Just Stop

I know, I know. I shouldn’t write this.

Not because this man’s devout followers will inevitably descend upon this blog post like jackals. (Do your frickin’ worst. I’ll even leave your troll comments here. I won’t delete them, as long as you utilize Webster’s Dictionary and leave the four-letter bombs out of it. It’ll say so much more about you than it’ll say about this essay.)

I shouldn’t write this because of how much I admired the object of this man’s nonsensical armchair psychoanalysis.

I shouldn’t write this because I think maybe this man didn’t get enough attention from his mommy, so he’s got to compensate now. (Speaking of compensation. Big man. Impressive. Bring others down, even if they’re dead – before they’re even buried. Way to prove your manhood.)

I shouldn’t write this because of this man’s raging case of psychological projection.

I shouldn’t write this at all, because by writing about this man, I will merely spread the public awareness of him – of his offensive remarks, and of his very existence as a media figure and as a miserable human being – to more people than he frankly deserves.

But I just spent a couple of weeks with fine people, teaching other potentially fine people how to march and how to conduct and how to error-detect-and-correct but most importantly how important it is to be decent to each other because that’s the best way to start getting positive things accomplished, and then I’ve got to return to the world of this?

“Rush Limbaugh on Tuesday tied Robin Williams’ death, which sheriffs believe was a suicide, to the ‘leftist worldview.’

“A caller on Limbaugh’s radio show lamented how much coverage the media has given to Williams rather than to other news stories, and asked Limbaugh, ‘What do you think the political reason for their doing this is?’

“The conservative radio host first discussed his concern that people commit suicide for the attention.

“‘The thing I worry about, I really do, they’re making such heroism out of this that I hope it doesn’t inspire a lot of copycats by people seeking the same kind of fame,’ he said. ‘To kill yourself is one way to get the media to spend a lot of time talking about you, if you want to be talked about.’

“He then said he didn’t think that the media’s coverage of Williams was driven by politics, but he said it was a factor.

“‘But I don’t think that the politics is driving it. I think there was, on the part of media and Hollywood, genuine affection for the guy that is driving it, but there is politics,’ he said. ‘If you notice the coverage is focused on how much he had, but it wasn’t enough.’

“‘Now, what is the left’s worldview in general? What is it? If you had to attach not a philosophy but an attitude to a leftist worldview, it’s one of pessimism and darkness, sadness. They’re never happy, are they? They’re always angry about something. No matter what they get, they’re always angry,’ Limbaugh continued. ‘They are animated in large part by the false promises of America, because the promises of America are not for everyone, as we see each and every day.’

“The story behind Williams death, fits with liberals’ outlook on the world, according to Limbaugh.

“‘He made everybody else laugh but was miserable inside. I mean, it fits a certain picture, or a certain image that the left has,’ he said. ‘Talk about low expectations and general unhappiness and so forth.’”

Talk about it, indeed.

Rush needs to shut up.

Sorry. As a kid I was told that this phrase is not the one we ought to use. And perhaps it was my initial, knee-jerk, snap-judgment response. So, to my teachers and my parents, I say, sorry.

Ordinarily I would now suggest many possible behavioral adjustments that might make Rush’s life better, happier, more productive – as well as the lives of anyone who chances to listen to him, on purpose or not.

Ordinarily I might go on for a bit about the Golden Rule … or the concept of empathy … or the concept of compassion … or at the very least the idea that knee-jerk reactions and snap judgments usually are made without all the proper information that would otherwise better inform the reacting or judging person.

Ordinarily I might express how appalled I am that some people, particularly those in position to shout it from the media rooftops (who are therefore not only prone to shout but paid to shout), cannot see past their own profession or their own beliefs, and thus cannot avoid making everything all about politics, all the time. Right-wingers commit suicide, too, y’know. So do centrists. So do people who don’t give a wet slap about politics. So do people who perceive that they have been placed in unsolvable situations by the beliefs and policy decisions of other people, about whom they can do nothing.

