Why I Heart Ira Glass

There are mediated and unmediated experiences that you just have to feel, and that you can barely explain. I was sorry, for instance, to watch the Detroit Tigers go down last night, especially on a game that was so riddled with errors. It doesn't conform to my Cinderella-story narrative about how Detroit could come back -- not just the team, but the City... just like the fact that the Yankees lost the World Series two months after 9/11 doesn't fit.

Baseball is just like that, for me. How I Met Your Mother did a funny run a couple of weeks ago about the men getting teary-eyed over Field of Dreams while the women made fun of it and just didn't get it. I howled. In its own way, that scene deserves a massive h/t for saying something true and saying it funny all at once.

I'm not always as deft at explaining my little mediated moments and why they're important. A friend in a bar who's a massive hockey fan pooh-pooh's my love for Baseball, explains why it's boring, and I can't explain exactly why he's wrong. I just know that he is, and sadly, that there's probably no way for me to explain it to him. You either get it or you don't.

You either get it or you don't is the ultimate mark of failure for a writer. It's the kind of thing that we're not supposed to say. And the truth is that, in my baseball example, there are others who have said it better than I could: the first chapter of Don Delillo's Underworld, Mamet, I think, when he explains how Baseball is a series of one-on-one duels; (was that Mamet? I can't remember) Field of Dreams and Bull Durham... I could probably come up with others, but the truth is I can't call them up immediately, because I don't have the need to. I understand baseball. I love it, and though we've had a rough time here and there, I'm amused mightily by the fact that the older I get, the more the game starts to mean to me.

And how, now that it's going away again, in its yearly fashion, I'm a little bit mournful. Hockey's a laugh. And football has some diversion. But it's not baseball. You either get it or you don't.

There are plenty of you either get it or you don't moments in my life, and it bothers me. I wish I could articulate how it felt to be an American in Canada in those months after 9/11, where the casual Anti-Americanism I'd been hearing for years suddenly came like hot needles -- sometimes even from friends. But I can't. I try, often, on this blog, to explain how despairing and lonely it feels to be an American who believes in American ideals, having to watch your country seemingly slip further into xenophobia and delusion. But every time I try, I know at the end, that I've failed. I, who trade in words, don't have the right ones to make others understand. A bigger testimony to your own impotence, your failure, your utter inadequacy -- well, I can't think of it. A writer without words. A man left shaking his head, whispering that ultimate admission of failure: you either get it or you don't. And the unsaid coda: if you don't, I can't help you.

This American Life, Ira Glass' weekly exploration of the small and true on American Public Radio, (Glass is pictured at left) has recently become for me the great exploder of You either get it or you don't. I love this show, and it's hard to explain just how much. For me, it embodies all those good and decent and admirable things about Americans and the American spirit. It takes me down roads and emotional pathways that I'd never understood before. It connects me to people I will never meet. It grounds me and expands my world, and it does it in the best way that only radio can: in a shockingly intimate broadcast tailored just for one.

I'm so happy and grateful to discover this show at this point in my life. In the early 1990's, when I first graduated from University, I had a job at a small educational TV network here in Canada. Part of the daily routine that I treasured was that I was able to listen to the CBC Radio Program Morningside every day. Something about that show, and its host, the late, great Peter Gzowski, reached me. Though I'd already been in Canada more than a decade by that point, it was through listening to that show that I swear, to this day, I finally started to understand Canada.

Now, This American Life has reintroduced me to the America I know. I thought it had gone away. But it hasn't. Every week, there it is. It's a measure of some relief to find it again. Next year, the show migrates to TV, via Showtime. I really wonder if it's going to work. I hope so. But however successful or unsuccessful the TV incarnation becomes, it won't ever reach the heights of the radio show. Not for me. And that's a difficult thing for a TV writer to admit.

When I write TV, when I watch TV, I'm forever aware of how this entertainment has been crafted for an audience of millions. This American Life is made only for me. Just for me.

And...you either get that or you don't.

This American Life is finally available as a weekly podcast. Each week, each show can be downloaded for free on Itunes or from their website at WBEZ Chicago.