Week 31 original / unexpurgated
Now here's a topic I can get behind. While I'm not a complete asshole, I swear, I must admit that I've always enjoyed being undeniably right at the known cost / consequence of being somewhat-to-seriously unpopular. And, gosh, there are just so many ways that I could try and piss off the LJI readership while simultaneously riding my throbbing rhetoric-erection to an explosive logic-climax, OOOOOOOOOOOOH YEAH.
While I could go with something easy and obvious here in my quest to argue my way to the brink of LJI-death and back-- gay marriage, Obama's multiple failures, legalize everything ever, fandom is stupid, your favorite band sucks-- they just all seem too easy and obvious.
No, I think I'm going to have to go with what will probably seem a real head-scratcher, although I'm still pretty sure it's going to piss off the entire stateside LJI readership (and that's three-quarters of the fun, dammit).
My topic of choice: Why I "hate" National Public Radio, and why you should too.
Look, before we start: I don't really hate NPR, as non-mouth-breathing readers could reasonably surmise from the quotation marks above. I listen to it sometimes, and can still enjoy it with multiple grains of salt. But I do have some rather strenuous objections.
Most of these objections stem from NPR underhandedly marketing itself as something which it is not. Seemingly every smart, well-read / educated person I know is a big, outspoken fan of NPR. They wear their NPR listenership like a badge of intellectual-leftie honor. I seriously question the strength and validity of such associations... and believe it or not, I'm not the only one.
Take, for instance, Curtis White. White is an English / creative-writing professor, oft-published writer and all-round super-smart guy from my home state of Illinois. He wrote a book a decade or so ago called The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves. It was his first attempt at moving from mind-bending postmodern fiction (which he is very, very good at writing) to opinion-informed critical essay (which, in contrast, is not exactly his strongest suit).
Sadly, The Middle Mind is perhaps White's best-known book; against the standards set by his fiction, it's not so great. It's mostly an exercise in beautifully-worded but ultimately incoherent rage... a few hundred pages of blindingly great turns of phrase all dressed up but, ultimately, with nowhere to go.
White's thesis in The Middle Mind concerns, well, what he calls "the middle mind." Naming your book after your thesis is pretty much the only essayist's convention that White honors in The Middle Mind. He does an incredibly poor job of defining the concept / demographic under attack... or at least he seems totally unwilling to define the concept in a sentence / paragraph. But his internalized definition of the ostensibly-problematic "middle mind" demographic gradually becomes clear anyway.
White is taking aim at well-educated, reasonably smart, middle-aged, middle-class, moderate-to-progressive folks. This seems a bit curious, given that Mr. White himself-- as a 50something academic with demonstrably progressive political views-- seems to fit into this demographic perfectly. And it's not like there's a shortage of much more deserving, much more powerful targets in today's world... a world with real assholes like Rupert Murdoch living in it.
A lot of the folks representing White's "middle mind" were once real-deal hippies in the revolutionary 1960s. These were people who, at earlier times in their lives, may have fought hard against the status quo to make a real difference. Now they exhibited no energy, no true / ongoing creativity, had no interest in truly challenging or potentially-polarizing cultural input, had stopped trying to shape society in the ways it ought to be shaped. Now they were content to, say, go home, listen to NPR while eating vegetarian cuisine, and endlessly congratulate themselves on their Smart Choices.
You can kind of see White's point. Being is not doing. In the process of continuously generating one's self-identity, it's only too easy to get lazy and conveniently confuse the two. Passive consumption of an ostensibly "smart" media source has little-to-nothing to do with being smart, let alone being worthwhile. It's certainly a far cry from protesting in the streets day after day, maybe even joining a hardliner sect with marginally violent leanings in the interest of the greater good.
But, y'know, Harley dealerships are full this time of year with sad old douchebags who mistakenly think, "HAWG OWNER = I WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE A TOTAL BADASS." * Likewise, NPR membership drives are hit up in large part by people who mistakenly think, "NPR PATRONAGE = I AM AUTOMATICALLY A SMART PERSON AND/OR LIBERAL WHO IS STILL DOING SOMETHING IMPORTANT FOR MY COMMUNITY." Same dif. One might be smarter than the other, but in swallowing the marketing line whole and allowing the "definition" of themselves through nothing more than throwing around some disposable income, both parties are still demonstrably stupid and wrong.
One of Curtis White's primary targets in The Middle Mind is Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air, the subject of many pages of unrelenting contempt in White's book. It's actually not the first time he's written about how much he hates her (IIRC, she finds her way into his work of fiction Requiem as a recurrent character, and is handled there with just as much visible disdain). But-- again-- White's exact, rational objections to Ms. Gross are never made completely lucid, despite all the lulzworthy vitriol he unblinkingly directs at her in The Middle Mind.
Maybe it's because Gross-- the quintessential NPR personality-- is just so gratingly smooth, so damned polite to everyone. Or maybe it's that her questions give the deceptive appearance of coming from a "smart place," when she's usually doing nothing more than pandering to her on-air guests via an endless stream of "thought-provoking" softballs.
