When The Boomtown Rats slur “I don’t like Mondays…”, I scream “TELL ME WHY??” Because, to be perfectly honest with you, I love Mondays. I live for Mondays. Strange as it sounds, Mondays are the best day of the week because the new podcast of This American Life is available for download. The crew at WBEZ Chicago have actually stumbled upon a way of making people want to get out of bed, turn their laptop on for iTunes (to update their This American Life podcast collection), frantically get dressed, make an unflattering dash for the bus (or train) just so that they can cosy up on some pulverous public transport seat, all in an effort to plug in their earphones and spin their iPod wheel to the latest episode of This American Life. It’s genius. I loathe public transport, but everyone disappears around me when I’m listening to This American Life. Because of course, nothing else matters in that moment. Nothing else matters…until it does. Because then, He speaks.
This American Life, the public radio show began in 1995 – founded on the belief that everyone has a story to tell. That idea seemed supremely hopeful in those days. It flattered the national pride in diversity while seeming to liberate various tense ideological discussions from identity politics. Stories, after all, aren’t static box-checking matters of race and ethnicity. They’re dynamic and individualistic, potentially bankable creations. But stories can also be true or false, and they demand heroes and villains. Along both of these axes, stories — unlike poems — can be actionable. As people have felt empowered to peddle their stories, lawsuits and scandals have followed. Perhaps a graver consequence of the belief that everyone has a story, though, is the slow-dawning realisation that the belief is itself a story. Anyone who has ever ridden a bus or been to a dinner party knows that many, many people have no stories. Possibly almost no one has a bona fide story, though most have arguments to make, consolations to offer and widgets to sell.
The front man for This American Life — the audio and now televised version — is Ira Glass. On his radio show Mr. Glass has figured out that the story shortage in America is serious, and he fills the narrative reserves out of his own pocket more often than anyone admits. Specifically he supplies “transitions” in the stories that are nominally told by his guests. He talks telegraphically, using short phrases and confident deep breaths. He also has a way of seeming to swallow while he talks that’s endearing. Listeners find Mr. Glass seductive in spite of his swallowed delivery. Which is probably because he makes liberal use of free, indirect discourse – the standard public radio trick of simulated empathy: it’s the version of the third person that stays deep inside the head of the subject. (A crude example: “Bethany went outside. Was it raining?”) For Mr. Glass it’s a way to take the wheel of stories when it’s clear that the everyman he’s recruited isn’t saying exactly what the producers want him to.
So anyway, Mondays.
Monday, Monday, Monday. If I can stop myself from listening in the morning (more than once it has caused me to be late for school, and now work), then I join my friend and fellow quirkyalone Emy for dinner – we gather around the laptop with bated breath, as our grandparents and great-grandparents once huddled ’round the wireless to listen to The Archers or Churchill’s fireside chats.
We laugh. We cry. We live and we learn.
My best friend Lucy, a lovely misanthrope, retreats to her usual scepticism of anything and everything American when I try to persuade her to listen. But I don’t care: for thousands of Americans in voluntary exile, and Brits wanting to believe that America can produce more than Hannah Montana, This American Life is an essential lifeline to hope and faith in humankind. A totally chimerical home, where everyone is like us: humanistic, bookish, self-deprecating, and above all, free-thinking.
In this anxiety-filled election year, this last facet of TAL is most important. Having become comfortable when Bill Clinton was still president and gasoline was less than a dollar a gallon, I am painfully aware that my conception of America is old-fashioned for a young person, even mythic: it has changed a great deal since Billy boy left the fold, and of course, not really for the better. I’d like to believe that Barack Obama will lead the United States of Whatever into a new era of change, but often – reading the headlines, watching the news – I feel pessimistic. I find it hard to believe that Yes, We Can.
But when I listen to This American Life, oh, I believe.
“Each week,” quoth Ira Glass, the iconic host of TAL in his monotone and nasal deific voice, enunciates, “we choose a theme, and we bring you several stories on that theme.” Despite the voice and the black-framed glasses he sports (which are bigger than his face), Ira somehow manages to be the coolest and most attractive American man ever, because he is the bringer of this amazing, romantic, liberal reverie.
The themes brought to us by Ira are broad – “The truth will out”, ”Quiz shows”, “Twenty-four hours in a Chicago diner”, “Something for nothing”. But the messages are consistent. Almost every narrative is somehow redemptive: sometimes they’re terribly sad, but at the end of each episode the listener is almost always filled with a sense of hope and faith that many Americans are, at the end of the day, good and kind and self-deprecating people. Much like us Brits. The editing is perspicaciously done – the most gut wrenching recent story, of a Muslim-American family harshly rejected by their local community following 9/11 was buttressed, as the weepiest ones always are, with hilarity: a sharp anecdote from writer Shalom Auslander about his comical efforts to write ad copy to flog American values to the Arab World. “I realised,” he says of his assignment, “that if you switched ‘freedom and democracy’ for ‘cool and refreshing’, it was pretty much the same strategy as the one I’d been given for selling soda to African-American kids.” I was so overwhelmed by the juxtaposition of comedy and tragedy that I had to lie down for a few minutes to recover.
Sometimes I wish that there was a new episode of This American Life every day, but I don’t think I could quite handle the emotional roller coaster – it usually takes me a week to recover my cynicism before Monday rolls around again, and Emy and I start laughing, crying, living and learning again, and I find myself thinking: is this real? Can you really find this level of comedy and honesty… wrapped in acceptance? It’s pure schmaltz, but it’s intellectual schmaltz – the range of contributors include a formidable cast of well-known writers and broadcasters (David Sedaris, Shalom Auslander, Heather O’Neill, Chuck Klosterman, Dan Savage, David Rakoff, and the list goes on) – and thus for an hour a week I’m not ashamed to put aside all of this political grappling, and instead indulge in the fantasy that America really is a land of hope, opportunity, and unparalleled charm. I know you want to hurl huge rocks at my head right now. I do too. But maybe, just maybe, we should try with all of our muster to grant a clean slate and give a standing ovation to the sheer beauty, brilliance, and bravado of This American Life. Who are we to keep them confined to the box they’re in right now? If we don’t give this irreverent humour and intellect a chance, then we might as well get in the box ourselves.
Some say it’s “so typical” that the show is based solely around the ordinary American – what about the ordinary everyone? Every where? Perhaps it should appeal to the global audience and just call itself ‘This Life’. I mean, it makes sense. Ultimately, what they are trying to show is that we’re all in ‘This’ together, that we’re all interconnected somehow – even though we can miss the point occasionally – that sometimes if we’re lucky enough,we see each other. But are we all really ready to endeavour the journey into our own minds – it can be a truly perilous realm. At least, when you think about it.
Maybe Ira Glass and the ordinary American are just the beginning stages of something much bigger, much brighter, and much better – for all of us. Let’s rid ourselves of ‘anti’ and start becoming more ‘pro’. Let’s say all the things we never said. Let us finally set aside childish differences. So what if it’s This American Life? We should just swallow our contempt for American’s over-sentimentality and their quest for the American Dream for the 50-something minutes of the podcast, and start looking forward to This Life.
For now, we can listen, learn, and hope that an Ira Glass is born on every continent – when we will finally be able to catch him on our frequency.
To download the free podcast, follow the link!
http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Podcast.aspx
Chipper, dark-haired renegade student with a particularly bent sense of humour. Ostensibly a pretty cuddly and charming girl, has a mess of vices to work through. Likes ‘76 punk rock, Kate Hudson films, expensive champagne, and tea parties. Favourite dish – sun-dried tomatoes. Collects newspaper cuttings. Looks good in a jumpsuit. Unsavoury.
