Sentimentality

I listen to a fair amount of National Public Radio (NPR) presentations. Perhaps too much. My use of this medium allows me to write or do other chores while becoming informed about current events. I find watching news on TV becomes numbing after the first few kidnappings, explosions or feel-good stories. Al Jazeera English and BBC are my TV news choices. 

My impression of NPR has changed. Perhaps NPR has also changed. Over the past two days, I listened to two segments of a series called "Story Corps" and shook my head at what seemed to be about banality, served up in a heavy sauce of schmaltz. The first segment was the recounting by an elderly African-American of his days growing up in a poor Southern U.S. town. He explained that an Anglo-American sheriff had shot his dog when he was eight. The dog had bitten an Anglo-American passer-by. Somehow this was a symbol of racist oppression in this man's mind. I suppose the logic of his mind dictated that dogs owned by African-Americans should have been allowed to bite Anglo-Americans with impunity. I had thought racism in the rural South took a less practical and more pernicious form.

The second piece was the recounting of a son's suicide by drug overdose by  two educationally limited parents in Texas. The son, an Iraq veteran, developed a deep drug habit after being dishonorably discharged from the military. The parents were obviously softening the edges of their description of their son's behavior prior to his suicide. They called his suicide an "accidental overdose". They also expressed helplessness and regret about their own roles in their son's life. There was no questioning of how lack of education and poverty had doomed their son to a military life for which he was not emotionally or psychologically suited.

NPR is supposed to be a medium of public education and information. That is the reason I have supported it with money and listener input over the years. However, this series exemplifies a shade of NPR content that is anti-intellectual and intent upon elevating the mundane and banal to a special place. It reminds me of elementary school teachers who praise the crayon scribbles of untalented children as "interesting" or "creative" rather than using the child's scribbling to teach him/her something. It is one thing for a doting parent to do this. It is another thing for a dispenser of public education to do this.

Sentimentality has infected the media since September 11th, 2001 and the subsequent militarism which was the reaction to it. The HDTV gore of LED flat screens is modified with feel-good stories about shepherds on the fringes of the Sahara. The shepherds may not feel so good about living on the fringes of the Sahara, but TV news producers seem to feel good after pulling our heart strings with the poverty and hard work for survival there. 

Part of my genetic heritage is Irish. Another is Russian. Luckily, another part is German-Jewish by way of The Netherlands. This last part perhaps saves me from immersion in peddled sentimentality to the extent of losing my intellectual capacity to winnow out important details. This is the core of skepticism. I wish media in this country, especially media which sell their mission as educational, would develop more skepticism in their editorial chambers.