Those are just my best guesses at the underlying cause(s) of White's death wish for Terry Gross... because those things are what drive me just a little nuts about her show (...well, those, and her ludicrously overexaggerated signature cadence on the words "Frrrrrresh Air," which always makes me want to break things every time I hear it).
From my distant recollection of White's book, though, all you know for certain at the end of his tirade is that he hates the shit out of Terry Gross. He holds her up as the living, breathing epitome of not only NPR's willfully deceptive marketing, but also as the prevailing American-culture icon of his pejorative "middle mind."
Ironically, White destroys his credibility as an effective polemicist by directly contrasting the "middle-mind" Gross with Radiohead's Kid A, an album that came out a few years before White's book to much undeserved acclaim in numerous media circles. White apparently regards naughties-era Radiohead as the "anti-middle mind," for reasons that are once again left completely unclear. He discusses and praises their much-ballyhooed 2000 album at length in a baffling, empty, lit-crit-flavored "analysis" which falls completely on its ass as valid analysis, practically bringing the whole book down with it.
For me, the consistently overrated Kid A-- and post-2000 Radiohead in general-- are the ultimate icons of the modern-day 20/30something middle-minder-- something White, being an Ivory Tower type in his 50s with no meaningful musical study under his belt, may have been unable to see. Kid A and Radiohead's followup albums all amount to little more than feel-good mass-market "experimental music" for people who wouldn't know real experimental music if it shot them in the face.
But I digress somewhat; I already said I wasn't going to write "Your Favorite Band Sucks" this week.
I'll try to state my objections to NPR, or at least the phenomenon of NPR-listener-as-identity, a little less uhhh "subtly" than White. Many NPR listeners clearly seem to be suffering under the delusion that their chosen information source is the "intellectual's choice." In the relative scheme of things, it's true that NPR is somewhat more cerebral than most other news / media sources available in the US. But calling NPR the "intellectual's choice" on such a dismal playing field is like saying that a McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder is the "health-nut's choice" because it may have 300 less calories than, say, the KFC Double Down.
NPR does seem to take some pains to occasionally report news in somewhat more detail, with somewhat more clarity, than most of our current media sources in the United States. But that doesn't mean their stories actually tell you any more than what you might manage to absorb through the atrocity currently known as CNN.
Longer stories do not automatically equal better or more well-balanced stories (hey, them's words to live by, the_day_setup). We all know that there are plenty of international stories which merit much more attention than they receive from the US media. But very rarely does an actual news story make it onto, say, All Things Considered that isn't also a talking point of the day on the multiple media sources for "dumber" people.
And just as your embarrassingly-coifed local news team can't seem to make it through a single broadcast without a News of the Weird-type digression, or a "story" on LOCAL DOG WEARS FUNNY HAT, All Things Considered and Morning Edition eschew those potentially-missed important stories in favor of lengthy puff pieces that have little to do with the significant breaking news of the world. The main thing differentiating such an NPR oh-isn't-this-random-thing-interesting "news" story and LOCAL DOG WEARS FUNNY HAT is about nine minutes of airtime, and possibly the NPR journalist's "exotic" accent.
I used to wake up to NPR every morning on the clock radio, enjoying the news coverage on Morning Edition, which was pretty much my only source of news each day. Where it started to smell funny to me was during the ramp-up to Gulf War II in 2002-2003. For well over six months, NPR dutifully reported on Bush's paper-thin justifications in unquestioning, matter-of-fact tones. At no point was an alternative perspective ever considered or covered. I thought the whole fucking country must have just gone insane.
It's not the job of the news to try and sway listeners to one side or another, or to questionably present opinion as fact, of course. I'm happy to leave that bullshit to Fox News (although I'd secretly be a lot happier if someone took it upon themselves to drop a few bombs on their studio from time to time, and/or if some confused, deluded, psychotic assassin "just happened" to put a bullet into Rupert Murdoch's head in order to impress Kim Kardashian or something).
Here's the thing, though: I lived in a bit of a friend-vacuum at that time (then as now, sigh). When the war finally started, and the nationwide protests began, I was legitimately shocked at the fact that any Americans gave a shit. Not only had NPR reported Bush's talking points with the utmost, unswerving faithfulness for many moons, at no point had NPR even hinted at a cultural stream of dissent within our borders. In retrospect, given the size of the objecting populace, it was obvious that there ought to have been a story or two on such objectors during the ramp-up. But I sure as hell never heard one.
NPR was barely better than Fox, ultimately, in this particular situation. They were as much of a culpable media lackey for Bush's ruinous, pointless war as any other US media source I could name. So much for the "intellectual's choice."
Not too long thereafter, I switched to an R&B station on the clock radio (because nothing gets me up faster than laughing at the overuse of Autotune and/or the rhyming of "thighs" to "hypnotized"), and started getting my news from the Guardian UK's website.
