any one have saved mankind, by pulling up the stakes, or filling up the ditch, and crying to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor; you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody." ”
— Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, 1754
The whole Democracy Now and even worse The Nation crowd is like that.
kutur, I wrote a letter to the editor of our local paper and used that quote ( you had sent it before I think and I saved it). Also a quote or two from Huxley on property. It will make many heads in this small rural valley EXPLODE.
I was talking about the contradiction between equality, liberty and property.
Ren, It is TPM and Jim Hightower, Progressive Magazine crowd as well. Everywhere really because it is so safe.
Troutsky: You should have seen the look Hightower gave me, when I asked him about a labor party. It was the same look Michael Moore and Ralph Nader gave me.
Support for the Democratic Party is the dividing line.
I have to agree. The Iowans on the last show were there to show exactly what kind of protest is most acceptable to Bill: the White, middle-American kind. He followed that with his good friend, the jokey, non-substantive Jim Hightower.
A truly disappointing finish.
Great post.
An interesting interview with German director Alexander Kluge.
Wish his "Yesterday Girl", "Part-time Work of a Domestic Slave" and "Patriotic Woman" were in print.
Ducky, fabulous site, thanks a million. How can there be so much knowledge and insight out there along with so much banal bullshit?
Yes, Ducky... just read it as well. As super article...
"This intelligence, which goes back 70 million years, might be similar to the intelligence in our skin in our intestinal villi, and indeed everywhere else except in our brains."
This is what was lost with the adumbrations to consciousness led by Sumer, then Greece, then the Enlightenment, Industrialization, and American Democratic-Capitalism
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