To: \u00a0National Public Radio (cc: Minnesota Public Radio)
\nFrom: \u00a0Mitch Berg; not really a pollyanna
\nRe: \u00a0The Season For The Wheezin’<\/p>\n
Dear various PRs,<\/p>\n
Last Thursday was Thanksgiving. \u00a0And like every week after every Thanksgiving, I know what that means, especially\u00a0vis-a-vis\u00a0<\/em>Public Radio programming.<\/p>\n To listen to your broadcasts, we are on the precipice of a national mental health plague, something Americans only survive with the aid of therapy, drinking or an endless slathering on of (wry, fashionable-understated) cynicism. \u00a0 A time of year where all ceremony is onerous, all family members are insane or intolerable, all travel is wearing, all human interaction is a layer of plastic fakery over a rotten, frothing core of anxiety and desperation.<\/p>\n That’s right – the Holiday season.<\/p>\n Public radio programming will be clogged with with newscasters droning on about seasonal mental health afflictions; with “entertainers” jabbering about the only kind of get-togethers any of them seem to have – ugly, dysfunctional ones; with obscure writers and artists elevated (?) to radio commentators, testifying to the ordeal we’re all about to go through.<\/p>\n Point taken, Public Radio – the upper-middle-class, over-miseducated, secular (wildly-disproportionally secular-jewish) crowd is exquisitely bored with the whole thing.<\/p>\n But might I suggest you poke your collective (heh) nose outside your Subaru-driving, Oberlin\/Bard\/Saint Olaf-educated, Whole-Foods-shopping, free-range-alpaca-wearing, urban-liberal-privilege-wallowing, Israel-divesting, coffee-shop-music-loving, prematurely gray, bumper-sticker-clad Obama-shilling bubble and take note that for a whole lot of people, perhaps the majority, the holidays\u00a0aren’t about mindless personal drama<\/em>, and bring us some measure of joy?<\/p>\n I mean, fine – you’ll joke about how pathetic you find it. \u00a0That’s fine – and nothing new!<\/p>\n Just saying – perhaps you can put down the bottle and take your head out of the oven and look around a bit?<\/p>\n That is all.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" To: \u00a0National Public Radio (cc: Minnesota Public Radio) From: \u00a0Mitch Berg; not really a pollyanna Re: \u00a0The Season For The Wheezin’ Dear various PRs, Last Thursday was Thanksgiving. \u00a0And like every week after every Thanksgiving, I know what that means, especially\u00a0vis-a-vis\u00a0Public Radio programming. To listen to your broadcasts, we are on the precipice of a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24,4,79,349],"tags":[249],"class_list":["post-57449","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-war","category-media","category-slander-files","category-urban-liberal-privilege-liberal-tyranny","tag-open-letters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57449","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=57449"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57449\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":57454,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57449\/revisions\/57454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=57449"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=57449"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=57449"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}