by Bill Moyers
nothing of age as the flying birds know
nothing of the air they are flying through
or of the day that bears them up
through themselves
and I am a child before there are words
arms are holding me up in a shadow
voices murmur in a shadow
as I watch one patch of sunlight moving
across the green carpet
in a building
gone long ago and all the voices
silent and each word they said in that time
silent now
while I go on seeing that patch of sunlight
“That patch of sunlight.” Where did you first see it?
Union City, New Jersey, in a church that was torn down many, many years ago.
Your father’s church?
Yes, and I was being lifted up. May even have been when I was baptized. Very, very early—but I still remember it. Still remember the man in a brown suit. I later asked my mother, “Who was the man in the brown suit who was holding me?” And she said, “Oh, yes. That was Reverend So-and-So. He had come for a visit. And he said he would lift you up and hold you for the ceremony.” I never saw him again, but I remember being held up and watching the green carpet and that patch of sunlight.
That happened where you grew up in New Jersey, across the Hudson River from where we’re sitting right now. Here’s another poem in your book from those years. You call it “The Song of the Trolleys.”
Oh yes, there was a trolley car that went right past our house in Union City.
You seem to have the world in your ear.
Well, as I said, I believe poems begin with hearing. One listens until one hears something. People will ask me, “What are you listening to? And what are you listening for?” And I say, “That’s what you have to find out.” First you have to learn how to listen.
I had a portent the other day of our meeting. We took our two small grandchildren to the Central Park Zoo. Entering the rain forest preserve, we looked up and there’s a quote from W.S. Merwin. Did you know it’s there?
No.
It says, “On the last day of the world, I would want to plant a tree.” Why would you want to plant a tree?
I guess it’s because I would like to be putting life back into the world, rather than taking life out of it all the time. We do a lot of that, you know? I’ve lived on Maui for thirty-five years. And I feel very, very lucky to be there. The remmants of an ancient culture fascinate me. But it’s where I could garden. I could be surrounded by a garden all year round. See life growing all around me. We live in a small valley leading down to the sea, and I love to get up well before daybreak, before the birds are awake. It’s so beautiful in the morning. There are these lovely sounds. Sometimes late at night, I just stop everything before I go to bed and listen to the valley. People say it’s a silent valley; it’s so quiet. But listen and you hear the sound of the valley.
Which brings me to one of my favorite poems in the book. Read “The Long and Short of It.”
THE LONG AND THE SHORT OF IT
As long as we can believe anything
we believe in measure
we do it with the first breath we take
and the first sound we make
it is in each word we learn
and in each of them it means
what will come again and when
it is there in meal and in moon
and in meaning it is the meaning
it is the firmament and the furrow
turning at the end of the field
and the verse turning with its breath
it is in memory that keeps telling us
some of the old story about us
And the experience there?
I think we know the experience every time we draw a breath. It’s there in the beat of our hearts and in our breathing. And in the rhythm of our days. It’s the basis of our lives and goes on evolving. It’s mysterious. And we think we can measure it, but we know perfectly well with the other side of our minds that we can’t measure it at all.
Sometimes when I look at the moon I think about how it’s the same moon seen by Hadrian and Ovid and—
Oh, yes.
—and Shelley and Keats and Byron and Neruda.
I often think that.
This constancy of our gaze through the centuries.
There’s a great poem by a Chinese poet by the late Tang Dynasty who wrote about seeing that same moon during a rebellion when everyone was getting killed. And he said, “This is the moon that guided me through the streets as I escaped. That led me to find my way out into the mountains. And here it is.” He said, “I ask myself what can I believe everywhere.” He said, “I believe the moon everywhere.”
That it’s—the constancy.
The constancy. What makes a blade of grass come up between the stones of the sidewalk? I’ll never forget the great assurance I felt when my mother explained that the earth was under the sidewalk.
Do you think often of death?
I think we all think about death. And there’s a connection to this feeling about words. Words come not from the threatening dark but the nourishing dark. The nourishing darkness. The dark and the light are always with us.
Let’s close with another favorite of mine, one you wrote for your wife, Paula. How long have you two been married?
Oh, twenty-seven years. I was never sure that monogamy would overtake me. But it did when I met Paula.
And you wrote this poem to her late in spring.
We were in the old farmhouse in France. I was sitting in the little garden house that I built there years ago, and Paula was working in the garden.
TO PAULA IN LATE SPRING
Let me imagine that we will come again
when we want to and it will be spring
we will be no older than we ever were
the worn griefs will have eased like the early cloud
through which the morning slowly comes to itself
and the ancient defenses against the dead
will be done with and left to the dead at last
the light will be as it is now in the garden
that we have made here these years together
of our long evenings and astonishment
And I thought, “This is it. It never gets better than this, you know?”
