The Last Interview

Bill Moyers is retiring--again.  But at age 83, this time he may mean it.  He's been away from TV for a few years but he continued his unique brand of journalism at his website, Moyers & Company.  But now he's shutting that down, too.  We're losing another significant voice, with a breadth and depth and point of view that we need.

Among the many things he did well was the interview.  First of all, who he selected, and then, how he conducted the interview, the questions he asked, the kind of dialogue he elicited.  I've watched, heard and read his interviews since the original Bill Moyers Journal and through all his minseries, like World of Ideas.  Moyers has been a key player in my relationship to these times.

He posted what may well be his last interview, and it's major.  Here's how he introduces it:

"Our times at last have found their voice, and it belongs to a Pakistani American: Ayad Akhtar, born in New York, raised in Wisconsin, an alum of Brown and Columbia, actor, novelist, screenwriter and playwright, with an ever-soliciting eye for the wickedness and wonders of the world."

The occasion is the play now ending its run in New York, by this Pulitzer Prize winning playwright.  It's called Junk, and the subject is high finance in the 1980s.

Moyers asked him why he set his play in the 80s--why not another era of financial mania, like the 1920s or the 19th century Guilded Age?

Akhtar: Oh, there could be a fascinating play about the robber-baron era and maybe even the relationship between JP Morgan and Teddy Roosevelt. There was a back and forth then between politics and capital. But in a way, those stories are not as relevant ultimately to us today as what happened in the 1980s. I think the difference in the ’80s was that the philosophical soil of the earlier American psyche was ready to embrace unfettered individualism as the rubric of behavior and decision-making. The collective mindset experienced a fracture in the ‘80s that we are still dealing with."

Okay, I quote this partly because I have known this since the 80s, and so have others of my generation, but it's exciting to hear it from a younger voice.

The 80s created the church of finance, worshipping the god of the economy, for the economy really is:

"... an abstraction that we placate and that we observe with holy attention on a regular basis whose well-being tells us more about our well-being than our own well-being tells us. When the economy is healthy, we are a hopeful people. When the economy falters, presages of doom are never far off. It’s mythic thinking. Through statistics and analysis we have substituted an abstraction that somehow is speaking eloquently about every aspect of our national and political and personal lives."

Akhtar and Moyers talk about this out loud--this assumption that is so basic that it's just accepted as "reality," as if nothing else ever existed.  To say this stuff is like fish defining water.  It's the reality we swim in, without questioning it anymore.

Moyers quotes lines from the play and Akhtar repeats some of them in explaining the premise:

"Those oppositions go to the heart of a money-obsessed culture: Upgrade your place in line or your prison for a fee. Rent out your womb to carry someone else’s child. Buy a stranger’s life insurance policy and wait for them to die. What she’s suggesting is that the entire compass of human existence is now defined by the imperative to monetize every possible interaction. This is what the system has created; it’s created this aberration where everyone is looking to benefit in a financial way off of every transaction they are having with everyone else. This is the ideal. And then people wonder why don’t we have a society anymore. Why is there no sense of mutual well-being? Because we are pitted against each other like merchants."

Akhtar defines in stark terms what this means for people in the prime of their working lives:

If you are a person of endowment confronted with fears about how to make your way in the world, Bill, there are really not enough opportunities for you to exhibit your excellence and secure your future. So you make the choice that puts you into the system. The system is the thing redistributing wealth. When you are in the system, the system works one way. It does not work two ways; it does not work five ways. It works one way. And working that way, with maybe a flavor of compassion if you want, or a flavor of ruthlessness if you want, depending upon your personality — that’s what’s going to ensure your success."

He talks about the scary implications for the future, as the ways to earn incomes shrink through technology, and capitalism eats the world.  There's more and you can read it, at least for awhile (I'm not sure what all will be eventually archived, but that's the ultimate fate of this site.)  But if for nothing else, the interview is classic for this one insight about why people who don't get wealthy support this culture, what benefit do they expect to get?

"What could be that benefit? And again the answer hit me: The lowest price. Offering people the lowest price has become the new promise, the new covenant, socially. Once that was usually offered to a member of society as a citizen: You have the right to representation, to certain social goods. No longer. What you have the right to now is the lowest price. So you see the rise of Amazon as the corporate centerpiece of contemporary life, because it’s servicing the only system that any longer makes sense: a system of customers. We have all been transformed, fundamentally, from citizens into customers."

Could this be the defining statement of this era?  Once again, Moyers is on to something.  We're really going to miss him, even when we don't realize it.  In fact, especially then.