Thank you for taking my call

Meghna Chakrabarti was NOT in the mood to let morons derail today's Hong Kong protests/China trade war On Point discussions, and when the Florida idiot called in and immediately bleated "Jeffrey Epstein is alive. Pizzagate is ..." she shut him off HAAAAARD.

I think I'm in love.

Open letter to the NPR On Point producer who put the Kentucky caller on air who then said nobody ever has bought an assault weapon because of racism and people in Kentucky need them to defeat ISIS (even though trump very recently declared "we have defeated ISIS in Syria") and to sleep better at night:

WHAT. THE. FUCK. IS. WRONG. WITH. YOU. Don't you have a dumbass filter to keep the psycho morons away from the airways?

Life Goals:

1. Be best friends with Kai Ryssdal
2. Hang out all the time
3. Talk about stuff

EVERY CALLER EVER TO CALL NPR/WBEZ'S ON POINT:

[audio delay] [extra pause just to set the stage for sounding stupid] Hello! Um ... ah ... how are you? *actually wastes time waiting for an answer* ... thanks for ta ... I love your show and thanks for taking my call ... *holds phone really far from mouth and drives through tunnel to muffle all words and sounds* ... so I just have one thi ... well, two things so I'll make it quick ... um ... ah ... thanks for taking my call ... so in regards to what the last person just said ... and I'll be real quick about thi ... um ... ah ... I have no idea what I'm talking about ... and I've made no effort to educate myself on today's topic beyond my own insular experience ... it's a miracle I'm even listening for comprehension regarding what your panel is saying on this show today ... and it's an even bigger miracle that I've taken the initiative to listen for your phone number in the middle of all my not paying attention ... do your producers even take three seconds to screen your calls? ... um ... ah ... but I'm going to sound off anyway ... thanks for taking my call ... and I'll be real quick about this ...

Not all heroes wear capes

Oh, SNAP

NPR’s Rachel Martin just spent five minutes trying to get straight, truthful answers about the border/shutdown shit show from White House Director of Strategic Communications (which is a fancy American way of saying Minister of Propaganda) Mercedes Schlapp, who kept greasily trying to change the subject and misrepresent selective truths in an effort to blanket-blame Democrats and RACHEL WASN’T HAVING IT as she quoted facts and played clips contradicting Mercedes’ scripted talking points and interrupted her desperate wandering AND I MAY OR MAY NOT HAVE WHOOPED AND OH-NO-YOU-DI-HINT-ED AT ALEXA MORE THAN ONCE as Mercedes descended into audible flop sweat. She was clearly used to fielding softball questions from the Fox ilk—and I have NO idea what possessed her to attempt to defend the indefensible in a forum like NPR that always does its homework—but it was a very satisfying way to begin my day.

Thirty years ago today ...

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different ... something so random and so unexpected that the shock of the words literally didn't make sense to me: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the 1988 autumn semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and what ended up being a definitive revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away. Dimly seeing what we could of it and haltingly learning more and more about it over the next hours was at once horrifying and comforting, filling us with both hopefulness and helplessness.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the murdered Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last thirty years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about catastrophic tragedies like the 9/11 attacks and the Stoneman Douglas massacre and the devastating 2018 wildfires ... though I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Thirty years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Thirty years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Thirty years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour news cycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are robbing you of a precious and very limited possession, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak both do and don't make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should work to find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Thirty years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for eight presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and eight houses and eight jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful (more or less), confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, even though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves ... and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you experience when you finally see images of the bloodied, abused corpse of Moammar Gadhafi—who denied to his last hopefully excruciating, terrified breath every credible report that he'd ordered the Pan Am bombing—feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Tony-winning actor? International journalist? Have-it-all mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m the only one in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and befriended her kids on Facebook and marched in pink hats with her in Washington and lost countless hours texting ridiculous memes back and forth with her.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Thirty years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken—and strengthened—my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

EVERY CALLER EVER TO CALL NPR/WBEZ'S ON POINT:

[audio delay] [extra pause just to set the sage for sounding stupid] Hello! Um ... ah ... thanks for ta ... I love your show and thanks for taking my call ... so I just have one thi ... well, two things so I'll make it quick ... um ... ah ... thanks for taking my call ... so in regards to what the last person just said ... and I'll be real quick about thi ... um ... ah ... I have no idea what I'm talking about ... and I've made no effort to educate myself beyond my own insular experience ... it's a miracle I'm even listening to this show today ... and it's an even bigger miracle that I've taken the initiative to listen for your phone number in the middle of all my not paying attention ... um ... ah ... but I'm going to sound off anyway ... thanks for taking my call ... and I'll be real quick about this ...

