Goodbye, Mr. Bill

Bill Moyers, the thinking man's Jimmy Carter, is retiring from PBS, an outfit he learned to milk to the tune of millions of dollars over the past 30 or so years. And while Tom Shales can't resist one last paen to the man who gave us LBJ's "Daisy" commercial, an FBI investigation of MLK, Jr., and the anti-Semite Joseph Cambell, we shouldn't let that stop us from joining in the rejoicing.

Shales's friends might want to insist that he take a drug test after reading this:

Bill Moyers has always taken the high road, but it got a little lonely up there. In a country where political discourse grows ever more shrill, his voice was more and more easily drowned out. Last night, at the age of 70 and on the eve of his 50th wedding anniversary, Bill Moyers took the high road home.

Or: His is one of the few liberal voices left in broadcasting, it seems, and his insistence on being armed with facts to support his opinions left him at something of a disadvantage when dealing with people who think the way to win an argument is to scream the loudest. Moyers represented reason, deliberation, serious questioning of the status quo and, especially, standing as firmly as possible against government encroachment into Americans' private lives.

I guess Shales had this kind of speech in mind when he wrote that:

These ideologues at Heritage and elsewhere, by the way, earlier this year teamed up with deep-pocket bankers--many from Texas, with ties to the Bush White House--to stop America from cracking down on terrorist money havens. How about that for patriotism? Better that terrorists get their dirty money than tax cheaters be prevented from hiding theirs. And these people wrap themselves in the flag and sing "The Star-Spangled Banner" with gusto.

And: If I sound a little bitter about this, I am; the President rightly appeals every day for sacrifice. But to these mercenaries sacrifice is for suckers. So I am bitter, yes, and sad. Our business and political class owes us better than this. After all, it was they who declared class war twenty years ago, and it was they who won. They're on top. If ever they were going to put patriotism over profits, if ever they were going to practice the magnanimity of winners, this was the moment. To hide now behind the flag while ripping off a country in crisis fatally separates them from the common course of American life.

Lowell Pointe wrote a great essay on Moyers this past week, and it's so filled with examples of Moyers's perfidy that I won't try to mine it. And don't miss Scott Ott's piece entitled, "Bill Moyers Retires, Fails to Leave Void."

But let's close with some observations by Brian Phillips from a 1999 issue of The New Republic, "Shiny Happy People," a review of some of Moyers's poetry.

What is distinctive about the new book is the extent to which it is steeped in toxins to which poetry is often considered an antidote: the drone of television, the vacancies of incomplete thinking, the banality and the sentimentality of "folksiness." The book is cluttered with the kind of pseudo-intellectual populism that has marked Moyers for a long time, and that characterizes so much of what passes for intelligent TV programming these days. The Dodge Festival is described as "the Woodstock of poetry." Moyers warmly recalls eating cookies and milk while his high school English teacher read to him from "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Moyers likes poetry because it sounds pretty, and he discerns in it the promise of a world without conflict: "At the poetry festival, the joy lasts, poets are cheered, and everyone wins."

Moyers's prose is at its worst in his introductory sketches, where he plumbs depths of cheap sentiment and corny stereotyping previously reserved for Olympic sports commentary. Moyers is the Bob Costas of the American poetry world: he is the ultimate fan. Describing Paul Muldoon, an Irish poet who lives and teaches in America, Moyers offers this condescending gem of a summation:

[T]he moment Paul Muldoon starts reading, you hear echoes of his country's history in his voice. The puckish wit and furrowed melancholy sail side by side like ships of the same fleet.... Later will come the sorrows and troubles of his roots in the tragic land that has so borne the brunt of history. For now, your imagination is fired by poetical mischief as delightful as the laughter of leprechauns dancing in the forest.

The book is riddled with such passages, which provide Saturday morning cartoons of national and ethnic identities in the apparent belief that readers will find them winning.