Ordinarily I would do those things, because I’m a teacher (but also, I hope, because I’m an okay human being). My job is to deal with children who haven’t been on earth a super-long time. Who maybe haven’t grasped these ideas, not by any fault of their own, other than they’ve not had a lot of experience, comparatively, with these ideas. My job – my instinct – is to try to present these thoughts, make these suggestions, in such a way that they might take away a fresh perspective, that they might learn from them. Not because I told them so, but because these ideas contribute to decent and civilized human relations, and also their lives may be less stressful if they keep them in mind.

Rush has been on earth for sixty-three years now. You’d think he would have grasped some of these, either through personal experience or observation of others or something.

Apparently not.

Obviously not.

Maybe it’s an entertainment-industry persona. Maybe if you actually talk to the guy, he comes off as not “radio Rush” but “human-being Rush”. Maybe, to paraphrase a favorite fictional character, he does care about anything, or anyone.

After all, we are now being treated to anecdotes about Robin Williams’ off-stage persona – for example, how, even though he was a “wild and crazy guy” on stage, he always expressed a caring attitude toward stagehands and production assistants and other entertainment-industry “little people”. American entertainment is littered with examples of people who were one thing on stage, and another when the lights went down.

So I’d like to leave open that possibility in Rush’s case.

But the problem is, movie stars’ performances mostly inspire their fans and followers to admire them, and to go see another of their movies. I don’t know how many people watch, say, Tom Hardy as Bane or Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter … and then go out and treat other people the same horrible way, just because they saw and heard what remarkable things those actors did to make those characters come to life.

Y’know … I was about to suggest that Rush is in a different position within society, one in which his on-stage behavior – the way he says things and what he actually says – does have the opportunity to encourage his fans and followers to think and feel certain things and then to go and act on those beliefs, to behave in ways that do dramatically affect other people’s lives – regardless of whether he’s a good or awful person away from the spotlight.

But I don’t think that’s fair, because you can take that last paragraph, rip out the name “Rush” and plug in the name “Mother Theresa” or “the Pope” or name-your-universally-beloved-public-figure … and the paragraph would still be true. Charles Barkley once said that just because he was a successful NBA basketball player, that didn’t mean he felt he should be seen as a role model. To which I remember saying, sorry, man, it’s out of your hands.

Instead, perhaps, my thoughts boil down to this:

Stop, Rush.

And unfortunately, because I’m probably not the only person who will pen a scathing reply to your utterance, you will not be encouraged to heed this advice. Quite the contrary.

And yeah, I’m a little bit of a leftist and you just damn well bet I’m angry, but not for the reasons your political stripe causes you to believe.

I’m angry at you.

I’m angry at what you say, and how you say it, and how it belittles the people that you don’t like, and how it encourages other people to behave inhumanely. Damn right I’m angry at you.

But I’m not so angry that I would wish physical or other harm upon you, no indeed. My worldview is not so dark that I think that physical violence solves anything, or that I think people who believe differently than I do are automatically evil or “takers” or drains on society or any of the rest of that crap that we’ve been subjected to for some time now.

But I’ve been subjected to it for long enough now, I think.

So, Rush, just stop.

Don’t stop and think.

Don’t stop and consider.

Don’t stop and then issue an apology, or revise your statement, or claim you didn’t mean or even didn’t really say such a thing.

Just stop.

The Big Time

Toward the end of my first year as athletic band director at Holy Cross, both of the school’s basketball teams did well enough to qualify for their versions of The Big Dance.

To make a long story very, very short, the HC pep band flew to Indianapolis, dumped our belongings in our hotel, and took a bus over to the RCA Dome (which, at the time, still existed) to watch the HC men’s practice session. As we entered the cavernous expanse of the Dome – which made the basketball court, placed near where the 50-yardline would have been, look exceptionally insignificant – twenty-nine out of the thirty-one of us looked around, and up, in varying states of awe and wonderment.

Two of us did not. I looked over at one of our mellophonists, and she looked at me, and one of us said quietly, “it’s good to be back.”

She had been to this venue when her high school marching band qualified for the Bands of America Grand National Championships, which were always held at the Dome. I had been there for the same reason, just in a different year, when I traveled with the UMass marching band, which was there to perform a collegiate-band exhibition or two.

