It’s National. It’s Public.

 ~  In the Land of the Blind, the Man with Basic FM Radio Coverage can Still Pick up NPR, Even in Rural Wyoming. ~

                Like the rest of the country over the age of thirty (except for the super-cali-fragi-listic right-wingers), I listen to a lot of NPR.  It’s mainly a fallback radio plan, a default audio position.  When there’s no particular music I want to hear, when I can’t find someone on AM radio spewing bizarre rants about the evils of duct tape and gravy or the hidden joys of cow tipping, I tune into NPR.  It lives up to its billing.  It is national.  You can find NPR in Alaska, Florida, Missouri, and probably in Guam.  It is public.  Their pledge drives are annoyingly effective.  And it is radio.

                That’s all it claims to be.  It is N.  It is P.  And it is R. 

                NPR is one of the political litmus tests of our time.  It shouldn’t be, but it is.  Conservatives feel that it’s leftist propaganda.  Liberals feel that it’s just decent talk radio.  As a political moderate, I can kind of see both sides.  NPR doesn’t spew out liberal position papers merely transferred to another medium like MSNBC, but it does skew slightly to the left.  Compared to Rush Limbaugh and his ilk, NPR programming IS lefty propaganda, but, then again, so is Andy Griffith.  It’s leftist in the same way that evolution is a theory and “Dancing with the Stars” is thought-provoking.  That position makes more sense if you already think it going in.

                But, setting aside the politics of NPR, let’s talk about its mildly hypnotic qualities.  There’s something about the speech rhythms and verbal pacing of most of its programming that feels like a guy with a white Van Dyke beard dangling a pendulum-pathed pocket watch in front of my ears.  I can’t believe that the Department of Transportation doesn’t yet have a code or an acronym for NPR-related traffic fatalities.  Unlike everywhere else on the radio, nobody screams on NPR.  Nobody rants and raves on NPR.  Nobody calls in with jingoistic “atta-boys” on NPR.  Nobody brags about how he’s the greatest singer/rapper/political theorist/UFO abductee/snowboarder on NPR.  They just calmly talk about various topics.  My cats tell me which things were considered that day when I come home from work.

                In an age of random reverberating noise, NPR is something different.  It’s just as predictable as other radio.  It’s just as sponsored as other radio (thank you Bill & Melinda Gates), even though its lack of commercials in favor of simply occasionally listing the big-donor sponsors is, in a way, revolutionary.  Where else can you hear two brothers laughing at their own lame internal combustion engine jokes every Saturday morning on a show based on giving people advice about their cars?  Where else can you find the single greatest interviewer of our time (along with her friends David Bianculli and Dave Davies)?  Where else can you find America’s most relatable financial reviewer with a name out of a sci-fi novel, Kai Ryssdal? 

                NPR is more like the evening news USED TO BE than the evening news now is.  NPR is more like a graduate school discussion group than most graduate school discussion groups.  NPR is something unique and special, something cherished and loved, something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue.  Actually, it’s better than that cliché bridal collection (most weddings are remarkably like every other wedding---at least Morning Edition comes up with new stories every weekday). 

                What’s really crazy is that there’s an easy fix to what the right-wingers who object to NPR want changed.  All the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (the most ironic corporation since the Corporation for Marxist Ideology went out of business in the mid 80’s) would need to do to silence the shouters would be to add a few more conservative commentators.  Pretty much the only right-leaning voice on NPR is David Brooks, editorialist for The New York Times, and one of the smartest, sanest and most even-handed conservative commentators of our time.  Although David Brooks is awesome, he could use a little company.  That would remove the charcoal of truth from the furnace of burning emotion that emanates from the right-wing radio and TV shouters.  They’d probably still object to NPR.  Those guys are pretty stubborn (but so are the liberals, even though neither side would admit to the fact that they occupy opposition-by-necessity connected seats in the mutual-aid seesaw that they do).  Still, if NPR wants to live up to its N and its P, even-handedness is a must.  There are probably one or two sane, monotonous, conservative commentators out there.  There must be.  It’s a really big country.

                Again, I took a tangent back to politics.  It was accidental, I assure you.  I just really like NPR and want it to be the best public radio station it can be.  I feel about NPR like most kids do about The Little Engine that Could.  The odds may be against it.  The hill may be steep.  The pledge drives may take a ridiculously long time.  But, gosh darn, I think it can.