Here are the links:
Cspan video: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/...
Transcription of Cspan video: http://solutionsearch-tbug.blogspot.com/
Bill Moyer's Journal: http://www.pbs.org/...
Books:
Bill Moyers Journal: The Conversation Continues
Moyers on Democracy
Bill Moyers conversation with Garrison Keillor on Cspan part IV
GK: I believe we have certain things in common brother. (laughter) I'm just pushing, pushing.
BM: I wish I could say them as easily as you do so that they would go down better. (laughter)
GK: I believe that you and I are a little bit uncomfortable in a um a very secular society. I believe that you and I are uncomfortable around profanity. I believe that you and I, I don't know if I can speak for you, I miss Sundays the way Sundays used to be. I miss quiet Sundays before the shopping malls were open. When we had the Sabbath. I miss the Sabbath. And I don't care what the ACLU says, I just do miss it. I'm not fighting for its return, but I miss it. And I miss my people and I don't understand why our people, your people and mine, the ones who had benefit of scripture, Growing up , why they took the current they did which has so changed our politics. The fervor of the evangelical right has given the other side an advantage over the wishy-washy middle. That shouldn't be there. How did they take that wrong turn, so that a man like Jimmy Carter who has devoted his post White House years to causes of peace and negotiation, and mediation. Who teaches Sunday school, for heavens sake, every Sunday. Could you imagine George W Bush teaching Sunday school ? (laughter) I can't. There's just way to many passages of scriptures he would blanch at. (laughter) How did we become living in these twisted times? Where our people, the people who grew up with scripture as you and I did, have taken this strange turn. If George W Bush had sent pictures of himself in his underwear (laughter) he would have been in serious trouble. But instead he started and unprovoked war, with a nation that did not attack us. A half a million or more Iraqis died in that war. Some five, six thousand of our own people died in this war. And, and the man skates onward. How did we come to be living in this, in this backward time. (applause)
BM: I wish I knew the answer to that. I agree with you. I do admire Jon Stewart very much, but I keep wishing that he didn't feel compelled, and I don't know why he feels compelled to use all the obscenities in his presentation. And its not that I can't move around them. But he feels that he has to use the f word constantly. They bleep it out. Its worse when your on the set than when you watch at home because it has been bleeped. But you know it. I don't know why Jon feels the need to do that because it means he will limit his influence to the survivors, the remnant of America that still believes. And even if we are all sinners and fallen from grace, we ought to maintain, as David Brooks, a conservative columnist, a columnist whom I often like, says "Maintenance of a public virtue is a very important standard for people even if privately we fall off the wagon". And I don't know what happened to that. Its always back and forth between culture. And in religion sometimes you get. We owe a lot to Progressive Christians like William Jennings Bryant who fought for a progressive vision of America. To Walter Roushinbush who taught us about the social gospel. That its not enough to be pious. You also have to be committed to a society that is just. Martin Luther King we owe. But those men never confused the way fundamentalist do today God and government. Government was an instrument for justice, but it wasn't the voice of God. And today there is so much confusion between God and government that many right-wingers just say they are one in the same. They don't want us to use government to advance the interests of the poor, but they want us to use government to deny women the power to control their own reproductive rights. (applause) I don't know the answer. I don't know the answer.
GK: I really liked your conversation with Jeremiah Write in this book. I thought that was a good deed in a dark world. Here was a black minister in Chicago, ministry of Trinity UCC Church on the south side. The church that Barrack Obama had attended for many years. Where he and his wife were married and his children were baptized. And Jeremiah Wright became a campaign issue briefly in 2008. For a sermon he had given. Tiny bits of which were paraded out and in which he was making the very same point. And criticizing the use of the phrase "God bless America" That the tendency to wrap the government of the United States with God in a neat way. Despite our history and profound examples of our wickedness. And you gave Jeremiah Wright a chance to explain himself. And you vindicated this man who had been used in this campaign. He was caricatured as an angry black man as a way of trying to portray Barrack Obama, the opposite of an angry black man, as one. And forced Barrack Obama as a practical politician to repudiate Jeremiah Wright. You gave him a chance to speak and that was a good thing.
BM: Jeremiah Wright, whom I didn't know. Got a bum deal from the corporate main stream media (applause) And from the right wing media. Fox news. Talk radio. Any one can, and they probably are, Fox News, Rush Limbaugh at this very moment are looking for seven seconds of our exchange which they can clip out and put into a loop and make us look like fools. They could. No context. Nothing comes before, nothing comes after. Their own context put on top of our text. You can do this. This is why there is an obligation that comes with journalism. But they could do that and that's what they did to Jeremiah Wright. I did not know Jeremiah Wright. My pasture James Forbes, as I said earlier, great African American divine at Riverside Church in New York called me up. He's a UCC, member of the United Church of Christ, said " Bill that's not Jeremiah Wright,. What we're seeing on ABC news and hearing on talk radio and Rush Limbaugh. that's not Jeremiah Wright. I know him. We've been through many fires together. That's not him. He went to Chicago. He was a brightly educated, smartly educated young man. He could have had his pick of any huge black churches. He chose one with 85 members. He built into, Frontline did a documentary on it, he built it into a huge loving church that feeds the poor, and provides advice to alcoholics and addicts. Provides HIV work and serves the community. Fights gangs and drugs. Great man. And Barrack Obama went to that church when he went to Chicago as a community organizer. And he saw something. And I just want to (reaches for his book) and this is very short read you from Obama's book his memoir in his book Dreams from My Father. He describes his first service at Trinity at Wright's church.
"People begin to shout, rise from their seats and cry out. A forceful wind carried the Reverends voice to the rafters and in that single note I heard something else. At the foot of that cross, inside thousands of churcHe's across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath. Moses and Pharoh, Christians in the lion's den, Ezekial and the dry bones. these stories of survival and freedom and hope became our story. (This is Barrack Obama writing) My story, the blood that was still our blood. The tears our tears until this black church on this bright day seem a vessel carrying the story of a people the future generations in a larger world."
And because in no small part, that sort of preaching Obama was baptized at that church as a Christian. When he was in his twenties. And to say this man was damning America with that sermon where he says God damn America. He was invoking the Jewish prophets. Who loved Israel, but hated Israel's waywardness. And would call down judgment on the people they loved when they fell from grace. And that's what he was doing and to take that and say he was damning, God damn America is a travesty of the truth. And a great injustice and that's why I invited him on. (applause)
GK: You just gave them the sound bite right there.
BM: I just gave them the sound bite, right.