Outside of the flagship news programs All Things Considered and Morning Edition, NPR programming is absolutely full of sheer fluff presented in oh-so-soothing vocal tones. The precise nature of the fluff you end up with, of course, depends on the the syndicated programming selected by your local NPR affiliate, which in turn is established largely by local-demographic factors.
Nearly everybody carries This American Life-- usually little more than a weekly venture to follow a given journalist down a Wikipedia-esque rabbit-hole of pointless (if admittedly fun) information-gathering-- and the aforementioned Fresh Air, a regular opportunity to learn absolutely nothing about your favorite celebrities, Terry Gross tossing softball after pandering softball at her guests while smearing everything in her trademark brand of vocal marmalade.
Talk of the Nation features pointless call-ins that may or may not be slightly smarter than the average call-in guest on Limbaugh. Whaddaya Know? is maddeningly gentle trivia-comedy and/or mindless small talk that you don't have to listen to particularly closely. Car Talk is a cult of personality wherein middle-class white people too "educated" to know anything about their cars call in to have twenty-second questions answered in seven minutes, six minutes of which are formulaic OH MY CRAZY BROTHER jokes and is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex-but-oh-isn't-this-so-charmingly-East-Coast guffawing.
Don't even get me started on Garrison fucking Keillor.
And then you have the music that some NPR stations use to kill time, particularly on the weekends. Not a whole lot of NPR stations specializing in intellectually stimulating music of the now or ever, never mind their ostensibly "intellectual" audience. More likely, you'll get an endless stream of beaten-to-death pre-1880 classical warhorses for bluehairs, or perhaps "smooth" jazz that is half a notch over on the treacle-dial from full-on Muzak.
Rest assured, though, that if you have an NPR affiliate that kills hours of its time with musical filler, said filler will be a) something that makes for completely inoffensive and unchallenging listening, b) something that gives a casual listener a false and completely unjustified sense of being a "smart" cultural outlier just for having the radio on while it's playing.
You know how Barnes and Noble plays only the most pleasant classical music in-store? Y'know, so you can feel like such a smart literate type in this big room full of books, never mind that you have no clue what's actually playing or why it even fucking matters culturally? They do that to sell you shit, so you can take that smug, literate feeling home with you-- "if I'm gonna keep feeling smart like this, gee, I better buy a book."
NPR does exactly the same, and as with B&N, it's nothing but marketing strategy. The hope is that you'll donate just to keep the thing that makes you feel so damned smart on the air, so that you can keep tuning in to that manufactured delusion day after day.
Before you blow me off as an overly cynical crank on the basis of those last few paragraphs, let me just say that I have firsthand, real-world evidence of NPR's mindset in this department... because I was very nearly an NPR employee.
Around the time that the Gulf War was beginning-- the same time that NPR seemed to be brushing the dissenter's movement completely under the rug in their coverage-- I had my hat in the ring for a well-paid job as a music director at a local NPR affiliate. Said affiliate was probably the very same station where Curtis White, a professor at the local university, first fatefully heard Terry Gross and immediately started smashing chairs.
Since the station was folded into Mr. White's state university, the hiring process was nearly as drawn-out and flaming-hoop-riddled as landing the average university teaching gig. I waited two months post-application without a word, and was surprised when they suddenly scheduled a phone interview; a month later, I was equally surprised to be called in as one of the two finalists to be interviewed in person. Once at the station, it was six hours of nonstop point-to-point madness, laid out just as strenuously and ridiculously as the two-day madness that one experiences in trying to land a university teaching job, minus the free flight and/or relaxing stay in a ritzy local hotel.
In the end, I was not selected. And, in retrospect, I think this was a good thing.
The NPR affiliate in question is a station that plays smooth jazz on the weekdays, horrible watered-down / unconfrontational Budweiser blues for Numb White Suburban Dad on the weekends. I was asked (for the twentieth time) what I could bring to the job as music director, and what vision I saw for the station's musical future.
I answered that not only had I run two college radio stations as the general manager (thusly having some *slight* inkling of how real radio stations work), I also had a deep background as a musician, including years of experience playing jazz piano in various combos and big bands (however badly).
Naively, I also answered that I saw room for "real" jazz on-air at the station, stuff beyond the horrible contemporary smooth jazz they were currently playing (although I was at least smart enough to avoid calling it "horrible" mid-interview).
I thought they ought to consider reaching a bit into the canon of classic real jazz, what with them being a university-affiliated station and an oft-overstated "service" within the community. It wasn't like anyone else was playing that stuff on-air in the region. It certainly had an audience, and/or deserved to be heard and remembered.
I was politely but solidly rebuffed on this response by a committee of my would-be coworkers. The station, it was explained, had in fact played "harder" jazz thirty years ago. But what they found was this: When the jazz got tamer, the contributions got bigger. Year by year, the jazz selections on-air got tamer and tamer, and the contributions got bigger and bigger.
