This American Love/Hate Relationship
A typical TAL listener, by madabandon, CC-licensed.
Without doubt, there are reasons to make fun of This American Life.
“In what cultural anthropologists are calling a “colossal achievement” in the study of white-collar professionals, the popular radio show has successfully isolated all 7,442 known characteristics of college graduates who earn between $62,500 and $125,000 per year and feel strongly that something should be done about global warming.”
(This American Life Completes Documentation Of Liberal, Upper-Middle-Class Existence, The Onion, April 20, 2007 | Issue 43•16)
One the one hand, there is the self-celebrating buzz of the “upper middle-class existence” mocked by The Onion. There are the ad segments at the end of the show when Ira Glass tries - more or less convincingly - to convey the excitement caused by driving a Volkswagen or a Saab in the U. S. of A. Since the car has to be mildly yuropean after all, giving you that special feeling of being one of the chosen few without showing off too much, still sustaining a certain extent of modesty - i doubt that BMW or Daimler would ever feature ads on This American Life. It would confuse the target audience. Volvo will do, though. But wait, now we’re getting way too close to the tone of the original Onion article.
Then again - from time to time TAL comes up with very touching and absolutely insane stories. Like the story a cryonics enthusiast from California without any form of formal education in the medical field who started freezing dead bodies in the 1960s in his garage and ultimately lied to his clients, letting the corpses of their relatives decompose. Or how about Jerry Springer’s pre-trash TV career narrated with the highest attention to detals? Or the career of a deformed baby doll in a gigantic toy store, exposing everyday racism in America?
Stories like that simply cannot be told on German airwaves. Thanks for being sooo highbrow, Deutschlandradio. I guess it would be nice if you would be largely dependent on direct financial support from your listeners instead of living off the ever-flowing influx of GEZ money. Maybe your programming would become worth listening.
Tags: deutschland, radio, usa