Bill Moyers by Robin Holland
When I think of the development of my political ideologies, I pretty much tie it to having grown up during the liberal presidencies of Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson, the Civil Rights movement led by Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Presidential candidacies of Bobby Kennedy and George McGovern. But little would I have known back then that behind the scenes were the likes of Ted Sorenson, advisor and speechwriter to JFK, and Bill Moyers, who pulled the same duty for LBJ.
Bill Moyers died today, and I feel as though we've lost a giant. When he left politics as a full-time job, he took a bit of a sideways step into journalism, which is how I learned of him. While he would regularly give reports during the news, I primarily knew of him by way of his commentary which was a regular segment of the CBS Evening News.
On 8 December 1982, I was living in a tiny house on the corner of West Northgate Parkway and Bennett Road in Toledo, Ohio with my then-wife, Penny, and our cat, Cat. That day, Norman Mayer drove a utility van up a sidewalk leading to the Washington Monument and threatened to blow it up. He was protesting the nuclear arms build-up the only way he apparently knew how to, and maintained a standoff with law enforcement for the better part of the day. It got him killed. His threat, of course, was as empty as the the van was later found to be.
The following night, Moyers' segment was introduced by Dan Rather and he proceeded to deliver one of the most brilliant and memorable essays I've ever heard, one which has been etched in my brain ever since.
Maybe Norman Mayer never had a chance to be heard, given his criminal record: his arrests for drug dealing, assault and battery. Maybe he became a criminal because he couldn't be heard. We'll never know, and it doesn't really matter. What matters is that he wanted to tell us that humanity is drifting toward nuclear war. Perhaps this is a cry only lunatics and outlaws can hear. It would not be the first time truth had failed to get the establishment to listen, or the foolish had been chosen to confound the wise.
The wise yesterday were rattling their sabers in Moscow, or putting the finishing touches in the House of Representatives on a military budget of $231 billion for the coming year—$231 billion, including over $2 billion to continue research on the MX missile they had symbolically voted against the day before.
This is the wisdom of the world which proved too much for Norman Mayer, who wanted only to stop the arms race. Once you realize the futility of your cause, you can choose to live as a zombie, a martyr, a cynic or a saint—or today, a video terrorist. Norman Mayer chose to go out that way. It doesn't appear he really had the stomach for it. Those detonators had nothing to detonate. So he played Atari on the monument grounds and died when the game was over. Lunacy? Yes, but it is the lunacy of nations today who hold the world hostage, as he did Washington, with the threat of violence for the sake of peace. This sad little man had the superpowers for a role model. He died unheeded by them, but the star of his own television special. Such was the final lunacy. His pathetic charade received far more time from the media than we'll give the dialogue on nuclear issues which he was crazy enough to think we might honor.
Not much has really changed with this world in the last forty-three years as our military spending continues to rise with no compulsion on the part of our legislators to rein it in and put the money to better use than dropping billions of dollars of ultimately ineffective bombs on Iran. Day by day we step further and further away from anything even resembling sanity. And as shitty a place as this world is right now, it just got a little bit shittier.
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