For example, the laughs don't get much bigger than Mike Davis and Bill Moyers, doing off-off Broadway in Two Old White Male Gas Bags Sitting Around Talking. The two of them sat down across from each other Friday night on Bill Moyers Journal and we couldn't help thinking of the tag line from the opening of Hart to Hart: "Because when they met, it was murder."
Truth is always the first casualty. Watching Bill and Mike speak before the cameras, 'letting it all hang out,' was like watching the latter day Tab Hunters and Anthony Perkins pretend they are just friends. There was Mike explaining why he was a Socialist and how he chose it because he "didn't want become a Marxist." Apparently Bill and Mike sit around wondering how things will 'play' in the mythical Duluth of their minds? That's the only plausible explanation for their refusal to tell the truth repeatedly. Mike Davis isn't a Marxist? That's hilarious.
It was hilarious -- and telling -- to see the two elderly White men chat on about 'injustice' which, for White Little Piggies, always means the woes of the Black man -- emphasis on the "man." If you don't get what two losers Bill Moyers and Mike Davis are, fast-forward and check out the hell they spawned which show up at DC Indymedia to post "Smack A White Boy: March 21 Radical People of Color Anti-War (distr)Action." Proclaiming "A Brownie A Day Keeps Whitey Away," the alleged 'radicals' signs off "D.C. Anarchist People Of Color" and "Philadelphia Anarchist People Of Color." In between, when not yawning, you'll wonder if the two cock-knocking orgs can halt their glorification of the phallus long enough to appreciate what idiots they are?
Probably not. (In fairness, Bill and Mike can't stop self-stroking long enough to grasp how badly they come off either.) So for nine paragraphs (eleven if you want to count in full -- they don't seem to grasp that they reposted two paragraphs twice), they go on about "people" and how "people" have been hurt. But it's not "people" they're concerned with, it's men. It's always men. That's all men like them (and Bill and Mike) give a damn about.
It's not a new characteristic of the left (Ellen Willis railed against it in the late sixties) so it's not surprising to grasp how strong the hatred of women still is. It's there in the comments replying to the DC Indymedia post. It's there when an African-American woman attempts to speak up about sexism. All the "we care about people of color" fronting slides away as the woman is ripped apart and is left undefended by "Tariq," for example, who can't stop posting repeatedly on every other comment.
At one point, "h" would feel the need to link to "Open Letter To Activists Concerning Racism In The Anti-War Movement" -- more telling garbage and this signed by the following losers:
Steve Bloom, Jean Carey Bond, Humberto Brown, Saulo Col?n, Bhairavi Desai, Cherrene Horazuk, Randy Jackson, Hany Khalil Ray Laforest, Ng? Thanh Nh?n, Ren? Francisco Poitevin, Merle Ratner, Liz Roberts, Juliet Ucelli and Lincoln Van Sluytman. [That's the way the letter is signed for those wondering about spelling.] Losers in every sense of the word. The rag-tag begins there "open letter" with "Brothers and Sisters" and tosses in a shout-out to "gay". That's it. One "sisters" and one "gay." Then it's about what they always want to talk about, "race" which translates as only one race (they're never concerned about Asian-Americans, about Latinos, or any other grouping) and only the male members of it. It's garbage, it's reductionist garbage.
The only injury, according to these Carl Davidsons, is the injury to African-American males. That is a fixed point of the remedial 'understanding' these White men almost managed. Heaven forbid they be forced to deal with complexities, let alone realities.
So you get Mike Davis yammering on about, "Well, in my case, there really was a burning bush. And that was the Civil Rights movement in San Diego where I grew up in the '50s and '60s. And at 16 years old my father had a heart attack. And I had to leave school for a while to work. And the black side of my family by marriage, they got me to come to a demonstration of the Congress of Racial Equality in front of the Bank of America in downtown San Diego. And I mean, it literally transformed my life, just the sheer beauty of it and the sheer righteousness of it. And I won't claim that every decision or political stance or political group I joined as a result of the Civil Rights movement was the right one. But it permanently shaped my life."
As you read that babble it's enough to almost make you side with Barack Obama for part of the bad speech he gave in Philadelphia. No, not for the section he stole from this website the Sunday before he gave the speech. But for his comments regarding Jeremiah Wright's generation. If you take those comments but apply them to the White males (and some women) of that generation, we're all on board. Because they are the ones who do the damage: the Mike Davises and the Bill Moyerses. The Jeremiah Wrights may be bitter or not. If they are bitter, they are bitter with good reason. But the soft White hands of a Mike Davis or a Bill Moyer can't grab personal victimhood so they try to hog it by association as they flash back on a rare moment when they briefly (and not to fully) thought of someone other than themselves.
You know those really bad 'coming of age' films, where the (White) boy has the 'universal' experience and we're all supposed to identify and supposed to praise it? That garbage keeps getting tossed on screen for a reason. Not because it's universal. It's done and redone over and over because men in power think they're the template. They think they are the universal. And it's not different from Moyers and Davis. They had their 'leave childhood behind' moment and can never stop yacking about it all these years later.