Twenty-nine years ago today

I’d finished my classes for the semester and my dad had come to pick me up from college for the holiday break. 1988 had been an emotional roller coaster for our family. We’d lost four family friends in a small plane crash Easter morning, my mom had undergone a radical mastectomy in October and she was just starting her first rounds of chemo before Christmas. I was in the middle of my junior year in college, and I’d finally found a major I was willing to stick with: English. But since I’d waited a full two years to admit to myself I always should have been an English major, I had a lot of catching up to do. And my first-semester courseload had been heavy.

December 21 is the winter solstice—the day of the year with the shortest amount of sunlight—but it was beautiful and sunny in Eastern Iowa that afternoon in 1988. And Dad and I had a nice chat over the 40-minute drive home. My family has always been close, so when we saw Mom standing in the driveway as we pulled up to the house, I figured she was just excited to see me.

But she was sobbing.

I assumed she’d gotten some bad news about her cancer while Dad was gone, so I jumped out of the car before it even came to a stop and I ran up to hug her. But the bad news was something entirely different ... something so random and so unexpected that the shock of the words literally didn't make sense to me: Miriam’s plane had gone down.

Miriam was a friend of mine who had spent the 1988 autumn semester in London studying under the auspices of Syracuse University. I’d just visited her over the Thanksgiving break, and we’d had an awesome time seeing the sights, exploring the museums and taking in all the shows we could afford on our college-student budgets. Among the four we saw were Les Misérables and what ended up being a definitive revival of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. Sondheim was just starting to appear on our collective radar, and we both agreed that seeing Follies together was a mountaintop experience for us to have shared over our magical week together in London.

But by December 21, I’d come home, a whole month had passed and I’d been so caught up in my finals and holiday preparations that I’d had no idea Miriam was flying back to the States that day—much less what flight she was on. Neither had my mom. But our friend Jody in Ohio did. And when the initial reports that Pan Am flight 103 had disappeared out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland, started washing over the newswires, Jody had called everyone she could think of.

Mom and Dad and I raced to the family room and crowded around the TV that crisp, sunny Iowa afternoon to see what we could find out about Miriam’s plane. It was the early days of CNN and 24-hour news, so we were able to get (spotty) information right away about the mysterious crash, along with grainy images of the wreckage shining dimly in the emergency lights that were working so hard to pierce the solstice blackness six time zones away. Dimly seeing what we could of it and haltingly learning more and more about it over the next hours was at once horrifying and comforting, filling us with both hopefulness and helplessness.

Over the next few months and weeks, the world came to learn about the bomb, the Libyans, the retribution, the embargoes, the bankruptcies. We cautiously wrapped our brains around the unthinkable efficiencies of global terrorism at the dawn of the Information Age. And the friends and families of the victims of the 103 bombing started experiencing the bizarre dichotomy of watching our personal tragedy play itself out on the world stage.

In the years since Miriam’s murder, I’ve befriended her parents and friends. I’ve gotten in touch with the roommates she lived with in London, none of whom had been on her plane with her that day. I’ve written pieces about my relatively removed perspective on the bombing that were published in newspapers and scholarly journals and read on NPR. And since I had been in London and had hung out with a lot of the murdered Syracuse students a month before the bombing, I’ve actually been interviewed by the FBI.

And as I’ve grieved and matured over the last twenty-nine years, I’ve discovered that I now tend to be efficiently emotionless when I hear about catastrophic tragedies like the 9/11 attacks and the Newtown massacre and the devastating 2017 hurricanes and the Tacoma Amtrak crash ... though I’ll still burst into tears over emotional pablum like Christmas cookie commercials.

Twenty-nine years ago today, the world learned what a volatile mix misanthropy and religion and blind nationalism can be in a global melting pot.

Twenty-nine years ago today, Miriam and her fellow passengers and their families and friends learned violently and unwillingly about harsh brutalities that the rest of the world got the relative luxury of absorbing over time.

Twenty-nine years ago today, I learned that the distant tragedies that so often happen to “other people” should never be observed as abstractions.

I discovered that news of plane crashes and acts of terrorism that play endlessly in 24-hour news cycles can be both disturbing and strangely comforting. I learned that life is precious, that there are no guarantees, that people who waste your time are robbing you of a precious and very limited commodity, that small gestures can make heroic impressions, that your pain and suffering and anguish and heartbreak both do and don't make you special, that no matter how bad it gets you should work to find solace in the fact that it will probably get better … or at least easier.

Twenty-nine years is enough time for someone to raise a child and send him or her off into the world. Enough time for eight presidential elections and four new Sondheim musicals. (Six, if you count Saturday Night and The Frogs.)

It’s enough time for a gangly, unsure college boy to cycle through four cars and eight houses and eight jobs and three cities as he grows into a successful (more or less), confident (more or less) man.

