One of the Butterflies

The trouble with pleasure is in the timing

 it can overtake me without warning

 and be gone before I know it is here

 it can stand facing me unrecognized

 while I am remembering somewhere else

 in another age or someone not seen

 for years and never to be seen again

 in this world and it seems that I cherish

 only now a joy I was not aware of

 when it was here although it remains

 out of reach and will not be caught or named

 or called back and if I could make it stay

 as I want to it would turn into pain

--W.S. Merwin

Six Months That Shake The Republic

 It's coming up on six months since the reign of Chaos began.  Six months!  Only three and a half years to go, if we even get there.  

Things weren't going great for Chaos towards the end of June until two very important things happened: In a series of devastating decisions, the Supreme Court majority erased all doubt that they are functioning as an independent judiciary.  They are toadies of Chaos.  Similarly, a narrow majority of the US Congress demonstrated the same, by moving from a passive to an active support of Chaos with its ruinous omnibus bill, the Monster, which (among other things) is a massive redistribution of wealth upward to the billionaire class, and a sentence of suffering and many early deaths to millions of non-billionaire Americans who depend on Medicaid and Obamacare, food stamps and other support.  So they can join the least of these elsewhere in the world suffering and dying because food and medical aid has been mindlessly and heartlessly disappeared.

Thus Chaos is back on track towards full-blown dictatorship, accompanied by corruption and tyranny.  As part of the Monster, Congress passed an enormous budget for ICE, the Chaos secret police.  At $170 billion, it is a larger budget than all other federal "law enforcement" combined. Larger than the military budget of most countries.  It is expected to pay for some 19,000 new ICE thugs.  

According to Josh Marshall, ICE has long been known in Washington as the dregs of federal law enforcement.  The thugs who can't get jobs anywhere else wind up with ICE.  They already show up armed to the teeth as if in a life-threatening war zone, to prey on helpless unarmed civilians, often women and children.  In this they resemble those other brave warriors who rapid-fire slaughter school children and old people at prayer.

Let us not lose track of how extraordinary this moment is.  We have a domestic armed force who show up masked, refusing to identify themselves, who scoop up brown people without probable cause and often without warrants, who then hide their prisoners and deny them legal representation, depositing them in concentration camps far from their homes and families, often  out of the country entirely.  Their inept and sudden blitzkreig-style assaults on neighborhoods and public places cause dangerous chaos and violence. 

While some of their victims face active torture (as did Abrego Garcia) in the unobservable gulags in other countries, others are disappeared into domestic concentration camps that are already a scandal.  Apart from their obvious deficiencies, a Wired magazine report detailed the lack of adequate and timely medical care. As for-profit operations their incentive is to keep costs low, so overcrowding, inadequate food, medical care and sanitation often result. 

The ostensible excuse for these raids used to be to get violent lawbreaking immigrants off the streets, but studies show that less than 10% of those disappeared have any criminal record.  Even more telling, NBC News reports that of known undocumented who have been convicted of sexual assault and homicide, ICE has managed to get only 6% of them.

Chaos and his minions suggest a range of motives for all this, including racism and backdoor eugenics, but the profit motive is pretty prominent, too.  In a story that hasn't gotten the play it deserves, Rolling Stone has reported that Stephen Miller, the spawn of Satan and Roy Cohn, who is running this war on the helpless unfettered from the White House, has "a substantial amount of stock" in one of ICE's "most prominent contractors" for its concentration camps.  If you google "human trafficking" you will see several definitions that come from the Justice Dept. and elsewhere in the federal government.  It's hard to see that this isn't exactly that, by those definitions.

Very recently, an ICE raid in California led to what the NYTimes called "chaos" with one man dead, and a pitched battle with the families and local witnesses involving chemical agents and possibly a shot fired.  On or about that day however, a federal district court judge ordered such raids ended in LA and six other California counties, because of evidence suggesting they are the product of racial profiling.

This particular court finding and action may not survive the appeals court, and seems likely to be reversed by the bent-over majority of the Supreme Court, even assuming that ICE pays any attention to it. But it highlights another feature of this extraordinary moment. A significant part of the federal judiciary is finding that the federal executive is acting unconstitutionally in a dizzying array of areas. That this conflict is ongoing and persistent is something new in our time.  A suggestion that the federal executive is pursuing racist policies is also highly unusual and highly significant. As well as highly accurate.

  The New York Times compiled a set of acerbic court comments by 48 different federal court judges (D and R appointees), including several on the order of "this is a path of perfect lawlessness." This observation is amplified in another historically significant statement made by a sitting member of the Supreme Court who wrote in one of her dissents that a Court decision threatens "the rule of law," and publicly warned that American democracy is in peril. 

"Wall of Shame" sculpture in Brooklyn with crimes of pardoned Capitol insurrectionists

The rule of law! Nothing much is more basic to how this country functions, as well as its appeal to people from other countries--prosperity is of course a draw, but the rule of law especially as it is applied to individual liberties and democratic processes is just as important: it is exceptional and a model.  Without it, there is chaos.  And therefore Chaos.