Just like a commercial radio station, this particular NPR station-- ostensibly a not-for-profit operation-- had no interest in actually challenging its listeners in even the slightest of ways. Bluehairs and middle-minders with money don't want a challenge, and/or to be faced with music they have to actually listen to when it's on.
No, middle-minders as a whole want nothing more than musical wallpaper, just the same as any mouth-breathin' Joe Six-Pack. They just want their wallpaper to be different enough from Joe Six-Pack's wallpaper so as to give the false sense that their wallpaper is more culturally informed.
And the station was not so interested in cultural history or art; they were far more interested in picking their middle-minded listeners' pockets as deeply as they could. That was made abundantly clear to me in the precise phrasing of the responses from staff and management. Fuck real music; we like money, so aural wallpaper it is, and forever shall be. "Well, uh, smooth jazz is just fine by me!", I heard my disembodied mouth say in context of the mid-interview rebuffery.
It took another month before I got the final call and was told I wouldn't be working there. I figured it would be something about my stated preference for more intellectually engaging music. The surprising explanation given: My would-be coworkers, average age 55, thought I would be great at the job... but they were also visibly uncomfortable with the idea of having to work under a guy who was less than half their age. They picked The Older Guy pretty much just because he was The Older Guy.
Probably grounds for an age-discrimination lawsuit in there, but again, I felt like I sort of dodged a bullet. I would have had to take the job in the dire financial circumstances of that time. Thereafter, I would have been doomed to a lifetime of listening to Diane Schuur's sickeningly pleasant bullshit, trying to pretend that the endless train of smooth jazz CDs crossing my desk contained the tiniest inkling of musical merit, and/or doing my darnedest not to hang myself from the office rafters.
White's The Middle Mind may have ultimately been a failure as a polemic long-form essay, but I still find the core concept valuable, and I've not been able to get it out of my head since reading it. I'm not saying I'm any better than the NPR-junkie middle-minders he seems to view with such disdain. Like so many other humans on this planet, I consider myself basically a tragically self-centric waste of space and potential at this stage of my life.
But we as smart people do have an unwritten obligation to society. It's nothing to do with being comfortable, surrounding ourselves with pleasant things that seem to validate our smartness without ever really challenging us on any level. It's nothing to do with congratulating ourselves for loving learning for learning's sake. As a dude who has been in the college classroom for over a decade, I've discovered that absolutely everyone loves learning, no matter how demonstrably smart they are. (It's the assessment of one's ability to learn, whether organizationally- or self-adminstered, that creates problems for some.)
Being smart in this utterly-fucked world means that, through the process of reason and rational thought, we should be pissed off basically all of the time. We should be out there doing something about the shit that is broken by any standard of real logic, the shit that rightfully pisses us off.
As we get older, it gets harder to be pissed off all the time-- not that I've personally had many problems in that department as of yet. Still, I know it's easy to fall for "intellectual" sedatives like the oh-so-reserved NPR, to say nothing of real-world sedatives that often fall into the laps of smarter folks, like earning a livable and/or comfortable income (if you're one of the dwindling few who still has that luxury).
We as smart people, though, really ought to be demanding more from our usual media sources. NPR is admittedly one of the closest readily-accessible things we've got, at least stateside. It could be a helluva lot better. We ought to be demanding-- through withholding of our contributions, through letter-writing campaigns, or at least through a refusal to fall for the "NPR sticker on my back window makes me cool" self-image trap-myth-- that they step up their game, hit way the fuck harder, become what they currently only pretend to be.
News for smart, progressive people has got to be about more than extended remixes of mainstream-media stories interpolated with "Oh, huh, well, I guess that's kind of interesting" puff pieces. We should be too smart to confuse arbitrarily-chosen streams of trivial information with the legitimately "thought-provoking." The provocation of actual critical thought should, at least rationally, provoke action in turn. NPR's oh-so-smooth coverage and story choices seem to aim for exactly the opposite. They want you, oh-so-smart listener, to just sit there and passively listen... oh yeah, and donate, natch.
* Harley fans, don't get me wrong: I don't hold you in contempt as the average "cager" would, I hold you in even stronger contempt as another motorcyclist. One should ride a motorcycle only because it's enjoyable, not because owning a specific f'n brand of motorcycle is key to one's poseur "identity." Buying into the Harley cult for its empty associations and/or a false sense of self-worth is as sad as playing guitar under the pathetic delusion that people still find guitarists sexy (hint: they don't). I don't dislike all Harleyites, but a lot hinges on their answer to this question: "I withhold the traditional, universal 'motorcyclist wave' if I see that the approaching motorcyclist is riding anything other than Detroit iron." Answer that with a "false," which puts you in the vast minority of "HD or FU" Harley riders, and you and I can still be buddies / take rides together. If the answer is "true," consider selling your hawg and using the proceeds to pay for a course of therapy. It's a much cheaper route to get to the bottom of your horrific and painfully transparent insecurity issues. Fugazi said it best: You are not what you own.
