One of the benefits of listening to NPR is not having to hear about Brittany Spears’s latest crackups. In fact, there’s little or no celebrity gossip. Instead you get to hear things that are actually interesting, and often you get the news before it makes news in the mainstream (or “drive by”) media. The downside is that NPR is unabashedly liberal. It might as well stand for “Nationalist Progressive Radio”, which is why I don’t donate one thin dime during their infomercial format beg drives. Pledge drive. You get the idea.
Tonight while driving my boy home from a Scout Troop meeting, I tuned in to the WHYY syndicated show “Fresh Air“. The last time I listened to Fresh Air, it was a fascinating interview with Jill Bolte Taylor in which she related her experiences as a victim of stroke. What made it fascinating is that she is herself a Neuroanatomist, so as her stroke was happenning she was able to rationalize her experiences, cope and get help. (You can watch her give a lecture on this at the TED Talks website.) Tonight’s fascinating guest is a familiar name from the recent Presidential race - Bill Ayers.
If you read a few blogs back, you know I have no love for Bill Ayers. Listening to the interview, as Ayers leaked stupidity from his mouth like so much oral diarrhea, I was gripped with stunned anger at what a small, petty, unrepentant little man Ayers is and how much attention he gets for being such an unabashed relic of 60’s radicalism. At one point I actually directed a question at the radio; “… how can you not see yourself as a terrorist when you acknowledge that you used unbridled violence in an attempt to effect political change? How can you not see yourself as nothing more than the other side of the same coin as that which you oppose?”
NPR, through shows like Fresh Air, give voice to fringe elements of society that we wouldn’t otherwise get through mainstream forms of media. I listen to NPR because long before anyone knew what South Ossetia was and where, I knew that it was a disputed region between an anterograde Russia and the pro-western independant former Soviet state of Georgia. While most people where talking about the Jonas Brothers and what happened at the MTV Music Awards, I was learning about the genius of Mstislav Rostropovich. The flip side of that benefit is that NPR also gives voice to the radical left, for which it has deep sympathies. Were any radio network - commercial or public - to give that level of voice to equally fringe right wing groups such as Aryan Resistance, there would be calls to strip them of their public funding and indeed their license.
In deference to the headline, the real Bill Ayers need not stand up. Now that the election is over and he cannot hurt his friend and protogé Obama, Ayers is free to remind everyone that he does not have an iota of regret for his actions. But as he emerges further into a nationally visible roll, he is also drawing the ire of true 60’s anti-war activists who decry his methods. You cannot escape the things you’ve done, and if you’re not willing to repent and make amends, then you also cannot outlive them.
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