I don’t think anyone else in the band heard that remark – which was okay, too. My brass colleague and I got to share a brief, unobtrusive moment of flashback. We’d been on this particular Big Stage before, in front of many thousands of people. Twenty-four hours later, the whole HC band would be able to make that claim to some degree (boy, did the team make Marquette work for that win!), but in that moment, she and I by ourselves shared a slightly weird feeling of familiarity.

During my time associated with bands and school music and such, I’ve been fortunate to experience a few Big Stage moments, although assuredly I was not the absolute center of attention in any of them. I got to march in the Macy*s Thanksgiving Day Parade in New York City, while I was a grad assistant with the Boston University Band. During my freshman year with the UMass band, I was in Washington, DC for President Reagan’s second Inauguration (the one that was so cold they canceled the parade; briefly disappointing but the decision probably saved lots of frostbite cases). The year I managed the Massachusetts All-State Symphonic Band, the band’s performance was in Symphony Hall in Boston, so I not only got to stand on the Symphony Hall stage, I got to adjust the positioning of a couple of chairs. Ooooooo.

So honestly, even if I never get to do anything remotely like any of that again … it’s okay. Those memories are mine as long as my memory lasts.

 

This past weekend, I listened to an interview on NPR’s “Only A Game” with tennis great Jimmy Connors. The program’s host, Bill Littlefield, asked Connors a number of questions about his career, and about a few things that were included in Connors’ newly-published memoir. One of Connors’ remarks got my attention, a little bit.

I remember watching Jimmy Connors play tennis on TV when I was a kid. My first impression of him was, well, he wasn’t my favorite tennis player. His personality – the way he did business out there – struck my very young self as too brash, too cocky for me, at least considering the way my parents brought me up to behave, and how a couple of my Little League coaches had taught me to carry myself. I didn’t care for the racket tossing, or the more than occasional dressing-down of the chair umpire.

In his book, “Jimmy Connors Saved My Life,” Joel Drucker wrote that no one before Connors “had ever thrown himself at every ball with such intensity. With his James Cagney-like strut, Connors was the quintessential ugly American: isolated, ambitious, arrogant, disrespectful of those who’d come before him — and wildly successful … Connors showed that the middle of life’s court was nothing. It was the lines where you wanted to live.” In the 1970s and early 1980s, fans gave Connors grudging respect, but “there was lingering sentiment that Connors, for all of that on-court brilliance, shouldn’t be getting away with such a rude, unsporting approach to the game.”

In 1990, after Connors had reconstructive wrist surgery at age 38, he was sure he’d never play tennis again. The next year, he was only allowed into the US Open field as a wild-card. He was ranked 174th in the world. He was assuredly not a contender.

That 1991 US Open was the scene of what became my two favorite televised tennis matches. In the opening round, Connors came back from basically two and a half sets down to Patrick McEnroe to win, 4-6, 6-7, 6-4, 6-2, 6-4. <> And then, in a fourth-round match into which no tennis pundit would have placed him, Connors defeated 24-year-old Aaron Krickstein, 3–6, 7–6, 1–6, 6–3, 7–6, in 4 hours and 41 minutes – on his 39th birthday.

It was the same old Connors in those matches. Plenty of tirades, rants and demonstrations that would never have passed muster on the grounds of, say, Wimbledon. In a way, he was lucky he was playing in a tournament located in New York City, where free expression has never been in short supply. And where audience participation could be considered mandatory. Everyone involved was well aware that Connors’ improbable run had captured national attention and a huge national TV audience; the Open spectators certainly participated, and Connors ate it up – pushing the boundaries of umpire treatment and general etiquette, but prevailing. At the time, John McEnroe, a tennis star with an even greater reputation for bad-boy behavior, remarked, “It’s unbelievable, the effort and the joy he gets out of playing.” And the equally demonstrative tennis great Ilie Nastase said in an interview, “What Jimmy has is what we would all kill for: just one more time.”

After bowing out of the 1991 Open in the semifinals, Connors told journalist Steve Flink, “That was the best eleven days of my life.”

