u-NPR-isom

Why does Instapunk listen to NPR?

I listen to NPR the way a kid who's losing a baby molar worries it in his jaw, to experience a pain that is in some curious way exquisitely uniform. It's a pain that rarely rises to the level of agony, and somehow its constant tingling potentiality of hitting that one thrumming chord cannot be ignored. NPR is there. Millions of people lap up its dreary and oh-so-polite editorializing-without-ever-coming-right-out-and-saying-it style of propaganda, and it's impossible to ignore all those highbrows listening sagely in their Bimmers and plowing their way through the ready-made reading lists that fall out of the not-so-Fresh Air of Terry Gross's interviews with the cognoscenti. The tone of it all -- from Terry to Garrison Keillor to 'What Do You Know?' to 'Morning Edition' to 'Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me' to 'BBC World' to 'All Things Considered' to Tavis Smiley -- varies within the same range as that moribund molar, which is to say hardly at all. Whether the intention is to be informative, thoughtful or humorous, the demeanor is almost constantly knowing, a bit weary, pretentiously allusive, and ostentatiously soft-spoken and indirect, as if we all -- NPR listeners, that is -- share such a huge set of common convictions and esthetic preferences that almost nothing in the way of straightforward comment is needed.

Or maybe it's for the soothing voices...