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 III
GK: The bond between you and me is not that we are Democrats. I think. Or you mentioning your father makes me think, its not that we're Democrats, its not that we are of same generation. But its that we had a similar upbringing. We were both brought up fundamentalist. We both had born again experiences. And to me religion and religious upbringing is more important than race. More important than politics. I was on Antiqua. I was on a vacation. I was at this very lovely expensive resort. And I went for a walk late one evening. And I heard singing. I was walking through a very poor neighborhood. And a lot of ragtag falling down shacky houses. And I heard singing. And it took me a moment to recognize it because it was in a different style. A different groove than I would have heard growing up among the Plymouth brethren in south Minneapolis. But they were singing "Oh happy day that fixed my choice on the my Savior, and my God. Well may this flowing heart rejoice and spread its raptures all abroad." They were singing it with percussion which we didn't (laughter). And they were coming down on a different beat than we would have. But those were my people. And I knew when I heard that song, that I was suppose to go find that music. And I did. And I walked over there. And I knew that they would welcome me. Those were my people. Those were your people. And it didn't matter that I was white, white, white and they were blacker than black. I walked in and they welcomed me. I didn't want to make a big show of myself. I stood sort of oft to the side, but they reached out. The put their hands on me and I was welcomed there. Those are my people. Those are your people.
BM: People said that Bill Clinton was the first black president. I understood what they meant. Because Bill Clinton grew up the same way I did in the south. I grew up in a segregated town. A small town of 20,000 people. 10,000 blacks. 10,000 whites. Very seldom did we meet and certainly never mixed in that southern culture. But Wednesday nights, I would often slip away from our church go down to South Almo street and sit outside a rundown black Baptist church where they sang far into the night. And I wished that I could belong to that church. Being white I couldn't. It was very eerie about that experience. It shows how you could grow up well loved, well churched, well taught and still be unaware of the reality of other people. But we could have a long conversation you and I about religion. Because in 1984 I wrote when I was a senior news analyst at CBS news, I wrote Minneapolis public radio. I didn't know anybody. I just wrote and said I just obtained 4 copies of Prairie Home Companion. Its fascinating. Where can I buy the others? And I was talking to an executive at NPR, and he said "What interested you about Prairie Home Companion?" And I said well its almost become a cliché, but its like going to church. What is it? Its a certain set of values. A certain amount of sense of justice and reverence that emerges particularly from religion that arises from the oppressed. The Jews were oppressed. Oppressed by the Babylonians. Oppressed by the Asyrians. Oppressed by the Egyptians. Oppressed oppressed, oppressed. And out of this came what also came out of the oppressed Black people. Songs of hope. Songs of redemption. Song prayers of promise. The promise land. The river Jordan. The language runs through both Hebrew and Black America. So there's something there. They are our people, yes, because we grew up not rich, not well educated. I mean, we didn't go to elite schools. And religion becomes then a force affirming yourself against a world that is oppressing you. Denying you. I wonder where religion came from Garrison. Was it from when the first woman awoke in a cave and felt the cold body of her husband and said where did he go? Where is he? The bodies there, but where is he? Marvelous interview in the book with Robert Wright who's one of the most outstanding thinkers of our time. He wrote a book that caused me to bring him on the show. Called Evolution of God. And he talks about this need of people, long ago, to find answers to questions the Universe didn't tell them. You talked about Joseph Campbell. I a little surprised that you didn't find him accessible. Because I think Campbell's great contribution, having studied the literature and the religions of the world was to translate religion into poetry. To help us see that the literal truth of the scripture is not nearly as important as, in fact it can be very misleading, to the poetic truth of the experience. And he said to me, "If you want to change the world, change the metaphor. Change the poetry." To me, that is essentially how I see religion today. For the ineffable truths that it reveals in poetic rather than literal language.
GK: We were not brought up with metaphor, brother. (laughter) You and I have had scorching experiences when we were young and you know it. We looked into a yawning chasm at our feet of hellfire and we withdrew from it. And we felt the love of the lord surrounding us. If Joseph Campbell had told the story of Abraham and Issaac, I would have understood that. If he would of told the story of Jonah and the whale I would have been OK with that. The prodigal son was my favorite. But anyway, because we both grew up with that. I know you. I know you deeply, maybe, more than you want me to know you.
BM: Well here's a difference. When do you first go to church?