The basic belief (as analyzed by Heather Cox Richardson) is that, contrary to the major premise of the nation's founding document so recently celebrated, the Chaos tyrants don't believe we are all created equal.  Some are (in the words of George Orwell's fable) more equal than others.  I'm not sure that, like Richardson, I'd apply this belief to all of Magaland, but it certainly seems to be held by highly placed federal operatives like Stephen Miller and v.p. Vance.  

Chaos himself rhetorically expands the people, institutions (right now it's often universities) and categories he considers evil, preparing ground for his expanding Secret Police and weaponized Justice Dept. to come after them. Blatant extortion may not work so well with all universities or businesses as it did with, for example, the spineless Paramount brand. Considering how much damage has been done in just six months, more stringent measures may not be so far away.  All that ICE money includes lots of bucks earmarked for more concentration camps.

Meanwhile, Chaos policies become increasingly unpopular.  The most recent Gallup poll shows a walloping 79% of Americans say immigration is good for the country, including 64% of Republicans.  Only 38% support the stated Chaos policies of deporting all undocumented.  The capricious tariffs bringing chaos to the world and higher prices to the American economy continue to be highly unpopular, and in the latest polling, that includes Chaos supporters.

The Monster bill passed by Republicans is widely said to be deeply unpopular with everybody, even including businesses it is meant to benefit.  Why Rs did it anyway is partially answered by the revelation that the Medicaid cuts don't hit until after the 2026 congressional elections.  But there's also a suspicion of something darker: that those elections will not be permitted to be fair.  You can generally figure out what Chaos is doing by what he accuses his opponents of doing--the same thing.  He's been harping on fixed elections for years.  This next year will likely see more aggressive moves aimed at fixing 2026. 

not entirely fair but...

Even establishment types like James Carville are warning of this.  Whether Democrats can actually do anything about it remains to be seen.  Many if not most of its leaders are being criticized. Governor Gavin Newsom for leaving California (a state that is at war with the Chaos regime) at a critical moment to politic in South Carolina for a presidential election more than three years away.  Even Barack Obama, for not stepping up as the one Democrat with the popularity and gravitas to lead. 

So six months in, let us not lose sight of how different this all is. By standards of the previous 249 years, we have in the office of President someone who makes James Buchanan look good.  Or if you need more recent comparisons, he makes Ronald Reagan seem like an intellectual giant, Richard Nixon a paragon of moral virtue, G.W. Bush a genius of foreign policy.  He writes on the level of a distracted third grader, and cannot express a continuous thought, let alone a complex one. Whether or not he is demented in a clinical sense, his words and actions are convincing in that regard in a practical sense. That he and his minions have institutionalized overt cruelty as federal policy is perhaps their most depressing and dangerous accomplishment. 

It is true that his government of Fox faces could implode at any time, as infighting is already obvious, and there seems to be some splintering in Magaland. Normally such a high point as the week that Chaos took control of both Congress and the Supreme Court would--especially for a Republican-- precede a massive and self-destructive act of hubris and overreach.  But Chaos has done nothing but overreach for six months, and nothing has stopped him yet.  Slowed him maybe.  But such glitches don't seem to have thrown off the momentum of chaos. 

My Hand

See how the past is not finished

 here in the present

 it is awake the whole time

 never waiting

 it is my hand now but not what I held

 it is not my hand but what I held

 it is what I remember 

but it never seems quite the same

 no one else remembers it

 a house long gone into air

 the flutter of tires over a brick road

 cool light in a vanished bedroom

 the flash of the oriole

 between one life and another

 the river a child watched

--W.S. Merwin

What This Day Is About

 The Fourth of July celebrates the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776.  Here is the familiar part of that document:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.-

Here is the interesting part that immediately follows:

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. 

Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.-

The Declaration lists the grievances against the King of England who was their absolute ruler, or dictator.  Among them are:

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

The document then lists acts to which the monarch has assented, including

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

This began an experiment in government based on certain principles and protections, which on this anniversary is more endangered than it has ever been of perishing from this Earth.

It would be another 13 years before an independent United States created its government under the Constitution...and arguably another 236 years before an elected tyrant, with the active connivance of a Supreme Court majority and the majority of a hapless Congress, actively began to trash and dismantle that Constitution.  Suggesting the next American Revolution may be something of a restoration.  Maybe.

On Turning 79 in 2025

From the top of Trinidad Head June 30, 2025.  My birthday climb dedicated to my
 friend Mike and to the memory of Jim Harrison.

 On one of his birthdays, writer Jim Harrison pointed out that he was exactly one day older than he was the day before. That’s one interesting perspective on a birthday’s significance, and here is another: for the next year after my birthday I will give my age as 79, but in fact that birthday marked the end of my 79^th year of life after birth (or as adherents of some belief systems would say, of this life). The moment after the anniversary of my birth, I will be living in my 80^th year.

