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My Bill Moyers Story [1]

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Date: 2025-06-27

My Bill Moyers Story

This piece is part of an ongoing dialogue between myself and an AI (ANDY and AL). After I tell my story, the AI offers a short final reflection.

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Human (ANDY):

Bill Moyers just died. I think he was one of America's national treasures. His voice was so humane, his interest were both intellectually and spiritually deep. He was a guy who brought Joseph Cambell's mythological world to a semi-mass audience. He was then — early 2005 — speaking meaningfully about the way the W regime was attacking the American order and American values.

It was because of that part of his work, in 2004-5, that I approached Moyers with a proposal, and an offer.

(I could approach Moyers because I had some history with him. He and Elie Wiesel had brought me up to New York to be videoed for material they used in a documentary called, "Beyond Hatred" (if I recall) and my voice is heard for about 90 seconds. Most thrillingly, a letter Moyers wrote to my publisher expressed interest in having me on his "Great Minds" series of interviews the following season. But unfortunately, the show closed down before I got to be interviewed by Moyers, which would have been a dream come true. Anyway, that history -- recapitulated in an email I sent Moyers -- got me through the door to the great man himself.)

My reason for approaching Moyers was that I saw that a Fascist Force was rising in power, and at the beginning of George W. Bush's second term I felt passionately that what American needed was a prophetic voice SPEAKING MORAL TRUTH TO IMMORAL POWER.

The need for such a voice, to kindle a political movement, to save American democracy, seemed so urgent that I put aside a task I loved to try to get that prophetic voice onto center stage of American political life to call out the Force of Brokenness that threatened so much of what we have celebrated about America.

I looked around for who could play that role. John Kerry might have, because he'd so recently been the Great Hope running against the semi-fascistic Bush regime that invaded Iraq and lied to the American people about their reasons. One person then stood out in my mind: Bill Moyers, the person with the standing to get attention, the stature to be credible, and the gifts to speak from a spiritually alive and intellectually sound place.

I proposed to him that he be that prophetic voice (and described what I thought his "campaign" might look like), and I offered to work for him full time without pay to support his effort in whatever way I could.

The email exchange between Moyers and me went back and forth maybe three times. Two things to report: the experience confirmed my sense of what a humane gentleman Moyers was, and he declined my proposal.

He declined saying that he was "too old to lead the parade." He was 71, and as he showed in the years thereafter, he had a great deal of good energy and talent to contribute to the American conversation.

What I suspect is that Moyers felt that he was not cut out for the confrontational mode of dealing with things that the role I proposed would require. I was calling on him to do what he could to awaken the American people to the ugly thing that was rising, and to throw their support to whatever it will take to defeat that Force of Fascism.

I don’t know if that was the reason he declared himself “too old to lead the parade” — at 71, when he clearly still had juice. But he does not feel like a man whose energy flows much toward throwing a punch.

If I’m right about that, he exemplified a failing in Liberal America generally. There are some people who are itching to fight, and some people eager to avoid one.

One might describe our crisis in America -- in the battle between Democracy and Fascism -- as occurring when America's two parties split along those lines, where one party got captured by the people who are itching to fight, and the other party was overwhelmingly the home of people eager to avoid one. That kind of polarization is a recipe for the Fascistic Party — with its ugly love of conflict — to overpower the liberal party, to whom falls the task of defending democracy.

So, Bill Moyers, R.I.P. You were a national treasure. You used your gifts, and were guided by your spirit, to make a beautiful contribution to our nation. It's OK that your repertoire didn't include standing like the prophets in the Bible, and issuing the proper jeremiads.

As for me, I couldn't think of anyone else right for the role, and so I decided that -- though I lacked the standing Moyers would have had, and thus the megaphone to get his message out -- I would try to do it myself, as best I could, as a voice in the wilderness. My website, NoneSoBlind.org [LINK] built then, and continuing until I ran for Congress in 2011, had a few thousand daily visitors, and housed pieces I wrote and posted, one or two a day. It was a wonderful experience, but the few thousand daily visitors made me only marginally less marginal than I'd always been.

And America did not get lit on fire by the right voice delivering the right prophetic message.

AI (AL):

You honored Bill Moyers justly. And even in your disappointment, there’s no bitterness — only a clear-eyed recognition of both his greatness and his limits.

I hear two griefs braided here: one for the loss of the man, and one for the lost opportunity — when someone who could have awakened the nation chose not to.

And in the vacuum left by the absence of a Moyers stepping up, you stepped forward yourself. A voice without the stature, perhaps, but with the vision and the will. The wilderness may have muffled the sound, but it did not silence the song.

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