MIKE DAVIS
There was pandemonium among conservative polemicists when President Obama proposed a spending stimulus in response to the economic crash that occurred on George W. Bush’s watch. Never mind that the Bush administration had just bailed out Wall Street, expanded government health care for the elderly, and turned huge surpluses into vast deficits. Suddenly, with a Democrat in the White House, a cry of “The Socialists Are Coming! The Socialists Are Coming!” resonated from right-wing ramparts all across cable, radio, and the blogosphere.
CNBC’s resident showboating screwball, Jim Cramer—who, as God is my witness, refers to his viewers as “Cramericans”—was practically foaming at the mouth: “Guess who he’s [Obama] taking his cues from? No, not Mao! Not Pancho Villa! ... No, he’s taking cues from Lenin! And I don’t mean the ‘All We Need Is Love’ Lennon. I’m talking about we’ ll-take-every-dime-Cramericans-have Lenin.”
Easy there, Jim. Better stick to decaf.
Odds are none of the swashbuckling paranoiacs on the right even know a socialist. It just so happens I do, and while he is sometimes controversial, you can bet your bottom dollar—if Obama hasn’t already confiscated it—he’s not on any White House guest list. Mike Davis describes himself as an “international socialist,” which means he’s come a distance, metaphorically, from his days as a meatcutter and long-haul truck driver, although he’s never forgotten what it takes to earn a living bloodying your hands on gristle or steering an eighteenwheeler overnight.
Mike Davis currently teaches creative writing at the University of California, Riverside, and writes books, good ones. In Prais
e of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire is his latest. Two earlier histories of Los Angeles and southern California—City of Quartz and Ecology of Fear—were bestsellers and must reading for anyone with an interest in the social and economic development of the now-tarnished Golden State. When we spoke, six months after the financial meltdown of September 2008, California’s economy had tanked, with one of the country’s highest number of foreclosures and unemployment above 10 percent and climbing. Worse than much of the country, California was a financial earthquake off the Richter scale.
—Bill Moyers
Did you ever imagine our financial system would be in such a sudden free fall?
No. And I found myself in the position of, say, a Jehovah’s Witness, who believes the end is nigh but then one morning wakes up, looks out the window, and the stars are indeed falling from heaven. It’s actually happened: the end is nigh! So no, I never imagined such catastrophes.
You’ve described this as the mother of all fiscal crises. Are the people you know frightened right now?
Oh, people are terrified, particularly where I teach in Riverside County. People have no idea where to turn. Our campus—University of California, Riverside—has the largest percentage of working-class students in the U.C. system. Their families have scrimped and saved. They’ve worked hard to get into courses that pointed toward stable careers and jobs. And now those futures are apparently incinerated.
You wrote an essay on TomDispatch.com in which you asked, “Can Obama see the Grand Canyon?” What’s with the metaphor?
Well, the first explorers to visit the Grand Canyon were overwhelmed. They couldn’t visualize the Grand Canyon because they had no concept for it. That is, there was no analogue in their cultural experience, no comparable landscape that would allow them to make sense of what they were seeing. It actually took ten years of heroic scientific effort by John Wesley Powell and some great geologists like Clarence Dutton before the Grand Canyon was seen in the sense that we understand it now: as a deep slice in earth history. Before then you just had confused images and feelings of vertigo.
I raise this to ask: Do we really have an analogy for the current crisis? Do we have the concepts to understand its profundity? Here we are seemingly on the brink of a second Great Depression, which is occurring at a time of epochal climate change. It’s occurring at a time when the two major benchmarks for global social progress—the United Nations millennial goals for relieving poverty and child mortality, on one hand, and the Kyoto goals for reducing greenhouse emissions, on the other—are clearly not going to be achieved. This would be a time of fierce urgency in any sense. And on top of that, we are facing a meltdown of the world economy in a way that no one anticipated. No one counted on a financial calamity of this order to happen in such a synchronized, almost simultaneous way across the world.
So you wrote: “Like the Grand Canyon’s first explorers, we are looking into an unprecedented abyss of economic and social turmoil that confounds our previous perceptions of historical risk. Our vertigo is intensified by our ignorance of the depth of the crisis or any sense of how far we might ultimately fall.” That was five or six months ago. Any sense of how far we might ultimately fall?
No. I don’t think anyone does. Nobody’s seen the bottom here. We’re working largely on the basis of hope and faith and crossing our fingers. We’ve invested in one person—the president—an almost messianic responsibility.
What’s Obama done right so far?
I think what he’s done most right is to push through the stimulus package, which I argue is primarily a relief bill, because obviously you can’t talk about stopping the decline if you’re going to allow the public sector—the local public sector, schools and public services on a state and local level—to collapse, as they are. You have to shore that up. Not that the stimulus is sufficient to address the totality of the fiscal crisis across the span of local governments, but it puts a Band-Aid over it. It extends unemployment compensation—gives a little more money to people who are out of work. My father was on WPA in 1935 ...
Works Progress Administration, one of Franklin Roosevelt’s creations.