If you read this "unexpurgated" version, comments still go here. (Yes, I've *purposely* disabled them on THIS version, this time out.)
While I could go with something easy and obvious here in my quest to argue my way to the brink of LJI-death and back-- gay marriage, Obama's multiple failures, legalize everything ever, fandom is stupid, your favorite band sucks-- they just all seem too easy and obvious.
No, I think I'm going to have to go with what will probably seem a real head-scratcher, although I'm still pretty sure it's going to piss off the entire stateside LJI readership (and that's three-quarters of the fun, dammit).
My topic of choice: Why I "hate" National Public Radio, and why you should too.
Look, before we start: I don't really hate NPR, as non-mouth-breathing readers could reasonably surmise from the quotation marks above. I listen to it sometimes, and can still enjoy it with multiple grains of salt. But I do have some rather strenuous objections.
Most of these objections stem from NPR underhandedly marketing itself as something which it is not. Seemingly every smart, well-read / educated person I know is a big, outspoken fan of NPR. They wear their NPR listenership like a badge of intellectual-leftie honor. I seriously question the strength and validity of such associations... and believe it or not, I'm not the only one.
Take, for instance, Curtis White. White is an English / creative-writing professor, oft-published writer and all-round super-smart guy from my home state of Illinois. He wrote a book a decade or so ago called The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think For Themselves. It was his first attempt at moving from mind-bending postmodern fiction (which he is very, very good at writing) to opinion-informed critical essay (which, in contrast, is not exactly his strongest suit).
Sadly, The Middle Mind is perhaps White's best-known book; against the standards set by his fiction, it's not so great. It's mostly an exercise in beautifully-worded but ultimately incoherent rage... a few hundred pages of blindingly great turns of phrase all dressed up but, ultimately, with nowhere to go.
White's thesis in The Middle Mind concerns, well, what he calls "the middle mind." Naming your book after your thesis is pretty much the only essayist's convention that White honors in The Middle Mind. He does an incredibly poor job of defining the concept / demographic under attack... or at least he seems totally unwilling to define the concept in a sentence / paragraph. But his internalized definition of the ostensibly-problematic "middle mind" demographic gradually becomes clear anyway.
White is taking aim at well-educated, reasonably smart, middle-aged, middle-class, moderate-to-progressive folks. This seems a bit curious, given that Mr. White himself-- as a 50something academic with demonstrably progressive political views-- seems to fit into this demographic perfectly. And it's not like there's a shortage of much more deserving, much more powerful targets in today's world... a world with real assholes like Rupert Murdoch living in it.
A lot of the folks representing White's "middle mind" were once real-deal hippies in the revolutionary 1960s. These were people who, at earlier times in their lives, may have fought hard against the status quo to make a real difference. Now they exhibited no energy, no true / ongoing creativity, had no interest in truly challenging or potentially-polarizing cultural input, had stopped trying to shape society in the ways it ought to be shaped. Now they were content to, say, go home, listen to NPR while eating vegetarian cuisine, and endlessly congratulate themselves on their Smart Choices.
You can kind of see White's point. Being is not doing. In the process of continuously generating one's self-identity, it's only too easy to get lazy and conveniently confuse the two. Passive consumption of an ostensibly "smart" media source has little-to-nothing to do with being smart, let alone being worthwhile. It's certainly a far cry from protesting in the streets day after day, maybe even joining a hardliner sect with marginally violent leanings in the interest of the greater good.
But, y'know, Harley dealerships are full this time of year with sad old douchebags who mistakenly think, "HAWG OWNER = I WILL AUTOMATICALLY BE A TOTAL BADASS." * Likewise, NPR membership drives are hit up in large part by people who mistakenly think, "NPR PATRONAGE = I AM AUTOMATICALLY A SMART PERSON AND/OR LIBERAL WHO IS STILL DOING SOMETHING IMPORTANT FOR MY COMMUNITY." Same dif. One might be smarter than the other, but in swallowing the marketing line whole and allowing the "definition" of themselves through nothing more than throwing around some disposable income, both parties are still demonstrably stupid and wrong.
One of Curtis White's primary targets in The Middle Mind is Terry Gross of NPR's Fresh Air, the subject of many pages of unrelenting contempt in White's book. It's actually not the first time he's written about how much he hates her (IIRC, she finds her way into his work of fiction Requiem as a recurrent character, and is handled there with just as much visible disdain). But-- again-- White's exact, rational objections to Ms. Gross are never made completely lucid, despite all the lulzworthy vitriol he unblinkingly directs at her in The Middle Mind.
Maybe it's because Gross-- the quintessential NPR personality-- is just so gratingly smooth, so damned polite to everyone. Or maybe it's that her questions give the deceptive appearance of coming from a "smart place," when she's usually doing nothing more than pandering to her on-air guests via an endless stream of "thought-provoking" softballs.