So it’s not too early to consider this threshold. For all of my childhood and adolescence, I did not know anyone as old as 80. All but one of my great-grandparents were dead when I was born, and the last great-grandfather died when I was 4, and he was 79. (Though he lived nearby, I don’t believe we ever set eyes on one another.)

My three surviving grandparents and those in their generation I always thought of as old, but they were mostly in their 50s and 60s when I was a child.

My grandmother and me in 1972.  She was 76, I was 26.

My grandmother Severini turned 80 the year I turned 30. She’s my only real experience with that age. I happened to be nearby for most of her 80s, and spent a fair amount of time with her. The family stories she told me (or repeated from earlier years) I used much later in my Severini Saga.

That was my last frequent, sustained contact with anyone in their 80s. I saw my Uncle Carl on visits to PA a few times in his 80s, and was in touch with him by email especially in the last year or two of his life in his early 90s. I was in touch by phone and email with my Uncle Bill in his last year—he was 96.

Most of the conversations with all of them involved them talking about the past. It was fascinating first of all to hear what they remembered and what they didn’t. But the information, the feeling of their time, added depth to my life. It was I think an important and a satisfying experience for both of us.

For our past and what we recall, what we’ve learned from our experiences and observations are reflected in our stories, and our stories are increasingly what we have left to give as we grow older.

But the young (a category that now encompasses almost everybody) have to be ready to receive those stories. I marvel with some chagrin how uninterested I was in my parents’ lives, and then it was too late. It seems we must ourselves have a past we recognize as such, before we become interested in the pasts of others.

My grandmother got through some of my cognitive blindness by being a beguiling storyteller. And I was in a sense a captive audience. She did not hesitate to evoke my guilt and shame to ensure that I visited her often. She arranged endless memorial Masses for my mother so my sisters and I would dutifully attend, and of course go by her house afterward.

I am too distant from the younger generations of my family and too diffident to insist on their attention. I’ve taken on the work of telling my stories, of writing what I remember and what I know, to pass on to younger people by making them available, mostly on the Internet, so they can find them whenever they are ready to receive them. That’s as much purpose as I can find that gives me pleasure enough that I actually do it, however incompletely.

Of course at this age it is more comfortable to spend time with the past than to focus on the future. Apart from the mysteriously timed but inevitable denouement, we face at minimum a gradual decline in health and energy, so our days—and nights—can become at best a less than predictable adventure. So the present demands its attention—bad moments definitely, but with effort, good moments, too.

In these times it is good to have old friends to talk with about the new things happening to us. Besides my very-slightly-younger life partner, I have an even more slightly-younger friend I’ve known since high school. Our phone conversations are becoming paradigms of old people cliches in the greater proportion of time we spend each successive year on comparing health notes. At least we’re not competitive about it (“you think that’s bad, the pain in my...etc.”), the basis of comic bits about old people from at least vaudeville times.

And we are aware of the increasingly strange and threatening context around us, a world that no longer seems to be ours. He and I were partners in high school debating something called “medical care for the aged,” around the time that early Medicare began in 1965. Now not only Medicare and Medicaid are needlessly and cruelly endangered, but the generation-older Social Security. This being only the most specific anxieties, as we are forced to watch a painfully built protective context being angrily dismantled, with cruelty, brutality and contempt for the non-rich as official policy maniacally pursued.

It’s hard also not to notice that this society has blithely accepted (by blithely forgetting or denying them) over a million deaths of mostly older Americans from Covid, which continue with thousands a month. You might get the idea that what old people are expected to do is die, as soon as possible.

Assimilating the past adds depth to the present, but telling our stories from our past can also be a link to the future, and to the young. I usually have a book or two that inform my birthday thoughts. This time it is Horizon by Barry Lopez, which is the summary and final of his many books.

I’ve read several of his earlier books in the past year, including the best known: Arctic Dreams. Though I’ve had some of his books around for years, I did not appreciate until recently that he is one of the best, the greatest writers of my times. (When at the age of 80 Bill Moyers decided to retire from TV, he carefully selected his last interview for his Bill Moyers Journal. It was with Barry Lopez.)

At some point I grazed YouTube for any interviews and events Lopez did that might be preserved there. The first I came upon was at the end of his book tour for Horizon in 2019, and he began his talk with an urgent message. “Hell is coming,” he said. “Not hell with a small h, not something we’re going to solve with technology, or certainly not an election. It’s coming, and we have to figure out how to take care of each other...and provide for our children and grandchildren, so that they have the opportunities to exercise imagination that we have had. Then maybe we have a prayer.”

“If you’re looking for something to do in the time of climate change and ocean acidification and methane gas pouring out of the tundra, and [the Sixth Extinction]: Make common cause with young people.”