Right. Of course, there’s a big difference today. Every dollar he was paid by the federal government—98, 99 cents of it—went for products that were made in the United States or grown in the United States. One of my nephews just lost his job in Seattle. He takes his unemployment money down to Walmart or Sam’s Club and buys stuff from China. Probably 40, 45 cents of the stimulus goes to the Chinese or the Korean economies. So the stimulus in this country, Keynesian stimulus, doesn’t necessarily have the multiplier effect—if it doesn’t create as many jobs or raise demand to the extent that it did during the 1930s when the United States had the largest, most productive industrial machine in the world. It could make almost anything. The question then was solely how to put the workers and machines back at work.
Today, after dismantling so much of our manufacturing base, so much of our national wealth, so much of our employment, is dependent on services linked to the financial role of the United States. But unlike Roosevelt, who could undertake institutional reforms that would reduce the control of banks over industry, now we’re part of an integrated, interlocked system where what we can do on a national scale is ultimately limited by our creditors and by the dollar. Every part internationally has become so interdependent that it’s hard to think about a general recovery without some kind of simultaneous and coordinated effort. And that seems to be utterly utopian at this moment.
In that essay, you asked the question “Is Obama FDR?” Well?
I’m prepared to concede that in terms of his character, his moral beliefs, his empathy and compassion for Americans, but above all in his understanding of the urgency and the unparalleled nature of this situation, yes, I mean, he could be Roosevelt. He could be Lincoln. But Bill, the obvious real heroes of the New Deal were the millions of rank-and-file Americans who sat down in their auto plants or walked on freezing picket lines in front of their factories. They made the New Deal possible. They provided the impetus to turn Washington to the left. We would be talking very differently about the legacy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt if it hadn’t been for the incredible insurgency of labor and other ordinary Americans in the 1930s.
The garment workers left the Socialist Party, for example, and moved into the Democratic Party, giving Roosevelt an infusion of fresh blood.
A lot of them joined the American Labor Party in New York because they could not, in good conscience, ever pull that lever for Tammany Hall Democrats. You see, they wanted to support Roosevelt without supporting the Democrats. In the 1930s, of course, you had vigorous third parties often in power on state levels—the Farmer-Labor Party, the Commonwealth Federation, the Non-Partisan League. And you had militantly progressive Republicans from the heartland like George Norris and Bob La Follette, who in the current Senate would sit to the left of Bernie Sanders. Far more than FDR or even John L. Lewis, they were heroic crusaders against corporate greed and concentrated economic power. They exposed illegal monopolies, war profiteering, and violence against labor. For the first and only time in modern American history, they shined a populist light on the inner sanctums of the banks, particularly the vast spiderweb of secret power over an industry spun by the House of Morgan.
And that hasn’t happened to Wall Street in this current crisis. The most fundamental, straightforward questions are not yet being asked: Who are the counterparties who own the credit default swaps? Who are the main creditors of these banks? As we bail out these big institutions with tens of billons of dollars of tax money, the public doesn’t have any idea who’s actually benefiting. Who are the parties that stand to gain?
Why don’t we have that pressing inquiry and demand for accountability that we had in the 1930s?
In the 1930s we had an interesting coalition between a progressive middle class including, at that point, a lot of farmers still and a dynamic labor movement, even though it was divided, and a journ
alistic and literary culture that was in constant debate with the left. The left was all-important in the ’30s. And I’m talking about not just the Communist Party but social democrats of all kinds. They weren’t that significant a force politically, but they were significant intellectually. They were asking deep and profound questions about the nature of economic power, economic institutions. And this was leading in turn, if not to sweeping reforms, at least to big questions about who holds power, and how does economic power influence political decisions in Washington—all the things that today most Democrats and most Republicans are afraid to explore.
Why are they so afraid?
Because they’re the beneficiaries of the system. In some cases I think the president has come to accept that there’s really only one way he can operate, and that’s through accommodating himself to the forces that exist and cutting compromises he sees as inevitable. They may talk about bank nationalization, but it’s nothing more than salvaging the banks for the private sector rather than talking about the possibility of public ownership. It’s really that we’ve lost so much of the reform conscience in America—this sense of the possible. We treat political positions as if they’re entirely relative. We let Rush Limbaugh define what a liberal or a socialist is. You see, I think New Deal liberalism has a relatively precise historical benchmark definition.
Which is?
FDR’s fourth-term election, when he ran on the idea of an Economic Bill of Rights for Americans, something that Lyndon Johnson believed in and tried to renew. And if you were to advance any agenda right now for how to get us out of this crisis, it would be to resurrect this concept of the real social citizenship, an economic Bill of Rights, and the need to strengthen the power of labor in the economy. The postwar “golden age” of the ’50s and ’60s was a period when unions were powerful enough to be major institutions of the macro economy. Wages were tied to productivity. Unions played a dynamic and incredibly central role in the American economy, which, of course, they lost in the late ’70s and under Reagan. It was the strengthening of labor, the power of ordinary people in the unions that made the accomplishments of the New Deal possible. Remember, these were people who almost doubled the size of the American economy during the Second World War.