IN WHICH I COME DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO SOUNDING LIKE A TALK RADIO HOST. AND I'M NOT TALKING ABOUT AIR AMERICA.

I have come to well and truly detest NPR. Oh, the news programs are decent enough, I suppose, but of course the bread and butter of public radio is the commentary, the "soft" programs. On the Chicago NPR affiliate WBEZ, this programming runs the gamut from just tolerable to excruciating. Leo Tolstoy wrote in the epilogue to Anna Karenina, "All happy families are alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." So too, every one of these commentary shows annoys me, but each does so in its own unique manner. One noisome element that unifies them, though, is the presumptuous tone they adopt by suggesting that listeners are shirking their duty to save the world. Whether the host's pet obsession happens to be climate change, human rights, the eradication of poverty, or some other melange of bien pensant concerns, there's this intimation that listeners ought to take it upon themselves to do whatever is necessary to improve the situation - even if this is completely unfeasible and would dramatically worsen their quality of life.

Now, I'm all for finding a cause that you believe in and supporting it, but that support ought never to result from having been guilted and bullyragged into taking action by a bunch of talking heads. A prime example of this type of manipulation was recently broadcast on the show To The Best of Our Knowledge, wherein they interviewed a university professor who had quit his tenured teaching job to live off the grid as a gleaner in Fort Worth, Texas. Now, some might view this as an invaluable opportunity to glimpse life outside the circuit of consumerism from the perspective of a highly intelligent, formerly privileged individual. Me, I think it's just bizarre. Someone who would give up a professional position that required so many years of commitment and effort and not just change course, but essentially elect to live off of the streets, does not seem to me like someone whose opinion is worth taking very seriously. I wouldn't engage the megaphone-wielding derelict on the street corner in a debate on religion for much the same reason: namely, you can kind of guess how that conversation's going to go without actually having to participate in it. Obviously it is possible to survive solely off the refuse of modern society; obviously people are wasteful; obviously there are vast discrepancies in wealth and consumption in America. These aren't exactly brave or shocking statements. But in this interview it was accompanied by the thinly veiled accusation that I the listener, a complete stranger to everyone on this show, was guilty of wasteful, apathetic consumerism. This is just patently false. I'll bet my meager savings that the effete douchebags hosting this radio show have far more excess "stuff" than I do, and yet they feel entitled to tell me how I can reduce my carbon footprint? I, who don't own a pair of shoes or jeans that's less than three years old, who'll drive his 1996 Honda Accord until the motor gives out, who lives in a modest 25 x 30 foot apartment with a roommate in a high-density metropolitan environment and who eats every scrap of food that he purchases - I need to be told how to reduce my impact? You know what, sui generis of NPR? Fuck you. Fuck you and fuck your BMW station wagons and fuck your Mephisto walking shoes and your soy milk lattes and your comfortable homes in White Plains and Swarthmore and Forest Park and Cambridge. Fact is assholes, everyone wants what you have, so if the deal is that we all have to give something up, how about you pony up a half-dozen of your luxuries and then maybe - maybe - I'll follow suit with one of my own. Until then you can just eat shit, which amounts to about the same thing as your high-minded tsk-tsking at the awful mindless consumerism of your fellow Americans. Most people I know buy stuff when they need it, for entirely satisfactory reasons. If they can't buy the things they need, that's a problem for them, but it's not my fault and it's not the fault of the guy who has more rooms in his house than he can count. If he can afford to heat and light all those rooms, then bully for him; if not, then he'll just have to move out and seek more modest accomodations.

My point is that almost everyone not on the brink of starvation could make do with less. But for most of us who lead fairly spartan lives, it's not a matter of cutting back from wretched excess. And for those who do live in a state of wretched excess, then the snippy declamations of a bunch of aging liberal arts majors on Sunday night public radio isn't going to amount to a pound of eco-friendly organic horseshit.

Oh, and don't worry about Jeff Ferrell, the erstwhile professor who thought he'd make some bold gesture by living on other people's trash. He's back in the academy as Professor of Criminology at Texas Christian University. I guess living on month-old bread and week-old milk got tiresome after awhile. He wrote a book, no doubt bolstering his credentials in the process, and got back to where he knows he belongs: amongst other tweedy mandarins, with whom he can cluck at the deficiencies of all the plebeians running around trying to make a dime as plumbers or insurance salesmen or any of the other thousand mundane jobs that make modern society function. My apologies if I'm starting to sound like Rush Limbaugh, but this widespread attitude among the professorial class is a hypocrisy that just stinks to high heaven and gives intellectualism a bad name to boot. God help me, if I ever get to be an academic, I swear I will be endlessly thankful for the opportunity and never try to piss on other people from the heights of my ivory tower.

Hey, a man can dream...