4.20.2011

NPR is consistently full of shit.

I'm just going to repost this from The Korean, because I have so much to say about this that it isn't even fair to spill it all over his comments. Fuck sake.

First of all, I want to clarify about my personal relationship with NPR. I don't fucking like it, particularly their cute little radio shows that are meant to create quirky little windows into the unique way that all those other weird, interesting people live. It's some of the most condescending shit I've ever heard in my life, and it's often made even worse by the fact that the people who are creating it claim to be open-minded liberals. It ends up being either back-handedly classist, racist, ethnocentric, or some combination thereof more times than not. The fuckers even managed to piss off the poets I was working with back in New York by being remarkably blithe about the definition of poetry (the entire basis of these men's lives, at that particular moment, and something for which they had given up a lot), and asking cunty stupid little questions while trying to provoke a "cute" sound clip.

They're cunts. They try to be modern and snarky and end up coming off like complete tossers who have so much privilege that they can't help but be cunts in all their free time. They're not even ignorant cunts. They are well-educated, blue state cunts who grew up hearing that the world is a beautiful rainbow of all of God's different colored people from their parents. They don't have any excuses, and they have no fucking idea how wrong they are most of the time.

I mean. I don't like NPR to begin with. To put it mildly.

But this. You know, I'm not Korean. And maybe that's why the "kimchee-scented Kleenex " bullshit doesn't even bother me that much, compared to what for me is the larger issue, which is that this cunt of an alleged "writer" had the nerve to do two contradictory cunty things at the same time: 1. Distance herself emotionally from the book by making it "from another culture" and 2. Completely fail to take that culture into account when evaluating the book.

You can't have your cunty cake and eat it as well, Maureen Corrigan.

I like that word today. Sorry.

The point is, why is this book so Korean? I mean, when NPR reviews a book by a French author, do we need to hear about how different French culture is from ours, and how ______ our culture is, compared to French culture, and how there are probably baguettes somehow involved, and French culture is just so inconceivable that maybe I'm just not getting this book right because French culture is "completely alien" to our own? No. We don't. It's just a different culture. Literature crosses the bounds of culture effortlessly all the time. Sure, we may miss some key points here or there, but there's no need to produce an entire battery of caveats about how this piece of literature is from another culture. I mean, she wasn't actually reading it in Korean, was she? Has she never read a fucking book by a non-American author before? How fucking idiotic.

At the same time.... I really can't help but feel like Corrigan must have been on some kind of epically pressing deadline. Like she was getting down to the wire on the presses, and had to half-assedly throw some bullshit together to try to make a point out of something she really didn't care about. Otherwise, I have absolutely no idea why a professional writer would feel the need to completely ignore the actual storyline of a book -- and the "completely alien culture" it comes from -- and scramble to grasp an irrelevant detail, like one of the book's characters being female, in order to drag it around into the spotlight and try to make it into a big, fat something.

How are vicious feminists such as myself supposed to actually hold people's attention with things that matter when anybody who needs a "summarizing point" is just trotting that shit out for the fun of it? The review itself clearly states that the other children, at least one of whom was male, were held as being just as responsible. Anyone who knows anything about Korean culture at all is aware that family obligations are definitely not limited to the realm of the female. One of the first things they'll tell you when you start dating Korean men, in fact, is don't get mixed up with an oldest son. Because he is the one who will ultimately be responsible for his parents.

The novelist is a woman. Of course, it's not a hard-and-fast rule, but generally, especially first time novelists will stick with a narrator and/or narration of a character of their same gender. It's just easier.

So a Korean woman feels responsible for her mother. Who, in all of Korea, doesn't feel responsible for their mother? Who, in the entire world, shouldn't feel responsible for their mother?

So, basically NPR did the same thing it always does: It othered another culture, and then criticized it based on its own cultural standards without having any actual fucking clue what was going on. So that clever little upper middle class white people can sit in their clever little houses and read their clever little book review about a clever little Korean book. And feel like they're checking all the boxes on their clever little cultured lists. And, in my opinion, it's just a symptom of everything that is absolutely, 100% wrong with that culture, that Corrigan finds it just so blase that someone would, like, feel guilty for like, being the totally unique and free butterfly that the universe intended, and instead would get all bogged down by icky things like personal responsibility and filial obligation.

