On the Road

I used to be an NPR junkie. I would roll into the university at 11 AM or so. This was life as a graduate student, when responsibilities are low. You have a few classes to attend, and the professors often didn't want to schedule them too early. On the way to work, I'd listen to WAMU, which is the DC affiliate for NPR.

WAMU is weird. Most of the week it is NPR. But for a few hours every afternoon, it would play bluegrass music. I don't know if they still do that, but they used to. On Sundays, these days, you'd hear radio shows from the 40s because some fan of old radio shows thought they deserved airing, and apparently, there are enough fans to listen to it.

In particular, I'd listen to the Derek McGinty show. Despite a name which sounds like some Irish fella, McGinty is African-American. The stereotype of an African American host is a decidely left-wing preacher type a la Al Sharpton, who rails against the white establishment.

McGinty hardly fits this stereotype. Sure, he's still somewhat left leaning as a commentator, but he's described himself as a fiscal conservative and social liberal, which would make him almost a Clinton type (except Clinton/Gore were relatively moderate on both).

Despite this, what made his show interesting was the wide variety of topics he'd discuss, topics that would be considered too obscure or too tame for an Al Sharpton type. For example, he had a show once about how juggling could help you become a success. The point was that everyone typically starts off as a poor juggler, but through hard work, they can work to be better. Even the best jugglers aren't perfect, and do miss, but this is OK.

Clearly, the guy promoting this idea was something of a motivational speaker. McGinty must have looked a bit puzzled, and the guy asked him what he was thinking. He was thinking that this was a radio show, and having him try juggling probably didn't convey as much on the radio. That was intelligent.

Or one day, a guy was complaining why computer software wasn't like building architecture or building cars. They should be just as reliable he argued, and they weren't. McGinty pointed out that we ask software to do more and more as time goes on, and that's not always the same for cars or buildings. That was an excellent observation, which not many people could make.

Once a month, McGinty would invite the computer guys which were John Gilroy and Tom Piwowar. They would answer questions about Macs and PCs. They are pretty good at explaining computer stuff to those who don't know that much about computers. Initially, McGinty didn't know that much either, but he started to do more with his own computer, and got a lot better, to the point where he'd offer some basic advice. Not everyone would bother learning more about a computer, and would be happy in their ignorance.

Another time, McGinty discussed racism---in Brazil. He was talking to someone who said that while the average Brazilian would tell you that there is no racism in Brazil, black and white generally co-exist quite friendly with one another, there was a glass ceiling for blacks in Brazil. The people at the very top of industry and government tended to be white.

Or the time where they invited a guy who was talking about men in the 30s and 40s who were obtaining games that they played when they were little kids, especially using the toys in ways that they weren't designed. This included burning, using Lincoln logs as projectiles, and talking about the various shortcomings of the toys out there. As McGinty himself had grown up middle-class, he remembered having these kinds of toys as well, and people called him reminsicing their childhood.

I had recounted this story to some graduate students in computer science and they began recounting computer games they played when they were young, which was in the 80s. When you grow up, there's a sense that you are playing in your own universe. Parents, however, are advertised incessantly, and so are their kids. (I love the phrase "ravenous, ravenous, rhinoceros" which was The Simpson's take on "hungry, hungry, hippos"). As the kids play with the games, it probably doesn't dawn on them that there are hundred of thousands, if not millions, of kids playing these games.

When they come back as adults and begin their collective nostalgia, they begin to realize that they weren't the only ones doing this. The generation of kids growing up can say the same about computer games they play.

Then, Derek McGinty decided to leave radio. He wanted to try television out. Bryant Gumbel, formerly of the Today show, wanted to create his own news show and wanted McGinty to join him. That didn't work out so well. Gumbel did then go on to host Real Sports, an HBO program about life beyond the playing field, and McGinty, who he'd refer to as "D-Mac" (a la Tracy McGrady's, T-Mac), joined him for some segments. To me, McGinty hasn't been the same since he left the show, though it's always interesting listening to Kojo Nnamdi, who replaced Derek and now has his own show, mostly for his elegant accent.

McGinty, for my money, was one of the most intelligent and fair radio commentators out there. He wasn't dogmatic to the left, nor dogmatic to the right. He wasn't standing on a soapbox lecturing others about this or that. He'd listen. He'd have great questions. His breadth of knowledge on different topics was astonishing, from DC local politics, to computers, to local sports.

Sometimes I wonder how he'd have fared if he had a show on PBS instead of Charlie Rose, to whom people often say is an intelligent interviewer.