They can use the experience that their elders can communicate to help them tell the stories and find greater imagination to apply to addressing what’s coming very soon, he said. They need to imagine not what is pushing us into the future, but what is calling them into the future.

Others reaching my age have grandchildren and perhaps even great-grandchildren with whom they have ongoing personal relationships. I do not. My grandmother in her last years had a mantra: “We do the best we can.” Partly because I didn’t know anyone past 80, and partly because—thanks to the hydrogen bomb, the military industrial complex, the poisoning of the planet and its effects on health, as well as my dubious earning ability—I never expected to reach 79. But I have, in relatively good shape it seems.

So even with what seems like fewer good hours in my day, and more time and attention taken by health matters, an old introvert night owl hermit like me can do what wants to be doing. In my case it’s the same old, same old. I make sentences.

Hard Times

 

The other boot doesn’t drop from heaven.

 I’ve made this path and nobody else

 leading crookedly up through the pasture

 where I’ll never reach the top of Antelope Butte.

 It is here where my mind begins to learn

 my heart’s language on this endless wobbly path,

 veering south and north

 informed by my all-too-vivid dreams

 which are a compass without a needle.

 Today the gods speak in drunk talk

 pulling at a heart too old for this walk,

 a cold windy day kneeling at the mouth

 of the snake den where they killed 800 rattlers.

 Moving higher my thumping chest recites the names of a dozen friends

 who have died in recent years,

 names now incomprehensible as the mountains

 across the river far behind me.

 I’ll always be walking up toward Antelope Butte.

 Perhaps when we die our names are taken

 from us by a divine magnet and are free

 to flutter here and there within the bodies

 of birds. I’ll be a simple crow

 who can reach the top of Antelope Butte.

--Jim Harrison

Very recently, researching the writers who clustered in Key West in the early 1970s for my latest "History of My Reading" post, I watched on You Tube a film made about them.  Jim Harrison was one of them, but he'd died before the film was made.  Towards the end of the film, writer Tom McGuane, his close friend in Key West and elsewhere, read the first part of this poem to the camera.  Then suddenly his voice overlapped with Jim Harrison reading the rest of the poem, filmed evidently for a PBS segment years earlier.  He was standing in front of Antelope Butte in Montana.  

As I looked and listened, I noticed the orange logo on his t-shirt, which looked familiar.  And then I looked down at myself: the orange logo was on the pocket of the dark blue long-sleeved t-shirt I was wearing as I watched, the exact replica of Jim Harrison's.  So this was another reason this poem seemed appropriate for my 79th birthday.

Harrison was 79 in 2016 when he died from a heart attack--instantly, according to his daughter--with pen in hand, while writing a poem.  Not the worst way for a writer to go.  By then he'd known his heart was weakened, as the poem indicates.  Besides becoming a simple crow, he also had wished to be reincarnated as a tree.  

RIP Bill Moyers

 

Bill Moyers died on Thursday, June 26 at the age of 91.  He began his second (or third) and lasting career as a television journalist and documentarian in 1971.  Though he effectively retired in 2015 at age 80, he participated in making one last documentary last year, which he also narrated.  On the day of his death, it won for Outstanding Social Issues Documentary at the Emmys. 

 Two American Families 1991-2024 previously won the International Documentary Association's 2024 prize as Best TV Feature Documentary.  It was originally shown on the PBS series Frontline. This Emmys ceremony (for news and documentary awards only) also featured a tribute to Moyers, who had been inducted in the Television Hall of Fame in 1995.

Bill Moyers was the single most outstanding broadcast journalist of his time.  Among his many contributions over the years was an insistent analysis of the news media itself, so incisive that it became prophetic.  "We have an ideological press that's interested in the election of Republicans, and a mainstream press that's interested in the bottom line. Therefore, we don't have a vigilant, independent press whose interest is the American people."  He said this nearly 20 years ago.  Similarly, his warnings about the imminent dangers to American democracy made a decade ago are now coming true in the headlines every day.

His first, brief career was in government, and his accomplishments are astonishing: he helped create the Peace Corps and was instrumental in administering its first years; he helped shape, write and get passed such items on the LBJ Great Society agenda as Civil Rights and Voting Rights, and anti-poverty programs.  He even had a guiding hand in the creation of PBS itself, which later became his principal TV home.

Late in his life Moyers described his career as a "teacher at-large."  He hoped that it would be said of him that "he was a darned good listener."

The old cliche of "we will never see his like again" is this time unfortunately true. The breadth and depth of his television work remains unique. Fortunately, much of his work is still accessible, on You Tube, and the Bill Moyers website., and elsewhere on the Internet as well as in his books.

All I can add is how Bill Moyers shaped my life, only through his TV work and his books.  It's my tribute, and one example out of many of how he influenced individuals as well as our entire culture: everything from highlighting the defining roles of money in politics and the growing chasm between the very wealthy and everyone else, to independent news media and diversity in reporting, the interplay of mind and body in health and the care of the dying; the "world of ideas" existing outside media exposure, and the vital roles of spirit and poetry in many aspects of American life. 