 

So, back to the NPR interview. (See, I didn’t forget.) Bill Littlefield asked Connors, “You say in your book that if you could still play at a competitive level – you’re as competitive now at [age] sixty as you’ve ever been and you’d be doing that – you’d be out there on the court, and that’s your nature. These days, what are you doing instead?”

Connors replied, “It’s certainly difficult to find something to replace that. To be honest with you, I don’t think I’ll ever find it – to play on the major stages around the world, against the great players that I was able to play against, at such a high level. So I don’t look; I’m trying not to look anymore. I was lucky to do what I did, at such a high level … maybe one thing is good enough.”

I suppose it must be true that you can’t compete as a professional athlete, in a game which is more often an individual sport than a team game, unless you’ve got a LITTLE bit of ego … but is it possible that Mr. Connors might consider that what might seem to him like a small stage might be a big stage to someone else? Could he get involved with programs that teach little kids to play tennis, to perpetuate and continue to popularize the sport? And that might make all the difference in the world to someone else?

Maybe another way to look at it is … are you living for the thrill of the moment, or can you find satisfaction in taking the longer view?

I can’t claim to have had experiences on “major stages” that are remotely as lofty as Jimmy Connors has. I absolutely don’t have the experiences I would need, in order to climb into Mr. Connors’ head and know what it’s like to have played against the best, in the top locations, in the top events in his business … and to not have that anymore. Fair to say, I’ll never know; and maybe that disqualifies me from making any comment at all.

But … I’ve been fortunate enough to get involved with musical organizations which have offered me (relatively-)big-stage experiences. I haven’t had the chance to dip my toes into the national-attention-scale event pool in a while; which is okay, too.  People who know me well would probably not identify me as having a personality that craves an American Idol-grade spotlight.  My “thing” (in my professional life) is music teaching. But I haven’t taught in public school districts which have marquee-name music programs that get onto music-ed magazine covers. We make good things happen, all right – just not necessarily on a global scale.

No, I may never set foot on the field at the RCA Dome (well, obviously, I can’t now; they knocked it over), or the Symphony Hall stage, again. But every time a kid leaves my class carrying a different idea about something musical, or having discovered a sound or a composer or a performer s/he didn’t know about before … and great heavens, if any of my students decide they’d like to be a music performer or teacher … or even if they end up as music consumers with slightly more informed eyes and ears … then I’ve won.

It’s not a Grand Slam title, at least not in the way that will get me listed in this year’s World Almanac. It’s probably not an achievement that thousands (or hundreds or dozens) of people will notice all at once and stand up and cheer for. But does it need to be a global win … to still be a win?

 

“It is the greatest of all mistakes to do nothing because you can only do a little. Do what you can.”  -Sydney Smith, English writer, Anglican cleric

Hearing Voices

I stumbled onto an intriguing job posting today.

No, I’m not looking for a new job. I just GOT this new one, for heaven’s sake.

In any case, the job is in an almost entirely different field from my current line of work; although some of the job qualifications I could have acquired eventually, had I somehow stayed in the journalism biz long enough and pointing in the right direction (which is to say, not the direction I was pointing, which was toward trade and tech journals, rather than television and radio).

National Public Radio is looking for someone to say, “This is NPR”. Repeatedly.

There’s more to the gig than that, but that detail was what got quite the attention of a number of my online acquaintances.

There’s a certain something about an NPR voiceover that makes it distinct, and distinctly different from, say, yahoo sports talk radio, or from 1010 WINS in New York City, or from most commercial broadcasters. Hard to pin down exactly what that certain something is. Once I heard some rube describe the men of NPR News as “announcers who’ve discovered their softer side”. But if you randomly turn a radio on and get an NPR voiceover, whether it’s “from NPR in Washington” or from a local affiliate’s on-air personality, you know you’ve hit public radio.

To describe the NPR voice, I suppose I could use adjectives like calm, relaxed, urbane, serene, or folksy; but that would label me as biased toward the organization. So sue me; I like the sound of it. With a few possible exceptions like the Car Talk guys, just about everyone on public radio, from news programming to “America’s Test Kitchen”, has those certain, yes, soothing elements in their voices. It’s a little jarring, the first time you hear “Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me” when one of the panelists is comedian Bobcat Goldthwait, he of the reedy and slightly desperate voice.