Those are just my best guesses at the underlying cause(s) of White's death wish for Terry Gross... because those things are what drive me just a little nuts about her show (...well, those, and her ludicrously overexaggerated signature cadence on the words "Frrrrrresh Air," which always makes me want to break things every time I hear it).
From my distant recollection of White's book, though, all you know for certain at the end of his tirade is that he hates the shit out of Terry Gross. He holds her up as the living, breathing epitome of not only NPR's willfully deceptive marketing, but also as the prevailing American-culture icon of his pejorative "middle mind."
Ironically, White destroys his credibility as an effective polemicist by directly contrasting the "middle-mind" Gross with Radiohead's Kid A, an album that came out a few years before White's book to much undeserved acclaim in numerous media circles. White apparently regards naughties-era Radiohead as the "anti-middle mind," for reasons that are once again left completely unclear. He discusses and praises their much-ballyhooed 2000 album at length in a baffling, empty, lit-crit-flavored "analysis" which falls completely on its ass as valid analysis, practically bringing the whole book down with it.
For me, the consistently overrated Kid A-- and post-2000 Radiohead in general-- are the ultimate icons of the modern-day 20/30something middle-minder-- something White, being an Ivory Tower type in his 50s with no meaningful musical study under his belt, may have been unable to see. Kid A and Radiohead's followup albums all amount to little more than feel-good mass-market "experimental music" for people who wouldn't know real experimental music if it shot them in the face.
But I digress somewhat; I already said I wasn't going to write "Your Favorite Band Sucks" this week.
I'll try to state my objections to NPR, or at least the phenomenon of NPR-listener-as-identity, a little less uhhh "subtly" than White. Many NPR listeners clearly seem to be suffering under the delusion that their chosen information source is the "intellectual's choice." In the relative scheme of things, it's true that NPR is somewhat more cerebral than most other news / media sources available in the US. But calling NPR the "intellectual's choice" on such a dismal playing field is like saying that a McDonald's Double Quarter Pounder is the "health-nut's choice" because it may have 300 less calories than, say, the KFC Double Down.
NPR does seem to take some pains to occasionally report news in somewhat more detail, with somewhat more clarity, than most of our current media sources in the United States. But that doesn't mean their stories actually tell you any more than what you might manage to absorb through the atrocity currently known as CNN.
Longer stories do not automatically equal better or more well-balanced stories (hey, them's words to live by, the_day_setup). We all know that there are plenty of international stories which merit much more attention than they receive from the US media. But very rarely does an actual news story make it onto, say, All Things Considered that isn't also a talking point of the day on the multiple media sources for "dumber" people.
And just as your embarrassingly-coifed local news team can't seem to make it through a single broadcast without a News of the Weird-type digression, or a "story" on LOCAL DOG WEARS FUNNY HAT, All Things Considered and Morning Edition eschew those potentially-missed important stories in favor of lengthy puff pieces that have little to do with the significant breaking news of the world. The main thing differentiating such an NPR oh-isn't-this-random-thing-interesting "news" story and LOCAL DOG WEARS FUNNY HAT is about nine minutes of airtime, and possibly the NPR journalist's "exotic" accent.
I used to wake up to NPR every morning on the clock radio, enjoying the news coverage on Morning Edition, which was pretty much my only source of news each day. Where it started to smell funny to me was during the ramp-up to Gulf War II in 2002-2003. For well over six months, NPR dutifully reported on Bush's paper-thin justifications in unquestioning, matter-of-fact tones. At no point was an alternative perspective ever considered or covered. I thought the whole fucking country must have just gone insane.
It's not the job of the news to try and sway listeners to one side or another, or to questionably present opinion as fact, of course. I'm happy to leave that bullshit to Fox News (although I'd secretly be a lot happier if someone took it upon themselves to drop a few bombs on their studio from time to time, and/or if some confused, deluded, psychotic assassin "just happened" to put a bullet into Rupert Murdoch's head in order to impress Kim Kardashian or something).
Here's the thing, though: I lived in a bit of a friend-vacuum at that time (then as now, sigh). When the war finally started, and the nationwide protests began, I was legitimately shocked at the fact that any Americans gave a shit. Not only had NPR reported Bush's talking points with the utmost, unswerving faithfulness for many moons, at no point had NPR even hinted at a cultural stream of dissent within our borders. In retrospect, given the size of the objecting populace, it was obvious that there ought to have been a story or two on such objectors during the ramp-up. But I sure as hell never heard one.
NPR was barely better than Fox, ultimately, in this particular situation. They were as much of a culpable media lackey for Bush's ruinous, pointless war as any other US media source I could name. So much for the "intellectual's choice."
Not too long thereafter, I switched to an R&B station on the clock radio (because nothing gets me up faster than laughing at the overuse of Autotune and/or the rhyming of "thighs" to "hypnotized"), and started getting my news from the Guardian UK's website.