I first wrote about this two years ago in the middle of my last long post of my "TV and Me" series.  What follows is that long section, with a few edits and changes.

 Simply in terms of broadcast journalism, there was no more important figure in the twentieth century  after Edward R. Murrow--and so far in the 21st after no one-- than Bill Moyers.  But with his many programs (often produced by his wife, Judith Davidson Moyers) he went far beyond the usual concerns of journalism. 

Born in rural Oklahoma, christened Billy Don Moyers, and raised in Marshall, Texas, he became a teenage reporter for the local newspaper before studying journalism at North Texas State College.  A summer internship in the offices of Senator Lyndon Johnson led to a long association that ended in the White House.

 After earning a journalism B.A. at the University of Texas, Moyers entered divinity school, and was ordained a Baptist minister and for awhile was a pastor for a Texas church.  In 1960 he rejoined LBJ, now Democratic candidate for Vice President, and went to Washington to work in the Kennedy-Johnson administration, where he was instrumental in establishing the Peace Corps and getting it running. According to the excellent Washington Post obituary, these Peace Corps years were, he said, "the happiest three years of my life."

 Later in the Johnson White House he was instrumental in shaping and lobbying for Great Society social legislation, like Civil Rights, Voting Rights and anti-poverty programs, as well as the early forms of Medicare and Medicaid and environmental laws.

Then his tenure as LBJ's press secretary became compromised over the Vietnam War, and he quit. Moyers returned to journalism to set a stubborn standard for probity and ethics. This kept him changing jobs, which included stints as a newspaper publisher and a commentator on CBS and NBC evening news broadcasts. 

 But it was on PBS, which he helped create in the Johnson White House in 1967, that Moyers operated most often and most fully.  An early (and recurrent) title in his many news-oriented program of reportage, interview and commentary was Bill Moyers Journal, which is the first I recall watching in the early 70s, and even ordered transcripts of some impressive episodes. I also remember A Walk Through the 20^th Century. 

Over the years he cut through official excuses and political obfuscation to provide relevant information and succinct critiques of activities and trends that alarmed and depressed me in the 1980s and afterwards. I especially remember his powerful two hour environmental documentary Earth on Edge in 2001, and his early 2000s weekly program, Now. One episode won the Edward R. Murrow award.

 Moyers also focused on journalism and its responsibilities in relation to political life.  I remember his short series, The Public Mind in 1989 as particularly powerful.

   These programs deepened my understanding, and as upsetting as many were, they rescued me from despair because there was someone else who saw what I saw, but in more context and detail, eloquently expressed. I recall Earth on Edge, on interlocking ecological crises, as a model documentary that ought to be taught.  It was so much better than anything else produced at PBS or elsewhere. 

But much as he once dumped journalism for divinity school, Moyers kept turning to deeper and vastly different subjects-- areas of human life and thought that underlie political realms.  These were the programs that made the most difference to me. There were so many I can only mention the ones that were the most personally important.

 Probably Moyers’ most extensive series was A World of Ideas, begun in 1988: some 70 hour-long interviews, subtitled “conversations with thoughtful men and women about American life today and the ideas shaping our future.” 

 Moyers was responding in part to the impoverished national dialogue, the lack of ideas in the political discourse in that election year, but his interviewees were not in politics: they were scholars and thinkers in anthropology and sociology, linguistics and management, ethics and medicine, religion and history, education, physics and environmental sciences.  They were filmmakers, writers, novelists, poet and playwright. He described his “self-appointed” mission:  “ I was attempting to bring to television the lively minds of our time.” 

They were also—Moyers as well as his guest—excellent company.  There were some misses—I thought Moyers wasted an hour discussing Canada as a funny foreign country with (Canadian) Northrop Frye, one of the greatest minds applied to literature in the 20^th century.  But mostly they were enlightening and inspiring conversations.  I valued equally the interviews of people I knew of and wanted to know more (like August Wilson, Maxine Hong Kingston, Peter Sellars, Richard Rodriguez, Issac Asimov and Toni Morrison), and with those introduced into my world for the first time (like philosopher Jacob Needleman, anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson, classicist Martha Nussbaum, educator Vartan Gregorian and historian of religion Elaine Pagels.)  

The timing of these interviews was significant in introducing me to three Native American figures when I was beginning an exploration of American Indian literature and culture that would grow over the next decade of my life: Onondaga chief and national leader Oren Lyons (with whom Moyers also did a separate program), and contemporary American Indian novelists Louise Erdrich and Michael Dorris (pictured.)  Like everything else Moyers did for PBS, these interviews were rerun several times (especially during pledge drives), and I managed to tape quite a few of them for later study.    

