This American Life: Tune In

Looking back over my posts, I’ve realized that I offer a lot of disclaimers. I’ll often qualify my writings as purely opinion or conjecture, worthy of little merit and even less wholehearted acceptance. Maybe I want to ensure that Zizzle-Zot, etc. is a welcoming, open forum by avoiding heavy-handed, opinion-as-fact diatribes (a la CNN, FOX News, etc.). Maybe I’m just an opinionated dude conscious of covering my ass.

I write that as a prelude to this disclaimer: Today, Zizzle-Zotians, I’m walking perilously close to the edge between self-deprecating pretentiousness and actual, nose-in-the-air pomposity.

I suppose being accused of snobbery is inevitable when one confesses to regularly listening to This American Life, which reeks of self-importance.

The weekly radio show, broadcast out of Chicago, could best be described as a purveyor of poignancy through the odd, the curious, or the seemingly mundane. Hosted by the always nasally, sometimes smug Ira Glass, each episode focuses on a different theme and offers a variety of stories on that theme. The stories are usually true, and for the most part chronicle average Americans placed in unique circumstances that illuminate an aspect of the episode’s theme, sometimes blatantly, sometimes esoterically.

I know what you’re thinking: it would seem that I hate This American Life. And when I tuned in online for the first time, I assumed I would.

But as I listened to my first episode, titled Twentieth Century Man, I became entranced. It’s the story of Keith Aldrich, a child of the depression that never quite found his identity, through the eyes of Gillian Aldrich (one of his nine children). It tells of Keith’s search for purpose as a preacher, an aspiring Hollywood actor, a Beat writer, a member of the New York literati, a hippie, and a suburbanite. Gillian catches up with Keith’s many other children by many other women (he would leave his old family behind every time he shifted identities). And ultimately, it paints the picture of a faceless, piteous failure fried by years of drug use and wandering.

It’s a truly depressing story, and the melancholy was palpable, real. The interviews with the siblings aim at getting beneath Keith’s many incarnations and finding the true man. In the process, some of them sympathize with their father. Some show pity, some irony, some only anger.

Therein lies the power of the show. By being pretentious and smug, Ira Glass and his This American Life cohorts can capture real emotion. They can transmit love, pain, happiness and sorrow over the radio without resorting to the sentimentality of a Hallmark commercial. They are relentless in interviews, they refuse to pull punches or let their subjects off the hook, and as a result they dig to the pith of their stories. By being so damned self-inflated, they invite their subjects to embrace the importance of their own stories and reach a level of honesty that would be impossible in other settings

This American life is ultimately about the duality of human nature, and in finding this duality they have arrived at something truly American.

Thanks for reading.