Outside of the flagship news programs All Things Considered and Morning Edition, NPR programming is absolutely full of sheer fluff presented in oh-so-soothing vocal tones. The precise nature of the fluff you end up with, of course, depends on the the syndicated programming selected by your local NPR affiliate, which in turn is established largely by local-demographic factors.
Nearly everybody carries This American Life-- usually little more than a weekly venture to follow a given journalist down a Wikipedia-esque rabbit-hole of pointless (if admittedly fun) information-gathering-- and the aforementioned Fresh Air, a regular opportunity to learn absolutely nothing about your favorite celebrities, Terry Gross tossing softball after pandering softball at her guests while smearing everything in her trademark brand of vocal marmalade.
Talk of the Nation features pointless call-ins that may or may not be slightly smarter than the average call-in guest on Limbaugh. Whaddaya Know? is maddeningly gentle trivia-comedy and/or mindless small talk that you don't have to listen to particularly closely. Car Talk is a cult of personality wherein middle-class white people too "educated" to know anything about their cars call in to have twenty-second questions answered in seven minutes, six minutes of which are formulaic OH MY CRAZY BROTHER jokes and is-it-live-or-is-it-Memorex-but-oh-isn't-this-so-charmingly-East-Coast guffawing.
Don't even get me started on Garrison fucking Keillor.
And then you have the music that some NPR stations use to kill time, particularly on the weekends. Not a whole lot of NPR stations specializing in intellectually stimulating music of the now or ever, never mind their ostensibly "intellectual" audience. More likely, you'll get an endless stream of beaten-to-death pre-1880 classical warhorses for bluehairs, or perhaps "smooth" jazz that is half a notch over on the treacle-dial from full-on Muzak.
Rest assured, though, that if you have an NPR affiliate that kills hours of its time with musical filler, said filler will be a) something that makes for completely inoffensive and unchallenging listening, b) something that gives a casual listener a false and completely unjustified sense of being a "smart" cultural outlier just for having the radio on while it's playing.
You know how Barnes and Noble plays only the most pleasant classical music in-store? Y'know, so you can feel like such a smart literate type in this big room full of books, never mind that you have no clue what's actually playing or why it even fucking matters culturally? They do that to sell you shit, so you can take that smug, literate feeling home with you-- "if I'm gonna keep feeling smart like this, gee, I better buy a book."
NPR does exactly the same, and as with B&N, it's nothing but marketing strategy. The hope is that you'll donate just to keep the thing that makes you feel so damned smart on the air, so that you can keep tuning in to that manufactured delusion day after day.
Before you blow me off as an overly cynical crank on the basis of those last few paragraphs, let me just say that I have firsthand, real-world evidence of NPR's mindset in this department... because I was very nearly an NPR employee.
Around the time that the Gulf War was beginning-- the same time that NPR seemed to be brushing the dissenter's movement completely under the rug in their coverage-- I had my hat in the ring for a well-paid job as a music director at a local NPR affiliate. Said affiliate was probably the very same station where Curtis White, a professor at the local university, first fatefully heard Terry Gross and immediately started smashing chairs.
Since the station was folded into Mr. White's state university, the hiring process was nearly as drawn-out and flaming-hoop-riddled as landing the average university teaching gig. I waited two months post-application without a word, and was surprised when they suddenly scheduled a phone interview; a month later, I was equally surprised to be called in as one of the two finalists to be interviewed in person. Once at the station, it was six hours of nonstop point-to-point madness, laid out just as strenuously and ridiculously as the two-day madness that one experiences in trying to land a university teaching job, minus the free flight and/or relaxing stay in a ritzy local hotel.
In the end, I was not selected. And, in retrospect, I think this was a good thing.
The NPR affiliate in question is a station that plays smooth jazz on the weekdays, horrible watered-down / unconfrontational Budweiser blues for Numb White Suburban Dad on the weekends. I was asked (for the twentieth time) what I could bring to the job as music director, and what vision I saw for the station's musical future.
I answered that not only had I run two college radio stations as the general manager (thusly having some *slight* inkling of how real radio stations work), I also had a deep background as a musician, including years of experience playing jazz piano in various combos and big bands (however badly).
Naively, I also answered that I saw room for "real" jazz on-air at the station, stuff beyond the horrible contemporary smooth jazz they were currently playing (although I was at least smart enough to avoid calling it "horrible" mid-interview).
I thought they ought to consider reaching a bit into the canon of classic real jazz, what with them being a university-affiliated station and an oft-overstated "service" within the community. It wasn't like anyone else was playing that stuff on-air in the region. It certainly had an audience, and/or deserved to be heard and remembered.
I was politely but solidly rebuffed on this response by a committee of my would-be coworkers. The station, it was explained, had in fact played "harder" jazz thirty years ago. But what they found was this: When the jazz got tamer, the contributions got bigger. Year by year, the jazz selections on-air got tamer and tamer, and the contributions got bigger and bigger.
Just like a commercial radio station, this particular NPR station-- ostensibly a not-for-profit operation-- had no interest in actually challenging its listeners in even the slightest of ways. Bluehairs and middle-minders with money don't want a challenge, and/or to be faced with music they have to actually listen to when it's on.
