Fresh Air

I just want to say that the banning of Terry Gross is a service to the humans of Mississippi even if it originated in prudishness. Curtis White memorably labelled Gross' Fresh Air a pornographic farce, although he regrettably dilated upon that pithy three-word phrase and revealed himself to be a sort of Catherine MacKinnon to Terry Gross, pornographer, a dour, priggish scold, deaf to his own incoherence. (A fine dismantling of White's ridiculous book-length expostulation on his original Harper's article is found here.) Anyway, with the possible exception of Garrison Keilor, whose 6:00 PM, Saturday-evening interruptions of Pittsburgh's classical radio station fill me with the urge to see if I can't turn his bullshit basso profundo into a counterternor, there is nothing on public radio so reeking of intellectually indolent self-satisfaction as the Terry Gross Radio Hour, which elevates mediocre art to rarefied genius and then subjects its creators to a crypto-Freudian machine-gunning ("So, like, you were molested by a priest in a lobster suit on a hot air balloon as a girl. Is that reflected in your new album?"), takes absolutely run-of-the-mill, center-left, progressive political commenters and whispers in worshipful colloquy about what could happen if only smart people, sensitive types, and scientists ran the world, and finally gives over the final 15 minutes of every show to some aggressively caucasian music critic with a fondness for lost blues artists who sound like carpet remnants from the brainspace of Richard Pryor.