Blech. Weather's still making me sick. So here's a whole lot of cut-and-paste...
Bill Moyers(<fangirl> squeee!!!</fangirl>) has a book out: Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues (amazon, B&N, gift-with-donation at Truthout). Here's Publisher's Weekly:
Culled from Moyers’s third PBS series, which ran from 2007 to 2010, there’s no small talk or superficiality in these interviews with 47 "independent thinkers." The topics are far-reaching (faith, populism, the Israeli occupation of Gaza, aging, lynching in America, health care, capitalism, capital punishment, lobbyists in Washington), and the guest list is wide-ranging (pediatrician Margaret Flowers, biologist E. O. Wilson, historian Howard Zinn, economist Victor Greidel, writer David Simon, minister Jeremiah Wright, lawyer Philippe Sands, journalist Victor Gold, novelist John Grisham, theologian James Cone). Karen Armstrong urges us to find the commonalities in diverse religious traditions, notably compassion. Jeremy Scahill alerts us that Blackwater’s Eric Prince "is a man who is building up nothing short of a parallel national security apparatus." John Lithgow shares some of his favorite poems; Jane Goodall turns one’s attention to the animal world. In an era of much instant and ephemeral talk, it is a pleasurable thing to hold this "book of ideas." These challenging, engaged conversations reward the reader’s serious attention. There are no sound bites here, just food for thought.
(and guess who else is in the book...)
He did an FDL book salon a bit ago (on Rapture day, IIRC). Here are a couple of his comments:
Matthew: I saw a poll earlier this week indicating that 52% of the respondents were fed up with both parties. The NYTimes this week carried a revealing story from Germany about how workaday citizens — neither left nor right — were staging spontaneous peaceful protests against their “political system” because it was out of touch with everyday concerns. Our political parties are just as irrelevant to the touchstone concerns of Americans. Yes, I believe fully in creating a non-partisan movement that challenges both parties to get serious about the quality of life for regular folks. It’s very hard to make a third party work in America because the two parties have effectively rigged the rules to produce that result, but a movement is not only possible but necessary. It will have to be aimed first at the Democrats, because the Tea Party has become the nominating wing of the Republican party while the Democratic party has no organized nominating wing to hold it accountable. How does a movement start? By linking all those people at the grassroots who know they aren’t taken into account, and sustaining continuous pressure at every level. Howard Zinn talks about this in my book — how governments don’t act until people make them.
You can’t despair because we can’t afford it. Leaders come from where you least expect them, and not today, alas, from politics (with some notable exceptions.) The abolition movement, women’s suffrage, labor unions, the civil rights movement (those people on those buses 50 years ago this month penetrating deeper into the heart of the southern wilderness) — movements brought forth the leaders, who connected their constituencies to others (I think of William Jennings Bryan, Eugene Debs, Bill Bill Haywood (Google the Lawrence Strike). Theodore Roosevelt’s was transformed from a conservative politician into a progressive by Jacob Riis taking him into the impoverished alleys and tenements of lower Manhattan and then by a bevy of women (including Jane Addams, who wasn’t even allowed to vote then) who informed him of the truths of ordinary life. I don’t have a marquee answer to this question, Mauimom; read the Zinn interview in my book, about how you and people like you have to become history-makers, take risks, join with like-minded neighbors in local causes, to bring about the combustion at myriad locations that hopefully then sparks a prairie fire. I’m not idealistic about this; it’s what I’ve learned from history. Gramsci got it right, I think: Practice the pessimism of the mind and the optimism of the will; that is, see the world without rosy glasses for what it is — hard, nasty, and brutish — but imagine a more confident future and get up every morning determined to do something to try and bring it about.
I still think that is the essence of the human dilemma: the individual’s uniqueness versus the necessity of civilization as a restraint on our collective impulses. We forget that civilization is but a thin veneer stretched across the passions of the human heart, and it can snap at any time (See: the Wiemar Republic, the American South (ante-bellum, post Reconstruction), Rwanda, the Balkans, and so on. If you have read anything by the great Yale scholar Immanuel Wallerstein (now retired), you will know how his understanding of society is rooted in equilibrium. “Systems don’t go on forever. They move slowly away from equilibrium, until they get too far away. And that’s in fact where the modern world system is today. The modern world system is coming to an end,” because, he says, “the accumulation of capital” has become so ferocious, so obsessive, so ruthless, that “it’s kind of a crazy system. You run, in order to run in order to run. And it worked brilliantly. It worked very well for a couple of hundred years, but it has moved far away from equilibrium…(into) a structural crisis.” The result is that while the US is a wealthy society, wealth has pooled at the top, and one percent of Americans own over one-third of the wealth (about 20 trillion dollars) while ordinary, regular, workaday individuals are treated as flotsam and jetsam. There is no longer balance and our civilization is coming apart.
Thank you. The graduating class at Whittier — a wonderful small school whose faculty is devoted to teaching — cheered when I quoted from the reason NYT op-ed piece by the 24-year-old Matthew Klein (whom I don’t know) writing about how his generation is feeling so frustrated by the lack of economic opportunity. “Watch out,” he said, “Arab young people are not the only ones who feel anger and despair today.” That’s when the class of ‘ll whooped. They know something the mainstream media and the corporate-owned political class are overlooking.
(and he does post some action items/links -- net neutrality, support alternative/progressive media i.e. blogs, work to reverse Citizens United, etc.)
Something else from that commencement speech:
Bill Moyers at Whittier College: “I’m not sure anyone from my generation has anything to say to your generation except, ‘We’re sorry.’”
And something very much unrelated that Google gave me:
What do pulled pork, spicy slaw and candy- covered cupcakes all have in common?
How about a single potent ingredient: Pickles.
Spurred by a love for Rick’s Picks, a pickled product company in New York, a couple of employees of the Park Avenue Bakery won an online contest by creating a three-course concoction using the East Coast company’s famed Hotties pickles...
The Helena native with nomadic tendencies ...fell in love with the pickle producer during an eight-month stay in Brooklyn. Mohrmann and a friend first tried Rick’s Picks during the annual International Pickle Day festival in Manhattan...
Rick’s Picks were created just seven years ago when famed New York television producer Rick Field of “NOW with Bill Moyers” turned his hobby into a growing business. Though it is slowly spreading across the United States, the pickler’s prized pieces were still a ways off from making it to Montana.
The young women realized it would cost nearly $20 to purchase and ship a jar to Helena. Instead, Mohrmann made sure that a friend who came visiting from the Empire State brought one with her.
“We had one jar with maybe 60 pickles,” Bischoff said. “We thought of five recipes and had to serve eight people and had to stretch this one jar over this whole meal.”..
The result was an award-winning effort that included a Skewered Chicken Satay with Hottie Peanut Sauce, Barbecue Pulled Pork Sandwiches and Spicy Slaw and Chocolate Cupcakes with Candied Hotties...
Mmm. Chocolate pickle cupcakes...
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