It’s enough time for him to realize that the world is not fair. That bad things happen to good people. That the bad people who did them don’t always get punished. That horrible tragedy gets easier to accept over time, even though it remains impossible to forget. That the hate that some people burn into your heart never entirely leaves ... and that the smug, satisfied self-righteousness you experience when you finally see images of the bloodied, abused corpse of Moammar Gadhafi—who denied to his last hopefully excruciating, terrified breath every credible report that he'd ordered the Pan Am bombing—feels powerfully good.

I often wonder what Miriam would be if she were alive today. Tony-winning actor? International journalist? Stay-at-home mom? She was among those people you just knew were going somewhere big with their lives. I’m sure that wherever the fates would have taken her, she’d be someone people knew about.

I also wonder if we would still be friends. We’d met that summer when we were singing and dancing in the shows at Darien Lake amusement park just outside Buffalo, New York. Our friendship lasted just seven months until she was murdered. I’m only barely in touch with the other friends I made at the park that summer. Miriam’s family and I aren’t in touch nearly as much as I’d like either (though her mother recently published a book of Miriam's writings along with essays from people who knew and loved her, including me).

Would Miriam and I have drifted apart as well?

Since at this point I’m the only one in control of our story, I choose to believe that by now I’d have sung in her wedding and befriended her kids on Facebook and marched in pink pussy hats with her in Washington and lost countless hours texting ridiculous memes back and forth with her.

And I’m pretty sure she’d have written the same story for me if our fates had been reversed.

Twenty-nine years ago today was the last, devastating act in a year that had shaken—and strengthened—my family to its core. It was the day my worldview changed from naive to guarded, from optimistic to cynical, from insular to secular.

It was the day my friend Miriam was murdered.

And it was just another day for most people.

And though the world continues to spin forward—as it should—and people’s memories continue to fade—as they do—I will never forget.

Waiting by a Window

The CD player in my car has eaten my Dear Even Hansen CD. No matter what button I push, so matter how sincerely I push it, the CD player insists it doesn't have a CD in it to spit out to me. But there's clearly a CD in the way when I try to slide another (show tune, natch) CD into the slot. I've reached the age where everything except NPR is just hideous, ear-exploding noise to me. So I'm driving everywhere in silence most of the day. With no show tunes to be found.

It's the first Monday in October

And that means the Supreme Court of the United States is convening and hearing the first arguments of its new term. Which means legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg is back reporting on NPR. I love everything I know about Nina: her unquestionable intelligence, her vast education and understanding of everything from arcane legal procedures to SCOTUS case law, her ability to filter and simplify and explain the continuum of information from Supreme Court hearings to the ramifications past and present of the Court's decisions, and the way she unfalteringly reports everything in a measured, authoritative, unbiased voice. I not only feel more informed and educated by her reporting, but I actually feel smarter because of it.

I'm still furious about Mitch McConnell's flagrantly defiant and proudly partisan denial of Merrick Garland's Constitutionally guaranteed right to a SCOTUS hearing last year solely because Barack Obama nominated him. I'm still furious that our Congress softballed Trump nominee and historically declared fascist Neil Gorsuch into Garland's rightful position on the court. But it's done. I don't trust Gorsuch and I have very rational fears about the ways he'll poison our legal discourse, but we're moving forward with a new term with him on the bench whether rational people like it or not.

I'm also furious and heartbroken about the mass shooting in Las Vegas and the terrible coincidence that it forms the cultural and political backdrop of this historic day in American jurisprudence. But with Nina Totenberg back to filing regular reports, I feel like I at least have a brilliant and steady captain at the helm as we collectively set out to navigate new and uncharted legal and sociopolitical waters.

"It's the last day of the public radio fund drive."

The ten most beautiful words in the global English language past, present and future.

Taylor. Only. Writes. Lyrics. That are. Torture.

Gym sound system: "Darling, I'm a nightmare dressed like a daydream"

Me: *calls to double my NPR pledge*

#ThatLyricIsStupid
#AndLazy
#AndClumsy
#AndBarelyParallel
#YoureTheProblemWithPopMusic
#TaylorSwiftlyGoAway

I want my NPR

Shouldn't there be some kind of secret code for overriding the NPR pledge drive blather if you're already a sustaining member on auto pay? I don't think I can weather another lighthearted host-to-host on-air conversation about the shade of heathered red that distinguishes this pledge drive's donor thank-you T-shirt from the last pledge drive's shirt.

Also: Target has boring lamps.

#KickYouAllInTheNutsJob

You know how sometimes you park somewhere and you get trapped in your car listening to a song you love?

I'm trapped in my car right now listening to NPR list this week's day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour lies, machinations and appalling scandals that spilled out of the man-boy administration and its expanding, fetid orbit. It's exhausting. And infuriating. And I feel like I need to know what our country is up against so I can't stop listening.