Ira Glass The Preacher

Nancy Franklin of The New Yorker has a piece about This American Life's morphing into television. It's a favorable piece, by and large, except for her critique of Glass's voice, which she artfully dubs a "rushing staccato mumble."

Well said.

What NPH finds compelling about the piece is Franklin's candid admission of her annoyance with the sacrosanct radio show. It has to do, this annoyance, with TAL's sermonic character, a character best illustrated in Glass's own words: “It’s the structure, essentially, of a sermon; you hear a little story from the Bible, then the clergyperson tells you what it means.”

To which Franklin replies, "Well, no wonder my head is exploding—meaning is being forced into it. When it comes to meaning, I prefer to grow my own."

NPH thinks Glass has a bad understanding of preaching and that Franklin has a bad understanding of This American Life. No good sermon simply tells you what a "little story" from the Bible means; it brings you into the story, explicates it and unfolds the character of God within it. Further, only some of the Bible is story. A sermon's also got to deal with poetry and argument.

And This American Life hardly forces meaning into your head. It tells stories and suggests a common theme or topic. Oftentimes NPH listens to a piece and things, "Wait: that doesn't really fit the theme they say it does." And that's okay. It's a listener's prerogative to take or leave the meaning suggested by the narrator. I mean, can a radio show really "force" any kind of meaning into your head?

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Viable Third

(Hat tip: Kansas City Soil)

Check out this local project, Viable Third. The project is seeking to improve life in a blighted urban community by pledging to not spend any money outside of it.

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Commercials as Entertainment

NPH is on vacation this week, enabling him to indulge in such luxuries as American Idol. Incidentally, the real entertainment during Fox's broadcast last night was not the parade of magnificently mediocre Idol wannabees, but rather Oleg the Cab Driver, the star of Fox's innovative eight-second commercial pods.

Viewers were treated to Oleg talking to Rosie O'Donnell and Oleg ripping on Donald Trump's hair. The spots actually started the night before on Fox's broadcast of 24, and the network plans to continue through the rest of the week.

Read about it here.

And watch two clips here:



What NPH finds intriguing about the spots is that they're not attached to any advertiser. They are original programming content run during the commercial breaks with the sole objective of keeping viewers from changing the channel or skipping through the ads via their DVR. Of course, their launch runs strangely close to the start of the Nielson ratings blitz, which has some people calling it nothing more than a stunt.

But NPH is intrigued. We think there's a real possibility here for television advertising time to be changed into something else. Could it be that viewers habits (aided by new technology) of skipping out on ads has finally caught the attention of programmers, so that the 30 second ad spot will soon be a thing of the past?

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Imus

It's a weighty matter, this Don Imus racial slur, and NPH thinks that neither the un-nuanced tarring and feathering nor the knee-jerk defensiveness is going to do any good. Here's what NPH thinks.

First, Imus said what he said. He called a basketball team full of African American women "nappy-headed hoes." Though the remark was made in the context of his shock comedy radio show, NPH doesn't think context explains the remark. It's inexcusable anywhere.

Second, Imus has profusely apologized (here on Friday and that here again today)for the remark, taking full responsibility and not bagging it with the standard issue "if I offended anyone" line. He's said it was wrong. He's said it was stupid. He's said it was inexcusable and he doesn't know why he said it. Further, he went on Al Sharpton's radio show (read the transcript here) knowing that Sharpton has called for Imus' firing. As far as public apologies go, especially public apologies for racist remarks, Imus is the best, most sincere NPH has ever seen.

Third, Sharpton and other African American figures who have called for Imus' firing have a good argument. These are men with daughters, and when Imus what he said they heard an insult to all African American women. Their calls for his firing are not over-the-top, and they're not opportunistic. They simply want some accountability.

So NPH (who listens to Imus whenever he can--though not last Wednesday) thinks that a firing (or at least a very serious suspension) is in order. No, Imus is not a racist, but, as a public figure with a massive popular following, he's got to be held to some kind of standard. You just can't say that kind of thing and walk away with a mea culpa, no matter how sincere or public it is.

At this point NPH would gain respect for him if he resigned.

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You Know What He Did?

One of the best reasons for the end of the Lenten blog hiatus. NPH has been struggling to not let this cat out of the bag.

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Acquire The What?

