The Eagle with Two Wings

I love Bill Moyers. I love PBS. I didn't enjoy his show on PBS very much. I don't agree with him on the war. I think he's sort of a Kum Ba Ya soldier, with a soft spot for new age blarney and old time religion. But I think he is a real reporter, an honest and tolerant man. He seems like a Liberal because he gives the floor to people who don't get it much. And he is a Liberal because he believes in those values of Honesty, Diversity and Tolerance, and certainly in Freedom of the Press.

Let me tell you that the Vast Right Wing conspiracy really does exist, and he has been a victim of it -- we have been victims of it. I can't understand why anyone would try to shut him up, though. He'll just end up giving a speech like he did the other day. It was long, characteristic of him and moving. Read the whole thing twice. This is why I worry that the Internet will be slowly chopped down, as surely as Conservative money flows to stifle the opinions of those it doesn't like.

Here's a short selection:

Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.

[break]

I grew up in the South, where the truth about slavery, race and segregation had been driven from the pulpits, driven from the classrooms and driven from the news rooms. It took a bloody Civil War to bring the truth home, and then it took another hundred years for the truth to make us free. Then I served in the Johnson administration. Imbued with Cold War orthodoxy and confident that might makes right, we circled the wagons, listened only to each other and pursued policies the evidence couldn’t carry. The results were devastating for Vietnamese and Americans.

5/17/2005 12:32 PM