GK: I went to church, I was carried into church in the bosoms of large women. (laughter)
BM: I walked into church under my own steam at the age of 12. You see I was spared the indoctrination. And then when I finally went to church, when we joined the church at 12. I was, and this is hard to believe in a southern fundamentalist conservative culture, I was introduced to a series of ministers, preachers, who really did believe that the life of the spirit had to embrace the life of the mind. And they were intelligent. They were compassionate. Only one of them delivered fire and brimstone. The others, all the way on, I had some of the great divines as preachers over the course of my whole life. And it was the emphasis of upon opening up the mind. Religion was not able closing. Well it was, Campbell used the word ridicuio (sp?) Religion is a means of connecting, not only us, but us through various other laboratories and experience in life. And I didn't have the fundamentalist indoctrination I might have had, if I like you, I had been carried in. None the less, both of us emerged from that. And I'm wondering what you might think that says about religion.
GK: Now are you saying that in Marshall, Texas, you did not sit in under preaching that made you quiver, that made you shake?
BM: Only once. Newman McCleary, who was succeeded by Brownlow Hastings who was such a gentle man. He was the one Judith Suzanne Davis and I asked to perform our wedding ceremony. Then I went to the University of Texas where I fell under the spell of a marvelous man who was later to be asked to become chaplain at Harvard name Carlye Marney. One of the great theological minds of our time. You don't know him because he was in that culture. And I went on, I could tell you J.P. Allen, James Robinson, and James Forbes, the great African American minister. Was my minister for nine years at the historical Riverside Church in New York. We all are the products of the influences that you say we were exposed. I was fortunate. I don't know how it happened. I was fortunate to have a series of ministers that called us out instead of trying to close us off.
GK: None the less, brother (laughter)
BM: Your hostility is showing again. (laughter)
GK: No we're just trying to get at the truth here. (laughter) None the less I believe that you have come from the same background, similar background. And I believe that you are probably uncomfortable about lavish praise.
BM: True.
GK: I believe that when you get an honorary degree, you cringe a little bit when they read that proclamation. I believe that you see the powerful and the wealthy as occupying a precarious position in God's world. That God will turn this world upside down. That these people have temporary prominence and will fall all the harder for their pride and their power. And you I believe you sorrow for our brethren who have taken the part of the powerful. Empowering the powerful. And who have ignored all the scripture says about the poor. And who have promulgated cruel policies.
BM: You don't have to feel guilty, to love justice. And my complaint about the very rich and the very powerful, not all of them because we all know some of them who have been most generous and democratic in the small sense. The suffer today from the characteristics of being sociopath. That is radically deprived of empathy. That's what a sociopath is. Radically deprived of empathy. And that's what was in the young man I think that came to Jesus and said "Master, what should I do to be saved?" And Jesus said, "Sell all your riches and come follow me and serve the least among us." It was a lack of empathy that was his hell. That was his separation from the rest of us. And its this division between them and the rest of us in society. You know the gap in equality in this country is greater than its been since the Great Depression. The difference between the top and the bottom. And its not a matter of its just is it money cause, you will never have, none of us will have equal money. It is that fact that when you are radically deprived of empathy, and you want to pay the lowest possible taxes instead of supporting the great consortium that is embodied in the constitution, "We the people, in order to ". When you want to not carry your fair share, you begin to deprive everyone else of the things that made my life. I grew up poor. My father had a fourth grade education. He never made over a hundred dollars a month until his last few years when he joined a union. And I have the paystub of his last check. $96 dollars and some odd cents after taxes. But I went to good public schools in Marshall, Texas. By the way, they were a antidote to any fundamentalist preaching we were getting town. I drove on a public highway to a public University, the University of Texas. I stopped in public parks. I used public facilities and most important of all, I had access to public libraries. And I never walked into the library at the University of Texas without thinking All of these were written for me by people who didn't know me? This whole University was built by people who didn't know me and never know me and that I will never know because they believed in us. Us the preamble of the constitution, We the people, and they invested their money in public institutions. And this gap between rich and poor today is starving the public sector. Despite our enormous debts. It is retreating from the public life of the nation. So that the rich will be behind their gated communities. And the rest of America in the next 20 or 30 years if we don't reverse this trend will be like areas of India. The doctrine of the right is the survival of the fittest. Every man for himself. And if that happens, ( applause) that means society becomes a jungle. And civilization, you know this, your shows reek with this, civilization is but a thin veneer of civility stretched across the paths of the human heart. And we have to work to keep that civilization. And when people withdrawal their consent and withdrawal their support from it then you are right close to reversion to precivilization of society. And that's what troubles me about the elites today. Who I think suffer from the worst of all religious sins which is malignant narcissism. (applause)