Big, huge pile of obvious horse shit. And I'm pretty sure Patti Smith would like nothing more than to kick a clever little empowered woman like Corrigan right in the cunt. That's worse than that KRD fuckwit sourcing his incessant drivel back to Hunter S. Thompson. You fucking wish.

12 comments:

Gomushin Girl said...

Ok, I'm going to step in here and defend NPR.
Maybe your local affiliate was crap. Maybe you don't care for some of their programming. I'd rather bore holes in my head than listen to Ira Glass be oh-so-twee on "This American Life" and my mother rolls her eyes and leaves the room when my dad turns on "A Prarie Home Companion." My brother tries to bail out of the car for "Car Talk" and my sister is horrified that we treat "Wait Wait" as a ritual weekend competition. Maybe you think Terry Gross is a bad interviewer. But the overal range of programming is exceptional, and I don't know of many commercial stations that are bringing things like "Afropop Worldwide" "Thistle and Shamrock" "Alt. Latino" and "World of Opera" together with "Mountain Stage" and "JazzSet." Is every program on every NPR station an absolute jewel of radio that will please everybody? No. Is there some poorly done or badly approached reporting? Obviously.
But I'm telling you, you go after Click and Clack at your own peril, and you'll be haunted by the ghost of Carl Kasell.

I'm no Picasso said...

Yeah it's those exact shows that I'm talking about. Unforutnately, those shows represent my entire relationship wtih NPR. Because when you live in NYC and participate in the "writing" world, that's what you hear about nonstop. And it used to drive me up the fucking wall. Just like a million other things about the NYC "writing" scene for more or less the same reasons.

Personal pet hate. And I hope everyone realizes that this post was largely tongue-in-cheek, anyway. I was partially just amusing myself by seeing if I could actually make it to 50 usages of variations on "cunt" in one post. I wasn't actually as angry as I sound. (Although the core point stands.)

3gyupsal said...

I agree with you on a lot of points, but the morning news program is probably the only national news program on the radio that actually reports the news. The political interview shows are pretty good too. (Except for when they get some pop-psychologist idiot to explain why some people might see some politicians as being sexy, I agree, very cunty, very condescending and just a waste of time.)

3gyupsal said...

On the other hand...Is there any radio that is really worth listening too? I mean there isn't much out there except for conspiracy theory conservative talk radio, idiot morning radio with sound effects, god channel, country channel, and classic rock.

Maybe New York is better, I'm from the midwest where what I described above is basically all there is. I'd love to have access to New York stations like hot 97, or any hip hop station where rappers go on and drop dis records.

Gomushin Girl said...

All I know is that when Carl Kasell finally retires, I'm going to join a nunnery. The outside world will hold no joy for me after that, and I might as well just devote myself to God.

Troeltsch said...

the bbc is superior to npr in every way; even in the reporting of american news

Troeltsch said...

the bbc is superior to npr in every way; even in the reporting of american news

Gomushin Girl said...

The beeb? I mean, don't get me wrong, I love the beeb, but between their current obsession with the wedding (I know, I know, they're not the only ones. still) and their goggle-eyed "OMG! Americans are so weird" I have to laugh sometimes.
Marvelous TV programming, though! No Doctor without the BBC!

Troeltsch said...

@Gomushin Girl: fair enough; I guess one ultimately picks their own poison: endless covrage about fair trade coffee (and consumables) or endless dribble regarding the royal family

Gomushin Girl said...

If only there were a single news source that could combine the two, endlessly telling us about the coffee consumed by the royal family. Fox appears to be aiming for something of this market with their coverage, but I think they've got the wrong Tea Party.

Troeltsch said...

i think your ideal programming concept was actually realized by the old bbc 1 (pre-war) and the new bbc 11- royals on tea.

Unknown said...

Hm, a jewel of radio that can't seem to stop lying through their teeth, make up complete bullshit and present it as a fact and can't, for fuck's sake, stop being so fucking obvious when they string every interviewee to give them the "right answers" that perfectly jive with the bullshit agenda of rotten to the base political system of Yankistan.