NPR is 50 years old now. It feels like an old friend.
I didn't even know it existed until the 1980s. I was still stuck on the 'latest' news, the kind of tabloidism that infects us even today.
I'm not even sure how I learned about it. But its richness survives. It's more than just news. It tells stories that matter.
Its permutations survive, too: All Things Considered; Weekend Edition, still with the incomparable Scott Simon on Saturdays (and Liane Hanson, who graced our Sundays until ten years ago with her clear, decisive but also comforting voice). Other weekly daytime shows like 1A, from Washington, DC; Fresh Air, with another incomparable interviewer, Terry Gross; and humor shows, like Wait-Wait, Don't Tell Me, with the droll Peter Sagal; and Ask Me Another, with Ophria Eisenberg.
Those shows drive my week. They certainly kept me going through the pandemic. Because they weren't mindless drivel; they celebrated not only people's abilities to think but their need to. You could get lost in them and feel better when the hour had elapsed.
There is a map--you can get it--that shows the location and scope of NPR stations throughout the country. It served me particularly well in my travels with the NEA and working gigs elsewhere. You could play with the dial sometimes, and come up with early afternoon classical music, if the funding wasn't there, or recorded shows like Hidden Brain (Ever listen? Fascinating) if there was. It was always someplace between 88.1 and 92.9 FM. There's also a cell phone app that tells you where the nearest stations are and if you're coming up on another one.
On long drives, you were secure in the knowledge that if NPR wasn't quite there at the moment, it soon would be.
You could, and can, wake up to it every day. Here, in Milwaukee, there is 89.7, WUWM in Milwaukee, for NPR news and daily coverage. West of here, there is Wisconsin Public Radio, 90.7, WHAD, which has stations in Delafield and Milwaukee. During weekday afternoons into the early evenings, it serves the state with Central Time. Over lunch hour, there's a daily reading called Chapter A Day.
The effect has been, and still is, to slow life down a little, to explain it a more deeply, to provide badly-needed context. It has never majored in happy talk. It has never had to conjure, or work hard to find, good things going on. It seems to attract them.
It has attracted some of the finest female journalists of the last forty years: the late Cokie Roberts and her weekly musings, often subtly pointed, on the Congress; Nina Totenberg, with her detailed and deep analysis of the Supreme Court; Linda Wertheimer and Susan Stamberg, with their definitive voices (about which a new book has been written). It seemed natural that NPR became a haven for their flourishing.
During the last four years of the pointless nihilism created by the previous president and all that surrounded him, NPR did not indulge in counterattack as much as it kept going and explaining the nonsense as exactly that. There was an edge to voices that wasn't there before; you could feel it. But there was a line it wouldn't cross, and the integrity was preserved as a result.
We have all survived--for now--that onslaught of language twisting and bold-faced deceptions. NPR sails on, fortunately. But the Big Lie still has legs because it has been woven together within one of our political parties, and it is due to make another national appearance. NPR gives us at least one place we can go in an ongoing effort to discern the objective truth of things. With each passing day, it gains value.
It's said that America is known for three things: baseball, jazz, and the Constitution. Add to that a fourth--National Public Radio.
Be well. Be careful. Wear a mask indoors. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.
Mister Mark
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