No, middle-minders as a whole want nothing more than musical wallpaper, just the same as any mouth-breathin' Joe Six-Pack. They just want their wallpaper to be different enough from Joe Six-Pack's wallpaper so as to give the false sense that their wallpaper is more culturally informed.
And the station was not so interested in cultural history or art; they were far more interested in picking their middle-minded listeners' pockets as deeply as they could. That was made abundantly clear to me in the precise phrasing of the responses from staff and management. Fuck real music; we like money, so aural wallpaper it is, and forever shall be. "Well, uh, smooth jazz is just fine by me!", I heard my disembodied mouth say in context of the mid-interview rebuffery.
It took another month before I got the final call and was told I wouldn't be working there. I figured it would be something about my stated preference for more intellectually engaging music. The surprising explanation given: My would-be coworkers, average age 55, thought I would be great at the job... but they were also visibly uncomfortable with the idea of having to work under a guy who was less than half their age. They picked The Older Guy pretty much just because he was The Older Guy.
Probably grounds for an age-discrimination lawsuit in there, but again, I felt like I sort of dodged a bullet. I would have had to take the job in the dire financial circumstances of that time. Thereafter, I would have been doomed to a lifetime of listening to Diane Schuur's sickeningly pleasant bullshit, trying to pretend that the endless train of smooth jazz CDs crossing my desk contained the tiniest inkling of musical merit, and/or doing my darnedest not to hang myself from the office rafters.
White's The Middle Mind may have ultimately been a failure as a polemic long-form essay, but I still find the core concept valuable, and I've not been able to get it out of my head since reading it. I'm not saying I'm any better than the NPR-junkie middle-minders he seems to view with such disdain. Like so many other humans on this planet, I consider myself basically a tragically self-centric waste of space and potential at this stage of my life.
But we as smart people do have an unwritten obligation to society. It's nothing to do with being comfortable, surrounding ourselves with pleasant things that seem to validate our smartness without ever really challenging us on any level. It's nothing to do with congratulating ourselves for loving learning for learning's sake. As a dude who has been in the college classroom for over a decade, I've discovered that absolutely everyone loves learning, no matter how demonstrably smart they are. (It's the assessment of one's ability to learn, whether organizationally- or self-adminstered, that creates problems for some.)
Being smart in this utterly-fucked world means that, through the process of reason and rational thought, we should be pissed off basically all of the time. We should be out there doing something about the shit that is broken by any standard of real logic, the shit that rightfully pisses us off.
As we get older, it gets harder to be pissed off all the time-- not that I've personally had many problems in that department as of yet. Still, I know it's easy to fall for "intellectual" sedatives like the oh-so-reserved NPR, to say nothing of real-world sedatives that often fall into the laps of smarter folks, like earning a livable and/or comfortable income (if you're one of the dwindling few who still has that luxury).
We as smart people, though, really ought to be demanding more from our usual media sources. NPR is admittedly one of the closest readily-accessible things we've got, at least stateside. It could be a helluva lot better. We ought to be demanding-- through withholding of our contributions, through letter-writing campaigns, or at least through a refusal to fall for the "NPR sticker on my back window makes me cool" self-image trap-myth-- that they step up their game, hit way the fuck harder, become what they currently only pretend to be.
News for smart, progressive people has got to be about more than extended remixes of mainstream-media stories interpolated with "Oh, huh, well, I guess that's kind of interesting" puff pieces. We should be too smart to confuse arbitrarily-chosen streams of trivial information with the legitimately "thought-provoking." The provocation of actual critical thought should, at least rationally, provoke action in turn. NPR's oh-so-smooth coverage and story choices seem to aim for exactly the opposite. They want you, oh-so-smart listener, to just sit there and passively listen... oh yeah, and donate, natch.
* Harley fans, don't get me wrong: I don't hold you in contempt as the average "cager" would, I hold you in even stronger contempt as another motorcyclist. One should ride a motorcycle only because it's enjoyable, not because owning a specific f'n brand of motorcycle is key to one's poseur "identity." Buying into the Harley cult for its empty associations and/or a false sense of self-worth is as sad as playing guitar under the pathetic delusion that people still find guitarists sexy (hint: they don't). I don't dislike all Harleyites, but a lot hinges on their answer to this question: "I withhold the traditional, universal 'motorcyclist wave' if I see that the approaching motorcyclist is riding anything other than Detroit iron." Answer that with a "false," which puts you in the vast minority of "HD or FU" Harley riders, and you and I can still be buddies / take rides together. If the answer is "true," consider selling your hawg and using the proceeds to pay for a course of therapy. It's a much cheaper route to get to the bottom of your horrific and painfully transparent insecurity issues. Fugazi said it best: You are not what you own.
If you read this "unexpurgated" version, comments still go here. (Yes, I've *purposely* disabled them on THIS version, this time out.)