As the years passed, I started listening to other radio. On 9/11, I was actually listening to Howard Stern, something I had been listening to for a few months, while not listening to NPR. I recall hearing about planes crashing to the towers, and then flipped to NPR unsure that this wasn't Stern playing some weird joke, only hearing news about the president talking about education in Florida, before heading to a class, then leaving to hear of the aftermath.

I stopped listening to Howard Stern once I found sports radio. Nowadays that's what I listen to. If I get on the road early, I listen to Mike and Mike in the morning. If I roll out late, it's Tony Kornheiser. Mr. Tony is about to go off the air to prep for Monday Night Football, a gig he was tapped with. MNF, which was shown on ABC for years and years, has moved to Sundays on ABC. Meanwhile, ESPN will host MNF on Mondays. We'll see how it works out. I suspect Theismann, who co-hosts the show, doesn't particularly care for it, though he's been rather gracious on the air. Kornheiser, for his part, pretends things will go awfully, and is apprehensive about staying up late to do the show, which typically ends around midnight, two hours past his usual bedtime.

From time to time, I find myself listening to NPR, although far rarer than before. Today, I was listening to three things. The first was a local band formed at the University of Maryland called Might Could. These are Andy Tillotson, Tim McCaskey, Luis Nasser, and Aaron Geller. Three of them are graduate students, two in physics, the other in chemistry. Luis ("Gordo") was just about to complete his Ph.D.

Their music sounds a bit like some guitar stuff I have, though I haven't played in a while. They also perform as Motherbrain! which plays acoustical (almost) versions of video games such as Super Mario. I didn't play these games as I grew up, mostly since I would have played Atari or Intellivision in my youth, and my parents weren't really going to pay to have their kids play video games all day.

The following story was about a Jewish Pole whose mother had been hidden from the Nazis, and how Poland has now begun to embrace its Jewish history, to the point where they are almost seen reverentially. In particular, Spielberg's film, Schindler's List helped to make Krakow popular as a place for tourists to visit. The woman, a reporter, goes to Poland to find the family that helped her mother, and what she discovers about Poland when she arrived.

This was followed by a short story by Jhumpa Lahiri's The Interpreter of Maladies read, I believe, by filmmaker Mira Nair.

Although I'm not Indian, I am somewhat familiar with Indian culture, at least, among those who have higher education. This story is about a man and his wife, who have moved in a new house, that has all sorts of Christian paraphenalia throughout. The wife is fascinated by all these things. The husband, more conservative, feels that they should be removed, as they are Hindus. It is a story of nostalgia, of how he remembers being a student at M.I.T., how he kept his college books even though he rarely referred to them, how he was lonely, and eventually decided to marry this woman (Twinkle?), an arranged marriage, of how they married in India, and now this situation, where he wonders if he's married a complete stranger, after only knowing her four months.

It hits all the issues that an Indian that moved to America would think of, from college, to food, to mothers giving advice, to the desire to keep some kind of heritage. Cities that are familiar to techies are mentioned from Cambridge, Massachusetts to Palo Alto.

These are the kinds of stories that authors are writing more of, where they show a great deal of inside knowledge of how life is lived. I recall a scene from Napoleon Dynamite where he works with chickens, and the guys who are hiring them are elderly Idahoan coots that drink an egg concoction in a pitcher. While that part, I'm sure, was a small exaggeration (I almost wanted to say, eggs-agerration, well, there, I've gone and done it), I'm sure working with chickens was something only someone who had done it would have even thought to commit to film.

The exodus of brain talent coming from India (and to a lesser extent, Pakistan and Sri Lanka) coming to the United States has been occuring for perhaps thirty years, and lagged the mass immigration of Chinese and Koreans by maybe ten years or so, has meant a great deal to the American economy. This is particularly strange for India, since it does have vast swathes of poverty, and reflects a decision to educate a small group very well, at the expense of universal education, in hopes that this will pay off.

This course of action may be more natural to a society whose class differences have a long history. The country's caste system still has a strong hold. Thus, having an educated elite may not seem that unnatural. Most of the educated elite don't quite think of themselves that way. To some extent, they live separated from the rest of the country and don't think of themselves as necessarily better or worse than everyone else, except in the quality of their education. There's also, to be fair, not a strong sense of trying to raise the literacy of India either (part of that may be a government that isn't really free from corruption).

Really, NPR's strength is not, as I've stated before, breaking stories. They're not so good at that. They're much better at finding personal stories to tell, of people that don't necessarily make news.

Overall, this was a good listen. I'm planning to head to Bethesda to listen to Might Could, assuming the NPR segment doesn't cause a huge flood of people to arrive.