Confessions of a Fud

I was the youngest person in my graduating class at Ponca City Senior High School, and for many years after I was the youngest person, or nearly so,  in any group that accepted me or to which I sought admission. This was so despite the fact that I looked old enough when I began frequenting beer halls, taverns, and honkytonks that I was never carded. It was the best of both worlds.

I was not, then or now, an incurious person; I was a doubter and a questioner, and often I would pursue some piddling assertion about "the way things always have been" back to the edge of recorded history if I suspected that the real story was to be found there. It was a characteristic behavior that served me well as a broadcast interviewer. My friends and family continue to find it both annoying and a marker of my identity.

It is not true, as was foretold in the Class Prophecy at Ponca City High, that I am today Professor Alan Bickley, the Man Who Knows Everything. Gaps in my knowledge as broad as the Grand Canyon and as deep as the Marianas Trench abound. I come up especially short on popular culture, a subject that has scholarly status in addition to being self-evidently something that most people imbide as effortlessly as they breathe air. I confess to have missed whole decades of popular television shows; rock bands have come and gone and their members have gone gray, and I have no memory of them when they mattered. Titles of middlebrow novels and the faces of celebrities of decades long past mean nothing to me.

The practical consequences of my spotty acquaintance with pop culture are not socially disabling; rather, my ignorance is like Tom Sawyer's limp, and it stands in droll contrast to my knowledge of, for example, working class history, Golden Age radio, and the music of Bob Wills. But there are consequences, and what I have written above is prologue to a brief mention which I hope will prove cathartic.

Every Saturday and Sunday morning for the past four weeks Suzy and I have rolled out of bed to watch UP With Chris Hayes, MSNBC's alternative to the dreary template of cable news with its disaster or scandal or celebrity disintegration-unto-death of the day. UP is miles above the average terrain because its producers value intelligence, conversation, and wit, because they believe that the attention span of UP's audience is untested, even by a two-hour commitment, and because they have shut the door to the cheerless mopes who clutter the sets of all broadcast public affairs program save this one. By this I mean the recycled political party hacks, the lobbyists, the academics-for-hire, the media has-beens, not-quites, and never-will-be's whose contributions are the stale talking points that they carry from venue to venue like the unsalable daubings that appear in "art festivals" around middle America.

Chris Hayes is an unexpected gift to audiences who have been fed mostly straw and little of nutrient value. He asks pointed questions that prove his claim to have been boning up on the subject all week, and he responds to answers intelligently in ways that inform while letting the conversation take unexpected turns.

Chris Hayes is 32 years old. His high, nasal voice would have disqualified him as a broadcaster before, let us say, 1965. His rapid speech with rising-end intonation tends to be incoherent when he wants to make a point, a condition which I have noticed in a great many people under 40 years of age. He has not been able, if he has even tried, to persuade his guests not to talk over each other. And, to get around to my point, he and his youthful guests drop pop cultural references liberally, breaking my attention, forcing me to look back to the vast, dark arroyo of my pop cultural obtuseness for a clue to what is meant by Charlie and Ents, funky cold Medina, Keith Moon, and the like. And when I say drop, I mean that their voices drop as if to exclude the dim bulb sitting in a Madison, Wisconsin living room and to solidify the Class-of-2010 bond between members of this group of five high achievers. It is tedious, it is petty, and it bespeaks an arrogance that doesn't mix well with the democratizing intentions of the UP company.

That's all I have to say about that.