THAT’S what it is – nobody at NPR ever sounds like they’re breathless and desperate. (Except around pledge drive time, but that’s not really programming, that’s begging. So.)

Anyway, the job opening. I’m not qualified. I have a few of the qualifications that NPR lists in its classified ad, but not nearly enough for them to toss my resume in the “take another look” pile.

“We’re looking for someone with serious production chops, … and is comfortable managing a complex workflow and ‘ready-to-air’ deadlines.” So, not me. I’ve only visited radio stations.

“Must have strong [experience with] Dalet, Adobe Audition, ProTools or similar production tools” … I’ve heard of the latter two, but I admit that I looked at the first one and heard the word “exterminate!” in my head, so I think that tends to deny me full marks.

“[Must have] at least four years of production or broadcast experience with emphasis in professional voice announcement and production” … not even nearly close, unless you count my emcee work at church hymn sings.

“[Must demonstrate] at all times respect for the diverse constituencies at NPR and within the public radio system” … well, I know people who can confirm that I’ve never made fun of Garrison Keillor, Ira Glass or any attempt by NPR to cover professional sports, so that’s something. And, years ago, I wrote a set of lyrics to the tune of “O Tannenbaum” that on the surface made me sound like I was taking shots at the public radio fundraiser, but actually there was plenty of affection involved. (“O woe is us, O woe is us / If we don’t get your pledges / Our operating budget is / Ragged ’round the edges”…)

So, knowing that I was not going to be a finalist for this position, nonetheless, I got to wondering: what would I sound like if I tried to make an audition recording?

Very few people I know actually like the sound of their own recorded speaking voice. Something to do with how we’re used to hearing it from inside our own heads, and it sounds different on the outside, where we never are. Many times, students of mine have exclaimed, “that’s not me! That’s not us!” Ah, but it is.

(I’ve gotten used to my speaking voice. Now my singing voice is another matter, but that’s one thing that’s great about being a church choir director: you’re almost always facing away from the congregation.)

From the NPR ad: “Bonus points for the ability to sound authentic on the radio – we’re not looking for ‘the voice of God.’”

You’re not? Why didn’t you say so sooner!?

So for kicks, I marched over to my little digital recorder device, took a deep breath, and read the copy that NPR suggested would constitute a proper audition recording.

“Support for this program comes from Zurich Insurance, providing risk management and insurance solutions to help businesses meet their ever-changing needs. Learn more at Zurich N-A dot com. {ZUR – ik}. Novo Nordisk, committed to diabetes care and changing lives for more than 90 years. Novo Nordisk hyphen U-S dot com. and CarMax, offering more than 35,000 used cars and trucks. Online, and in stores from coast to coast. Learn more at CarMax dot com. This is NPR.”

I will admit that speaking those words … words which for the most part are just ads for NPR’s corporate sponsors … put my mind in a different place than most words I speak.

“All Things Considered is a production of NPR News, which is solely responsible for its content. Transcripts of stories you hear on this program are available for free the following day at NPR dot org. Select the “Transcripts” link on every story page. To find out more about the movies you hear about on NPR programs, go to NPR dot org slash movies. This is NPR.”

The equivalent in the non-NPR world would be contributing your own voice to the paragraph “You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension: a dimension of sound, a dimension of sight, a dimension of mind. You’re moving into a land of both shadow and substance, of things and ideas; you’ve just crossed over into the Twilight Zone.”

Or substituting your own voice for the CBS Sports announcer who used to rattle off the commercial sponsors of its NFL games: “Brought to you bahhh…”

Or using your own voice to pull a Don LaFontaine movie trailer maneuver, saying things like, “In a world… where this and that collide… one man… has the power to change the world… forever.”

Can’t pull any of that off. Sorry.

But this, I can manage:

“And even though Ernest Shackleton organizes another doomed expedition to the Antarctic whenever he hears us say it … this is NPR, National Public Radio.”