because the first car i drove to high school had no tape deck and because memphis radio was not what you might think, given its alleged status as the birthplace of rock and roll, i developed my npr habit in the tenth grade. that's why i'm still drinking the national public radio kool-aid.
well, that's one of the reasons. much of where the network has gone in recent years has driven me to c-span, but i still have the npr junkie's affection for scott simon's saturday morning essays, the network's regular and reliable newscasts, anne garrels' broadcasts from baghdad at the war's beginning, dan schorr's commentary, talk of the nation's reasonable call-in format, ira flatow's nerd-irrific science friday, and robert seigel's masterful interview style. i confess, i have tired of this american life, of diane rehm, of car talk, of weekend edition sunday's puzzles, of garrison keillor, of the endless series of loosely-themed programs (see, for instance, studio 360 and soundprint). i no longer care whether or not wamu fills its sunday afternoon with bluegrass or prairie home companion, or another rebroadcast of hypereducated boston mechanics having fits over their own jokes.
yet the one point on which i will give no ground -- and i am not alone in my fervor -- is bob edwards. if you are among those who haven't heard (fewer and fewer, i imagine), edwards, who has hosted morning edition for almost a quarter-century will no longer do so but will become a "senior correspondent," a la noah adams, linda wertheimer, and susan stamberg.
i've gone on too long already. there are plenty of apt encomia at npr's tribute page (if you go there, do listen to the archived stories, too. edwards' interview with johnny cash is as good as you'd imagine). the sort of gloopy nostalgia that leads us to call edwards our friend goes to far, for sure, but his voice and the things he asked and said with that voice sure were reliably right.
i like scott simon's praise, which makes sense, because i like scott simon's weekend edition almost as much as bob edwards' morning edition. this is good:
A whole generation of Americans have grown up hearing Bob tell them who won or lost (elections, wars, and the World Series), what happened while they slept, who's been born, who's died, and who's having a birthday. He has been the very voice of history, and losing his morning companionship will be as hard as losing the kind of old friend you could always rely on to tell you some news, give you a laugh, and steady you through rough times.
Just now, The Sundance Channel worked me over fairly well with a startling juxtaposition. Because my cable carrier provides both Sundance and Sundance West, I was able to move back and forth between Kirby Dick's Derrida and Anne Aghion's In Rwanda We Say... The Family That Does Not Speak Dies. Each is part of the the network's Monday "Docday."
I wish I had transcripts, because I'd love to describe the oddness of watching Derrida lecture a group of South African university students on the nature of forgiveness and tapping the remote to watch a Rwandan Tutsi say, "Sometimes we manage to talk [to Hutu neighbors], and we feel safer." A student called Derrida out, observing that he was talking to white South Africans, more likely to be the object than the purveyors of forgiveness, and wondering whether or not D might be deploying some irony. As D attempted a response (in fairness, I can't imagine the right response to that question.. D said, yes, irony is always in play, and he agreed that his "pure forgiveness" lecture needed to have taken better account of its audience's recent history -- this, dear reader, is why I pined for a transcript)... Right. As D attempted a response, I listened for a few moments, then went back to the other channel to hear a Hutu man explain that he killed a child to whom he was related (by marriage) because the surrounding mob explained that his failure to do so would result in a far worse end, in which the child would be killed and the family would be forced to cannibalize him.
And I wondered about the Derridean insistence that discourse contains its own unlocking. The narrative of the genocide didn't seem to be always already anything.
Maybe unfair to Derrida. I suppose his model could account for the sort of stories being told to achieve a kind of reconcilliation in Rwanda, but the matters under discussion in one of the Sundance documentaries tugged against those addressed in the other.