As Moyers simplistic racial discussions indicate year in and year out, it's not about education. It's about rubbing that fixed memory, rubbing out their nostalgia orgasm.
We can never step forward as a society not because of Jeremiah Wrights but because of the likes of Michael Pfleger. Remember him? Mincing about onstage at Barack's now-former church. Mincing about and screaming about racism. Never mentioning sexism, naturally. Attacking Hillary with lies and hate. And it being eaten up by that uneducated crowd. Whitey Pfleger has nothing to offer. He can't talk about love or God's love. Despite being a man of the cloth. So Pfleger goes to the largely Black church of Trinity and serves up attacks on . . . White people. Serves up race based attacks that have no bearing on reality. And it gets eaten up. That crowd caught on camera looks like Romans screaming with joy as Christians are fed to the lions. There's nothing civilized or advanced about that taped moment and never forget that it was a White man stirring it up.
Which is what Mike and Bill do every day of their life. They're not interested in injustice. They're interested in (and caught in) the past. Which is how you get Socialist (Marxist-Environmentalist) Mike Davis waxing on and on about Barack Obama. Why? Because Mike sees the bi-racial Barack as "Black." The programs of Barack? Mike can't stand them. But those programs are never Barack's fault in Mike's eyes. Of course not. As a "Black" man, Barack is the eternal innocent in Mike's patronizing eyes.
It's really ridiculous and pathetic and most of the time we just roll our own eyes. But we were wrong not to confront it earlier. It's what put Barack in the White House and it's what put Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court. In both cases, women had to be savaged in order for the men to be installed. So it's time to get honest about what's going on because the Michael Pflegers and Bill Moyers are ensuring that their garbage is fed to younger generations.
All those decades ago, it was the height of 'sophistication' for Moyers, a racist from the South, to grasp that racism against Black men was wrong. That was the life altering moment for Bill and he can't stop revisiting it. Think of it as the political equivalent of Losing It or Porky's or any other movie where the young male 'comes of age' by losing his virginity. All these years later, as Bill constantly revisits Summer of 42, he doesn't see it as it was, he sees it only in his idealized view, the one he's beat off to repeatedly during the many lonely nights that have ensued since.
And we all suffer for it.
Doubt us? Let's review the guest list for the year thus far.
March 20th featured Mike Davis and Marta B. Pelaez
March 13th featured Karen Armstrong
March 6th featured John Lithgow
February 27th featured John McWhorter and Robert Johnson
February 20th featured Parker Palmer and Robert G. Kaiser
February 13th featured Nikki Giovanni and Simon Johnson
February 6th featured Eric Foner, Glenn Greenwald and Jay Rosen
January 30th featured Pierre Sprey, Marilyn Young and Vartan Gregorian
January 23rd featured David Sirota, Thomas Frank, Melissa Harris LIEFACE and Patty Williams.
January 16th featured Simon Schama
January 9th featured Leo Gerard
January 2nd featured John Lithgow
Besides marveling over the fact that in three months John Lithgow has been booked twice, you should have caught on to another basic fact: more men than women. Over twice as many men as women: 17 males and 7 women to be exact. And Bill does this year after year and gets away with it. You'll never catch FAIR calling Bill Moyers Journal out because closeted radicals stick together -- closeted radicals and closeted sexists. (And if you're really observant, you'll note that African-Americans are underbooked and that other racial minorities fared even worse over the last three months.)
Bill Moyers thinks he's a decent caring man. He believes he fights injustice and does a real service. But if that were the case, Bill, how do you repeatedly exclude women? How do you take the majority of the US population and repeatedly under-represent them when compiling your guest list. It's not unlike that ridiculous best-film-of-the-year list that surfaced awhile back where Bill could be fascinated by anything and everything but women. Monsters and King Kong? Check. Mae West (in two box office smashes and film classics), Katharine Hepburn (in an Oscar winning role) and all the other women were ignored in Moyers' long, long list of 'film classics' for 1932.
The Journal doesn't like it when we talk like this. They never like it. They get angry and snitty and it floats back to us via PBS friends. While we put off a sitcom producer this week, he took it in stride. PBS friends freaked when we mentioned that we might be addressing Bill Moyers again.
We were accused of "leading the left movement against Bill!" We weren't aware that there was a movement against him (from the left or the right) but that's really not our problem. Our problem, PBS' problem, America's problem is that Bill Moyers has been cuddled and ego-stroked for far too long. His sexism has been on display for decades, tales are still told of his CBS days and, in DC, tales are still told of his LBJ days. In fact, at a formal dinner Wednesday night, an LBJ alumni entertained our half of the table with nonstop Moyers' tales.
If we were leading a war against Bill Moyers, believe us, we'd be repeating these stories word for word. Instead of getting pissy with us, they might try asking why a 'respected journalist' can't adjust himself to the 21st century? Or why PBS can't impose some order on his show? It's not like they haven't repeatedly tried. On our end, we haven't seen a leftist movement against Bill -- led by us or anyone else. Knowing that Moyers frets and imagines one may be the funniest thing about last week. But like all of last week's other big laughs TV provided, it was an unintentional one.
