I listen to NPR. There I said it. And I'm glad (cue maniacal laughter). The truth is that NPR gives me conniptions most of the time - not because it's lefty but because it is so predictably and doctrinaire, lefty. If you're a lefty imagine listening to Rush Limbaugh - feel that burning sensation the pit of your stomach? the gut stewing discomfort? the irrational urge to flee? - ok, now you know how I feel when I listen to NPR. I like my lefties non-traditional, lefties with a brain enough to think for themselves rather than playing the 'symbol' game - "where do you stand on AGW, Reagan, abortion, Obamacare, etc? Oh you do, well to hell with you, you right winger".
I don't like most NPR (or BBC for that matter since NPR seems to slipping ever so slowly Anglower and lower) because the stories often don't seem to be so much written as piled together. Take a few slices of bien pensant prejudice and lay on a dollop of collegiate indoctrination and garnish it with phrases that end going 'up' in that odd questioning way that lefties seem to favor rather than in the normally declamatory down direction as if nothing is every really known? And we're really not sure that mass murder was bad? and bam! you've got an NPR report. I also find the casual moralizing of their pledge week to be indescribably painful but I don't give them squat so I get that pain back.
So why do I do it? Why do I put myself through such psychic torment? I do it for the children so that someday little rich boys and girls and little poor boys and girls can play together without the latter expropriating the former. But mostly I do it for the G2 which for you Yalies means military intelligence: what is the cliche du jour? In which predictable direction are they spinning the President's latest gaffe? What 'outrage' are they 'outraged' about today? What are the hens pecking at now?
But every once in a while, a beam of sunlight bursts through the unrelenting progressive eat your peas gloom and hits me like a bolt of lightening: this. THIS! is what truly progressive port side radiophonic pander could be. THIS! would be cool. It happened to me while I was driving to Houston, that affront to liberal sentiment everywhere. I was passing through Dallas listening to KERA, the weepy Dallas station whose big whine is 'we are the only wonely NPR station in all of North Texas, poor pitiful us, give us money' when the thunderclap hit.
I was listening to Wait, Wait, Don't Tell me and I don't know if it was because WWDTM has old dudes like Tom Bodette and Roy Blount Jr. on it or because the only prize is Carl Castle's voice on your answering service (pretty damn cool in my book) but they spun away from liberal orthodoxy in a way that shocked me - they mocked the unmockable - they twisted the tiger's tail - they gasp! Shit, I can't remember exactly what it was that they did because I was busy cursing a pickup load of Mexicans for weaving into my lane as I was trying to make the transition from US75 to I45 to get on the road to Houston. But whatever it was it must have pissed off the donor base because I felt a surge of joy and pride that limited me to very minor obscenities rather than the entire Mexican cussing oeuvre that my Uncle Jesus taught me. It was that damned good. It'll come to me eventually, but in the meantime I wanted to make sure to go 'yay' WWDTM before the producer and host are shot at dawn for treason.
And the TED hour, God bless TED. In their defence, TED opened the show in a doctrinaire wave the little red book manner with a Malcolm Gladwell piece. Gladwell is the guy that 'debunks' things in predictably leftward ways that aren't really debunkings as much as a concatenation of examples that support whatever the types of people who still subscribe to the New Yorker want to believe. In this edition he pointed out that the tale of David v. Goliath didn't just represent weak vs. strong but also clever vs. dumb, agile vs. slow, creative vs. brute force and new hotness vs. old, big and busted. Wow. He must go to an Evangelical Presbyterian Church to get that much deep, astounding insight. Not one of the big ones with the top preachers because they move well past that but one of the small ones whose preacher nearly flunked Old Testament. Old Mal specializes in working the corners of the lefty mind that are clogged with debris and confusion - which is good because there ain't no frickin' way a dude that looks like him could get a job at Walmart.
But it got better - after a really fun and hunger inducing segment on how Chinese food has gone native and ripped off the Japanese fortune cookie industry by Jennifer 8. Lee (I know, I know but she did), Leslie Chang actually told the donor base that everything they thought about big nasty exploitative American corporations eating poor little asian working girls as snacks was a bunch of hooey. Really. Swear to God. Of course the cynical right winger could point out that this message was one that Apple, Nike and other impeccably lefty corporations wanted to get out for profit reasons and they would be right but still it whacked the Marxist sensibilities of the average NPR nobbler right in the kisser. The segment pointed out that Chinese factory girls did what they did because they chose to do it, not because of any 'false consciousness' (shit!) and that it was arrogant and self righteous of westerners to think that they knew better (shit! shit!) and that it was really stupid to think that some German jackass scribbling in the corner of the British Museum in the middle of the 19th century knew more about what these people needed than they did (holy screaming NPR effing shit! shit! shit!). I have never been so proud of a story told on NPR in my life (well except that time that they asked my friend Thor "Thunder God" Hearne to do a series to save their assess after Newt Gingrich and the Republicans unexpectedly waxed Bill Clinton - it lasted one 5 minute segment before he was - to his everlasting credit - banned for life.).
It ended with a fascinating segment about Alan Savory, a guy who has a theory for why grasslands in drier places turn to desert and how by quadrupling the number of livestock that things could be made much better. No, you didn't read that wrong: by quadrupling the intensity of agricultural exploitation via grazing of the African and other grasslands, Savory has been able to dramatically improve the productivity, water retention and diversity of the land. And he said the key wasn't any simple trick of nature but detailed, focused human planning and management of the environment. I mean this breaks so many lefty/green tabus that frankly I'm gobsmacked. For TED to do this he or rather it must have brass balls. I can see every green group alive sharpening their long knives for poor old TED's cojones. I mean this TED dude, he has got to be one helluva stud to pull something like this on the Green Midgets.
And to top it off, the entire freaking show was focused on debunking things that to paraphrase Will Rogers: 'we know that just ain't so'. Which after over 17 years of no global warming is a topic that the green faithful are staying as far away from as humanly possible.
As I said before, these two shows (and no I still can't remember the coolness from WWDTM but it was there, I swear) have shaken my assumptions about proggos to their foundations. God I hope these chaps survive the week because they have committed the ultimate acts of heresy and treason. Pray for them, indeed, hide them if they come desperately scratching at your door for sanctuary. Poor sods.
And don't forget to listen to Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me on Sunday afternoons. Just in case lightning strikes twice.....wait, wait, don't tell me, it's on the tip of my toungue....no I got nothing. Maybe tomorrow.
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