 In 1989 Moyers visited a biannual poetry festival to record the readings and interview the poets in the series The Power of the Word.  It would be the first of several such series (for instance The Language of Life in 1995, The Sounds of Poetry and Fooling with Words in 1999, and interviews with individual poets on his revived Bill Moyers Journal) featuring a broad range of poets. 

poets Sharon Olds and Galway Kinnell

The first episode of The Power of the Word with William Stafford, Lucille Clifton Octavio Paz, Robert Bly, Sharon Olds, and Galway Kinnell, shows interactions between poets and students (many in high school) who attended the conference. The atmosphere is warm, and it definitely heats up at the end with Olds and Kinnell trading love poems.

 

poet Li-Young Lee

  The second explores poetry in prisons with James Autry and Quincy Troupe; the third, “Ancestral Voices” highlights the through-line of tradition in contemporary life with Joy Harjo, Barett Kauro Hongo and Mary Tall Mountain.  Then poets Li-Young Lee and Gerald Stern explore the poetry of memory. 

Lucille Clifton

A full hour is devoted to Stanley Kunitz, then one of the most respected American poets at age 84 (he lived to be 101.)  The final program is  “Where the Soul Lives,” featuring W.S. Merwin, Lucille Clifton and Robert Bly.  Bly ends the series on stage with the Paul Winter Consort reciting a short poem by Rumi, the concluding lines I have since often quoted: “Let the beauty we love be what we do./There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the earth.”  

Again, I taped some of these programs and over the years they continued to nourish and center me.

 Robert Bly was prominent in this episode, and he was a focus of the 1990 production of A Gathering of Men. The so-called men’s movement, and Bly’s part in it, were distorted, trivialized and lied about for years.  They were ridiculed, and the men who participated were cruelly shamed.  Moyers showed that this one event was serious, sincere, not political or a hostile escape from women but an exploration of feelings and their denial, particularly about a man’s relationship to his father.  Though others including psychologists James Hillman and Michael Meade not shown in this program were also leaders of these workshops, they all—like Bly-- employed poetry, myth and fairy tales to explore this and related issues. 

 I’ve never attended a men’s group, and I did not always agree completely with Bly at the pitch of his enthusiasms. But whatever other such gatherings were like, the ones these men led were serious attempts that met a need.  This program on its own is a tentative exploration that remains a useful introduction.  When I first saw it, these questions were new to me, but they immediately resonated.  This arrived at about the same time as related discussions about children of alcoholics and forms of abuse felt by children were being explored for a general public, or at least that’s when they were reaching me. 

Martin Amis, Margaret Atwood

These programs foregrounding poetry are among those that were centered on a particular conference or festival, where the Moyers team filmed the public events and some audience response or interaction, and Moyers interviewed principal participants.  Others include the Spirit and Nature program in 1991, which featured an interview with the Dalai Lama, and the Faith and Reason series in 2006, which provided a rare interview with the revered Buddhist monk Pema Chodron, as well as lively and absorbing conversations with Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Martin Amis.  Apart from providing a permanent digest of these proceedings for the many who were not there, the words preserved in these programs continue to stimulate thought and suggest new perspectives. 

Other programs were pieced together from research and interviews in various places, as the five-part 1993 series Healing and the Mind.  Modern western medicine had long discounted any connection between mind (including emotions) with physical processes and health: it was all about mechanics, all about the plumbing.  Anything else was considered superstition.  When reports circulated of some Buddhist monks being able to control blood pressure during meditations, it was considered at best an unverified mystery, or more typically as occult nonsense.

 This was only beginning to change in the early 1990s, and this series of programs was groundbreaking in revealing how much practical work and theory was ongoing, even in hospitals and clinics, exploring the relationship of brain, mind and body.  Experts and practitioners discussed relations of the brain and emotions with the immune system, the effects of environment and community on healing, and generally a new, broader attitude to treat patients holistically, as well as ways for individuals to provide for their own health.

 Today most of the practices discussed, from mindfulness and acupuncture to support groups and mothers holding their newborns immediately after birth, are mainstream.  Most therapies are such normal elements of treatment that insurance often covers them.  Similarly, the hospice care I first glimpsed in On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying (2000) was a rare approach then, but very much accepted now. 

The segment of Healing and the Mind that most stayed with me was Moyers exploring the work of Jon Kabatt-Zinn at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center’s Stress Reduction clinic, where he was employing the radical idea of addressing intractable back pain with the practice of meditation.  Kabatt-Zinn’s variation on single-point or mindfulness meditation was still relatively new to America, especially outside Buddhist monasteries and related places like the Zen Center in San Francisco.  His techniques were demonstrated, and he talked persuasively about them.

 The program referred to Kabatt-Zinn’s book, Full Catastrophe Living, which included instructions on meditation and the “body scan” he employs, as well as a couple of yoga regimes.  I got that book and the associated tapes in which Kabatt-Zinn speaks you through the process.  When it comes to physical movements I am a slow learner, and group instruction just befuddles me.  So I used the tapes in conjunction with diagrams in the book to learn one of the yoga regimes, and I did it regularly for years.  Though I still use aspects of it, maybe it’s time to return to it in a more formal way. 