Jeff Sharlet's "The Revealer" is one of the best things out there for people interested in the interaction of culture and religion. Sharlet has written for a handful of major publications, and is regularly featured on programs like "On The Media."

He has a piece in the upcoming edition of Rolling Stone about the BattleCry campaign, a series of rallies enlisting teenagers in a fundamentalist "army" to do battle against "secularism" in all of its forms. If you've seen the documentary Jesus Camp, then this will seem like little more than an adolescent version of the same thing. But there's more going on here. They're both playing on the easily-stoked guilt of young people, but BattleCry involves teenagers in consciously pledging themselves to a puritannical "anti-secular" lifestyle that any reader will recognize as impossible to sustain (which is why, as the abstinence people have discovered, having kids take pledges just doesn't work).

NPH is interested in the phenomenon because we get material at the church for this kind of stuff all the time, most commonly for what are called "Acquire The Fire" rallies. As far as youth ministry goes, these people are the most enterprising and aggressive marketers out there. Which is interesting, because one of the genuine virtues of the BattleCry rhetoric seems to be its attention on the influence on media, marketing, and electronic culture on kids. Sharlett says on this week's On The Media that Luce's media critique is essentially the same as the one he got in his "Godless . . . leftless . . . media history course in college."

Consider this quote from Sharlet's piece:

When you enlist in the military, there's a code of honor," Luce preaches, "same as being a follower of Christ." His Christian code requires a "wartime mentality": a "survival orientation" and a readiness to face "real enemies." The queers and communists, feminists and Muslims, to be sure, but also the entire American cultural apparatus of marketing and merchandising, the "techno-terrorists" of mass media, doing to the morality of a generation what Osama bin Laden did to the Twin Towers. "Just as the events of September 11th, 2001, permanently changed our perspective on the world," Luce writes, "so we ought to be awakened to the alarming influence of today's culture terrorists. They are wealthy, they are smart, and they are real."

Yet kids who attend these rallies (drawn, first of all, by a glossy church mailer or the lure of a big headliner band) pass by tables full of merchandise they can buy, from cd's to T-shirts to hoodies to baseball caps.

The tension at the heart of it seems to be that it wants to shout down every form of "modern" and "secular" culture, yet in order to do that it has to depend on very modern and very secular techniques of marketing and publicity. I mean, what's more modern than a massive rally? Ever since the early revivals in America, evangelical Christians have depended heavily on the spectacle of the rally to coerce conversion and commitment. It's thoroughly modern. Furthermore, it doesn't work.

Which is why NPH is not all that worried about Ron Luce and his campaign to enlist teenagers in a "Holy War." Teenagers are more resistant to this kind of garbage than hucksters like Luce can recognize.

Note: hear Sharlett's interview with Bob Garfield of On The Media here.

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It's Time To Come Back

Whew. That was a long time.

It was a good, long, time.

It was no too-busy-to-post stretch either. It was an intentional hiatus from blogland, both writing and reading, that lasted from Ash Wednesday to yesterday, Easter. It was a lenten discipline. And as far as those disciplines go, it was beneficial. With the time he had been spending cycling through blogs and looking for things to post about, NPH substituted a good deal more book and magazine reading. The Christian Century had some great pieces, as did the Presbyterian Outlook, including this one by San Francisco Theological Seminary President Phil Butin.

As far as book reading goes, NPH got stuck into an Emergent YS publication, "The Out of Bounds Church?" by Steve Taylor, as well as Stephen Fowl's "Engaging Scripture," Lewis Mumford's "Technics and Civilization," and Kenda Creasy Dean's "Practicing Passion." Did NPH finish any of those books yet? No. But we're squarely engaged in all of them.

Oh, and we re-watched, in about 20 minute increments, our favorite movie ever.

As we've found with other lenten abstentions (most notably coffee and car radio), staying away from blogs and blogging actually takes away the appetite for it. You get to where you don't miss it. And so when you start it up again you're quite conscious about it, and you tell yourself that you're not going to let it come to dominate your life and attention as it had before. All the while, you know that it probably will.

Perhaps it's a step in the right direction that NPH refused to get back on the blog this morning until he had left the house and gone to a nearby coffeeshop.

Or maybe that's just what we're telling ourselves. In any case, good to be back.

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