Discovering This American Life
October 14, 2005
This American Life works so well as a neo-NPR show (NPR with Pew funding) because it is often a kind of red-state safari for urban, blue-state, NPR-listening surrender monkeys. Nevertheless, I like it. It’s usually just in search of a good story without being too patronizing toward or ignorant of the natives, but the latest broadcast was a bit hard to read in this respect.
The storyline that Producer Sarah Koenig took in her visit to Pearlington, Mississippi frequently turns on her amazement that this town had no government before Katrina, and after being destroyed, it continues to thrive without provisional federal control. Inexplicably to Koenig at first, Pearlingtonians are subsisting via voluntareerism and mutual aid without any federal or “expert” personnel (with all the requisite Special High Intensity Training) to oversee and manage them. (They don’t like the federal government much at all. Most opinions about FEMA and the Feds were substantially beeped out.)
How strange that some of the Pearlington residents love their home (now having lost their houses) more than ever! Others find great meaning in a post-hurricane football game or share their recreational assault-rifle shooting with out-of-state church volunteers–and they’re not only good-hearted but apparently smart enough to survive and recover, even if they do say things about how good it is to “hit people.” (In football.)
This is Discovering This American Life in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Wasted on the Young | Next: “Is She with Us?” “Is she with Them?” Harriet Miers and the Asymmetrical Evangelicals | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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