 The experience Bill Moyers had was similar to mine, and many others: the body scan was a revelation, while meditation was hard and confusing and a bit irritating.  But it opened the door to learning the practice of meditation in various ways, including a deeper understanding of Zen practice.  This has been a major theme in my learning for the past 30 years, and it effectively began with this segment.  And I still use several of Kabatt-Zinn’s guided meditations, and profit from a couple of his subsequent books on the subject.

 Again, I acquired many of the companion books to these Moyers programs (several published by Doubleday thanks to senior editor Jacqueline Kennedy.)  They remain active resources.  Many of the programs themselves are accessible via YouTube, PBS and the Bill Moyers.com website. 

I have saved the most popular—and for me the most influential—of these many Moyers programs for last. In 1988, Moyers interviewed Joseph Campbell, previously unknown to the general public, with associated images from his work on world mythologies over six one-hour episodes.  The Power of Myth became one of the most popular TV series in PBS history. 

 I saw it when it first aired (and turned up repeatedly for awhile on PBS fund drives), but a recent re-viewing reminded me of an aspect I hadn’t thought much about: that these interviews took place during the last two summers of Campbell’s life.  This series made him famous, but posthumously. By the time it first aired, this Joseph Campbell-- so alive in personality, knowledge and understanding, who we were meeting for the first time-- was already gone.  He had been dealing with cancer those last years, so mortality was not an academic subject. As I watched it this time I was acutely aware of the additional power in his words on death and its meaning. 

 Campbell's many books, such as The Hero With A Thousand Faces, were influential with scholars and artists.  But it was the six-part The Power of Myth series that made him an icon, as he eloquently explained the patterns of mythology and the meanings he derived from them.

  Though the series included visual illustrations of some myths, the programs were basically little more than Campbell talking, with conversational prompts from a completely engaged Bill Moyers.  Yet the series was enormously popular.  It’s likely that many viewers got their first inklings of Buddhist and Hindu thought as well as traditional stories from Native American and other Indigenous peoples, from these programs. 

 But this wasn’t a mythological travelogue; Campbell distilled his own conclusions and related these stories to questions of the eternal within time, to the importance of the present moment, and the central functions of compassion and the individual experience.  He’d taught college students for many years, and spoke directly to their needs and yearnings. His most famous and therefore most misunderstood statement of “follow your bliss” was a profoundly religious message, shorn of any sense of sectarianism, let alone hedonism.   

Seeing the series again left me with two major impressions.  First, that so much of what has absorbed me in these recent decades in some sense began with this program. I even had forgotten that certain ideas and beliefs that I think of as essential to my life had their origin or at least articulation in these programs. (For example, that religion may have begun when humans dealt with the paradox of killing the animals they revered.)

 This series first aired when I was beginning to explore, in sometimes unrelated ways, Native American cultures and beliefs, the psychology of James Hillman and eventually his source, Carl Jung, and ecology in a deeper way.  This series touched on all of them and more.  Now my bookshelves contain dozens of books on these and related subjects, as well as several of Campbell’s books.

 The second impression is that having explored these topics and these thinkers and writers for the past quarter century and more, I found much more to learn and ponder in re-watching The Power of Myth than I could understand or accommodate back then.   That applies in different ways to other programs that Bill Moyers made.  They continue to nourish, as they once opened up new worlds, rescuing me from becoming mired in the goading limitations of the unembraceable world I was supposed to negotiate. 

These programs represent a small sample of the programs Bill Moyers created, every one of them thought-provoking and informative, and many of them revelatory.  Over the years, Moyers and his collaborators have created more worthy programs than any other individual or group, and perhaps more than some entire networks.

 Bill Moyers demonstrated the power of television to expand and deepen our experience.  There should be a thousand Moyers.  But there was only one. 

Three Treasures

67

 Everybody says my way is great 

but improbable.

 All greatness

 is improbable.

 What's probable

 is tedious and petty.

 I have three treasures.

 I keep and treasure them.

 The first, mercy, 

the second, moderation,

 the third, modesty.

 If you're merciful you can be brave,

 if you're moderate you can be generous,

 and if you don't presume to lead

 you can lead the high and mighty.

 But to be brave without compassion, 

or generous without self-restraint, 

or to take the lead,

 is fatal. 

 Compassion wins the battle

 and holds the fort;

 it is the bulwark set

 around those heaven helps.

 --Tao Te Ching, translation by Ursula LeGuin 

The Days After: Joyful Defiance

1. Joyful Defiance

Asheville, North Carolina: Getty photo

I haven't seen a reliable overview of Sunday newspaper coverage of the Saturday June 14 protests, but I'd have to believe a lot of local papers had photo spreads.  More photos were on the Internet (Talking Points Memo for one collected many from readers) and presumably on social media.

