Ode to This American Life

I went to see Ira Glass tonight. It was absolutely wonderful. Blargh. I’m feeling really irritable right now. It’s weird, what This American Life does for me is make me absolutely love and appreciate everyday life. Not the boring stuff, of course, but the interesting stuff. “how fascinating ordinary people are,” as Summer Roberts would say. It really does make me want to dive deeper into life with people, it makes me think about how beautiful everything is, but then, as soon as I step away from it, whether I’m taking my headphones off or leaving the Nashville War Memorial Center where I’ve just heard Ira Glass speak, I am just annoyed with everything else in the world that it’s not as wonderful as this. I think it’s just that I want everything to be spoken in perfect story form, with swelling music filling silences, and not drenched with sentimentality, but just the right amount of sentimentality and cultural relevance and interestingness. But life never ends up that way, and I end up feeling imprisoned by the people around me. It’s a shame. I hate being annoyed with people. I hate that I let myself believe my feelings can somehow hold me hostage.

Anyway, I can’t remember the exact way he said it, but the gist of it was that there’s just something about hearing a story from the inside that is fascinating. He talked about how one of the first stories he did came from a headline in a Chicago newspaper that read “How not to get struck by lightning.” It was mostly statistics and bland recitation of facts, but there was one little quote tossed in at the end of a survivor saying “and I was on the golf course, and I was holding the umbrella, and all the sudden I heard a huge boom and everything was white” and so on, and he thought “That’s the story.” And so he went and found the 15 people in the greater Chicago area who had recently been struck by lightning and asked them about it. But it’s not just getting struck by lightning that is fascinating from the inside, and that’s not really the thing that This American Life has given me. It’s suicide bombers and Guantanamo prisoners and people wrongfully accused of murder. Congressmen. Assholes. Politicians involved in scandals. Small children of parents with dementia. American Muslims. Atheists. Christians. Canadians. Children of illegal immigrants. New York prostitutes. Gay Who Wants to Be a Millionaire contestants. Mentally handicapped people. Iraqis. American soldiers in Iraq. Where else would I have come in contact with all of those people? And it’s true, hearing all of these stories, just imagining what it would be like to be those people, it helps me make sense of the world, and it makes me feel closer to all of my fellow human beings. Ira said it makes him feel sane. That’s not it as much for me. I think it draws me a little closer to the truth, the truth that we’re all the same, that of course everyone has reasons for the way they are, and that if we could just stop gawking long enough to actually try to understand our differences, maybe we could all live together peacefully. And maybe we could actually learn to love each other. I don’t know when I became convinced that the key to the world is communication, but it’s deep inside of me now. People just don’t understand each other. If there’s any type of person that you feel ok judging or dismissing or condemning, I can guarantee that you don’t know one of those people. You just need a face to the hot-topic, that’s all. And once you finally see one, you will be converted. You’ll never be able to point a finger again. You’ll never be able to dismiss a whole people group. I tell this to my Dad all the time, but he is convinced that it’s liberal bullshit, he feels a moral responsibility NOT to change his mind just because he has a gay friend, or because he gets to know a few convicted felons, and it’s a shame. What it means is, he has a moral conviction to never be changed by his experiences and encounters with people different than him. And that might feel safer, but it’s also a guarantor of ignorance. It’s a self-imposed glass ceiling for maturity, and what good is that?

A strip of my computer has just fallen off. That’s what I said, folks. Just fell off the edge of my keyboard. I know macs are all the rage, and I’m certainly still a fan, but they are not as indestructible as you might be thinking.

Anyway, Ira said he had a mentor that used to say to him “The question behind every story you ever hear is always the same question: How should I live?” And he said he thought that was such a beautiful idea, but that it ends up putting too much weight on all these tiny little stories that fill the airwaves, and that it’s probably more appropriate for a story to have a point than a moral. And that’s true, and it’s what’s so great about This American Life. They don’t try to tell you how to live, but they do tell you how other people are living, and they do it in a way that’s interesting, that draws out the humanness and the universal. But the force of all those little stories together really is something powerful, and I think for the first time tonight, I could understand why Ira Glass says that what he does is “incredibly important” to him. I am pretty sure he would never be claiming to do something as grand as he actually is doing. He just wants to make radio journalism more interesting and more honest. But in the process of doing that, there’s the potential for a whole new way of seeing the world. I always feel dumb admitting how much books and movies and NPR affect who I am and what I think, but why else would I have spent hours upon hours reading and watching and listening, if it weren’t doing something valuable for me?