Broadcaster and great soul Bill Moyers had an absorbing, important conversation with the poet Naomi Shihab Nye in Campbell Hall last Tuesday night. Anyone who had been to hear Garrison Keillor the night before (see report this issue) and had been longing in vain for some passionate political commentary, must certainly have come away from the Moyers evening fully satisfied.

Moyers was introduced by Thomas Tighe, head of Direct Relief and former national director of the Peace Corps, who cited about a page worth of Moyers’s incredibly rich and varied achievements and admitted that he could have gone on for more time than the who event had. After listening to this reverent catalog of his virtues, and then to Nye’s equally admiring opening statement, Moyers thanked everyone and said:

"I must apologize that the person who was introduced could not be here this evening, but I am happy to fill in for him."

Nye began by asking Moyers about his discovery of poetry and he traced it back to the teachers he had had in his last two years of high school and his first two years of college. What all these teachers had in common was that "they read aloud to their students." He didn’t offer this as a criticism of present educational practices, because if Moyers reveres any class uncritically, it is that of English teachers. But the audience was free to make the comparisons and decide for themselves.

The conversation ranged far and wide, with Nye drawing Moyers out on a number of disparate topics. As an ordained Baptist minister, he naturally was illuminating on the current high tide of religious fundamentalism -- Christian, Islamic, and Jewish. Taking "fundamentalist" and "tribalist" as synonyms, he spoke of his own background as "Evangelical but not fundamentalist." He was saddened to note that "globalization had often produced a new tribalism."

Moyers said he remains an optimist: "I just couldn’t get up each morning if I didn’t believe in a confident future."
But when asked about specific things, he was much gloomier. Did he see hope for a Palestine-Israeli settlement in the foreseeable future? "No," he said, "because extremists are driving events."

On the Bush administration, he said: "How can someone so well-loved, so well-schooled, and so well-churched, be so unaware of the experience and pain of other people?"

And: "They don’t have the imagination to put themselves on the other side of any question."

And: "Nothing seems to embarrass the political class in Washington nowadays."

Of his own profession, journalism, he was not censorious of the failure of his erstwhile colleagues to keep the public informed but he urged everyone to seek out information on the web or from books. "News," he said, "Is what people want to keep hidden. Everything else is publicity."

Moyers stressed the importance of acting locally, "where we all live," and he suggested we pay particular attention to "redistricting," "a universal voting machine with a paper trail," and "controlling the power of money in politics."

Asked whether he was hopeful that it was possible to save American democracy, Moyers said: "I can’t answer that question. But I know that we have no choice but to act as if we can turn it around."

Courtesy photo

Caption: Journalist/hero Bill Moyers had a brilliant conversation with Naomi Shihab Nye in UCSB’s Campbell Hall.