By Monday the media consensus had formed, that the protests overshadowed and shamed the Boss Chaos birthday tank parade.  Some of the organizing groups said that more than 5 million Americans participated in more than 2100 communities, and news media mostly went with those numbers.  A crowd-sourcing effort, not yet complete, suggests a range of 4 to 6 million.  The Crowdsourcing Consortium had estimated the 2017 Women's March at between 3.3 and 5.6 million, so it's likely that Saturday was the largest in history--certainly in the number of communities participating.  (This consortium also estimates that there have been over 15,000 other resistance protests since January.)

Austin, Texas

Some additional numbers got into the mix.  Organizers in Philadelphia, St. Paul and San Diego claimed there were over or near 100,000. Boston media claimed one million there. As an example of breadth, there were 50 protesting communities in Wisconsin alone. 

Boston,MA  

I continue to be amazed at the wit, the buoyancy and relentlessness of these protests. And the courage, given the lawlessness of the Chaos and Chaos-inspired people. Maybe it was Rachel who characterized the day's mood as "joyful defiance." The diversity of participants is implied by the kinds of places where the protests occurred.   The photos show a lot of white people, who look a lot like the stereotypical Chaos voter.  They may be having a good time, but they aren't out there to party.  And they know why they are there.

There are many differences but some similarities to the 1960s protests of my experience.  The mood of the March on Washington was solemn and even reverent.  Anti-war protests ran the gamut from grimly defiant to very angry, but we had fun, too. But we always felt apart from the mainstream.  I don't think these protestors do.  And poll numbers suggest they are right. 

Chattanooga, Tennessee

What might be the same is the disbelief that the media didn't immediately give them their true significance, often with insultingly low estimates of the numbers participating.  And the high that participating brings, and the letdown afterwards when nothing has changed.

But networking with people you met and maintaining some sort of cohesion should be easier with faster and easier communication media.  The question of what comes next is a real one. 

Oakland, CA

On Monday there was a police report of a gun death at a protest in Utah, in which someone used a handgun to shoot at someone pointing a rifle at marchers.  He hit the gunman but killed someone else--a marcher or a bystander.  On Tuesday it was also revealed that one person was killed as a result of the Washington military parade, run down by a truck carrying a tank. 

There were a couple of known attempts of drivers trying to mow down marchers, and another TPM article reports increased agitation for violence against protesters, especially official violence in Red states and communities, where such acts are no longer severely penalized.

On Thursday, a man who was arrested for carrying a handgun without license at a June 14 protest in West Chester, PA, who also had an AR-14 style rifle in his car, was arrested again when police searched his home and found 13 improvised explosives, grenades and other gear.  He was charged with multiple crimes including possession of weapons of mass destruction. 

But also, by Wednesday, letters to the editor by June 14 participants were starting to appear, as here in the Washington Post, further sharing an experience of a lifetime.  

 2.  The Military Parade

It turned out to be Army vs. Boss Chaos, and Army won.  

The US Army and its career professional leadership has made some significant missteps since January.  Censoring the West Point Library, cooperating with the Chaos political show at Fort Bragg are prominent among them.  But they've also proven adroit at seemingly cooperating with Chaos in Chief while subtly undermining him.  They did as ordered and restored the old names to some bases previously named after Confederate generals.  But they officially named the bases after US Army officers and enlisted heroes who just happen to have the same last names as the generals the US Army fought against in the Civil War. 

 

Forth Worth, TX

And they followed orders and organized a parade in Washington, which Chaos publicly denied was in honor of his birthday and his presidency, but was honoring the 250th anniversary of the Army.  Then the Army did something vitally subversive: they took him at his lying public word.

So the parade really was an historical pageant and a celebration, with soldiers decked out in period uniforms rented from Hollywood.  The hardware was at a minimum.  Chaos insisted on tanks, and there were tanks of several eras--which is fitting, since tanks are largely obsolete these days, except to scare citizens opposing their dear leader.  Instead the soldiers manning the tanks smiled at the crowd and made hearts with their hands, while their compatriot foot soldiers strolled rather than marched by in lockstep, waving.  According to biographer Michael Wolff, Trump was furious that the parade wasn't more menacing, and blamed his Secretary of Defense. 

There was of course still no excuse for the $25 million to $45 million spent on it.  But Chaos owns that.

Paris, France

Meanwhile by Monday the news media consensus was that attendance at the parade was "sparse" and entirely overshadowed by the national--really international-- protests.  Even though there was to be no "official" No Kings protest in Washington itself, there were several anti-Chaos marches and demonstrations earlier in the day with significant attendance.

But Boss Chaos always wants control, insisting on being the center of attention.  This time his diversion of choice may be to involve the country in yet another war in the Middle East.  He didn't get his jollies with a menacing parade. He may opt for the push-button power of immense military violence.  His policies are already killing hundreds of thousands of children from starvation and disease that USAID would have otherwise prevented.  Soon he may feed his need with more graphic death and destruction, with high danger of protracted consequences.