Confessions of a Public Radio Talk Show Caller

Yesterday afternoon I walked into the kitchen just before 2 and heard a familiar voice on the radio. I realized it was the end of a conversation with Karen Armstrong in an archive edition of Think on KERA-FM, and it was a program I had called with a question when it was live last summer.

I had to chuckle, because other fans of this program had already heard me once in the span of a week, on xmas eve, when they replayed an interview with Oscar winning costume designer Deborah Landis. I was the first caller in that line up, to ask about employment opportunities and degrees in the field; my daughter is studying costume design in college. Ms. Landis gave a hopeful and comprehensive answer to my question.

The conversation I heard concluding yesterday was with religious scholar Armstrong, and my query was regarding the growth and spread of the large religions of the world. I had an “ah ha!” moment as her response filled perfectly a gap in my general understanding of the morphology of Old World established religions versus small localized New World religions. She was thorough as she described what I had wondered about—those “industrial” religions are urban in nature and rose in economic conditions far different from the land-based hunting and gathering and agrarian religions. Of course! She clearly linked science and religion (they are not separate at all, but in some ways, co-conspirators, ever since Newton used religion to explain why the sun circled the Earth. Which has, of course, since been debunked, but the tie of religion to science was never sundered at the time of that debunking).

I sometimes download the podcast, if I get to it before they’ve taken the link off the web site. They used to only stick around for about 10 days. This evening I went looking for the Armstrong interview and realized local listeners got me three for three so far this week. The program I missed yesterday was a repeat of the interview with (former) Gourmet editor Ruth Reichl. I’d called to ask about recipes as artifacts (I helped a friend edit The Ellis Island Immigrant Cookbook, and some of those recipes are pure artifact, almost uncookable, with odd ingredients and no instructions. But they all have great stories!) Her answer was, as usual, perfect, and set me to thinking about how to preserve family recipes for my children. I guess I’ll have to get out the camera and add some more pages to the blog.

I’m embarrassed to think about what the next couple of repeat programs will be about this week. I suppose I could be on those also: I call the program about once a month. I doubt they’re scheduling these programs to highlight my stunning questions. I think we just have great taste in which are the best topics.

Getting on the air

It doesn’t take long after the hour-long programs start before I decide to call in. I don’t know if they recognize my voice, though when I hear myself talk I’m surprised at the pauses as I think about how to best phrase my question clearly. I suppose that is distinctive. You don’t get much of a shot at asking it before they drop you off the air again. As a listener, I remind myself of Diane Rehm, though I don’t think I have spasmodic dysphonia. Sad to say, I think my phrasing also sounds like Dr. Condoleezza Rice in senate hearings, always pausing to think in micro-bursts as she gave non-answers to important questions.

I recently heard a description of a character in a television program on a cable channel I don’t get. He is at his best on call-in radio, and makes notes about what he’s going to say, and the reviewer tended to suggest his preparation was excessive. I think it makes perfect sense. I’ve done a lot of public speaking as a park ranger, but for only a couple of hundred people at a time, not in a broadcast-sized audience. (I find that daunting—how do people get in front of a mic or camera and banter extemporaneously for so long for during pledge drives?) I try not to trip over my own words or ideas, so on a pad of paper I’ll add keywords to my list or cross things off as they’re discussed while I wait. The great thing about public radio is you can ask a fairly complex question if you can be concise about it, just giving enough information so the listeners know what you’re talking about. Questions that work on public radio would make the DJ’s eyes glaze over on regular commercial radio.

So, for my four or so regular blog readers, three of my 15 minutes of fame are available this week in the KERA-FM podcast lineup. I was the first caller in on each program. It sounds a little silly when the programs are all bunched together in one week, but as a rule I’m not a radio hog, I take my turn and pace myself. Visit KERA-FM’s Think podcast page and look for the most recent (as of this writing) podcasts on Dec. 24, 28, or 29.

Darwin, Lamark, Galton, and the American Museum of Natural History

If you’re interested in tracing the history of scientific thought, of how ideas evolved, were viewed, practiced, and how they ultimately could go terribly wrong to effect social policy in an adverse way, there is perhaps no better place to start than with the birth of Evolution and how it affected popular culture and governmental behavior. One can go back to ancient civilizations, religions, and philosophy to study this, but for sheer charisma, the heinous interpretations and actions resulting from the misunderstandings of Darwin’s important work are current today. And the antidote of more information and common sense is not far away, if one goes searching for it.

I did graduate work in Environmental Philosophy at the University of North Texas for several years, and while my employment today doesn’t often entail using the understanding of earlier world views, it remains a strong interest. In conversation if I encounter someone who is interested in but unfamiliar with the topic, I have one favorite essay as a starting place to give a comprehensive view of how codified Social Darwinism came to be. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908 – 36,” in Donna Haraway’s Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science (Rutledge, 1989) is a great starting point. Who knew that the eugenics ideas adopted at a natural history museum could end up strongly influencing how inspections would be conducted at Ellis Island, and eventually the drafting of restrictive, Social Darwinist immigration quotas in 1921 and 1924?

Today, I found an essay in DailyKOS, “Big Mike and the Paper Hanger,” that I’ll print and tuck into the Haraway book. It’s a very nice overview of science and mathematics going off the rails when enough information and good techniques aren’t available (or weren’t completely understood at the time).

Charles Darwin’s half cousin, Francis Galton, like Jean-Baptiste Lamark, contributed a great deal to modern science, but along the way, got some of it terribly wrong. Modern scientists have found more suitable applications for some of these important theories, and discarded others. As these early scientists and mathematicians looked for applications for their theories, civilizations literally trembled, and the poor and the apparently genetically inferior were dealt with.

In my collection of books from a family estate is one from 1877 called The Jukes: A Study in Crime, Pauperism, Disease, and Heredity, by R.L. Dugdale, Member of the Executive Committee of the Prison Association, NY. Mine is the fourth printing from 1888, Putnam. It’s quite a vile slim volume that comes from a collection called “Questions of the Day.” The index doesn’t list sources, but the book may well contain reference to Galton. This perverse application of a pseudo science is a relic that one would hope is of bygone days, yet today we have hate-mongers and racists spouting similar ideas. Ethnic cleansing is happening today in war zones around the world; and here at home attitudes toward immigration and immigrants are as bigotted as the old Chinese exclusion act. There is no fact, only subjective opnion, behind the hysteria preached on some of the popular news networks. It comes straight out of Galton’s misapplied “science.” The realism of the 1920s fed into the surreal Nazi behavior of the 1930s and 1940s. We’ve settled back into the realism mode, where suggestion and innuendo place immigrants with darker skin as inferior and who must be blocked or deported.

I look forward to the rest of this book, by whoever is behind the moniker Devilstower.