You'll never hear this on NPR
Guest Commentary One person's viewpoint
Mack Hall

In an unsettled time when some discount stores will sell a customer only 100 pounds of rice a week (Oh, no!

How will we survive the coming winter?), one is strangely comforted by the eternal 1968-ness of National Public Radio. Here are some observations that will never be heard on NPR:

We've polled everyone who works for the station, and no one here knows what "Hegelian dialectic" means.

Food prices are skyrocketing, huh? Does this mean we have to scratch our files of stories about greedy, overweight Americans?

We really are being just a little too, too precious by bragging about how we don't have advertising but then really do have advertising anyway, and then spend hours and hours of air time begging for money because we don't have advertising. We also receive hundreds of millions of your dollars in tax support every year, and voluntary donations are tax-deductible. This message is sponsored by the Calvin and Ethel Plonk Foundation for a Greener and More Diverse Recycled America.

Have you noticed how cleverly we phased out global warming in favor of climate change? Clearly the planet, which has been cooling and warming in cycles for millions of years, is little influenced by your lawnmower. However, if today there is rain and tomorrow there is sunshine we can call it climate change and still blame it on your lawnmower. Climate change - formerly known as weather.

Today on All Things Considered we're not going to feature a single story about some lazy oaf in New Orleans who can't be bothered to clean up his own front yard while whining about how the rest of you aren't sending him enough money.

Following All Things Considered we'll have Car Talk and then Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me, known to radio professionals as dead-air time.

And now an interview with AlleeSHEyah von O'Hara y Gomez d'Raheem, the daughter of a Chinese- Irish father and a Spanish-Moroccan mother whose parents were persecuted everywhere else and who then came to America and received lots of freebies but were snubbed by a grocery store carryout which is why AlleeSHEyah hates America and wrote an award-winning book of I, I, I, me, me, me poetry that doesn't scan detailing her existential angst. And, honestly, her book stinks.

In the next hour we'll feature an awardwinning musician, Friedrich "Stubby" Hamncheese who plays fusion Afro- German-Suomi on an Indian sitar handmade by unemployed Sherpa draft evaders in Toronto, and, really, that doesn't make any sense at all.

You people need to get real about fairtrade coffee. If some grocery chain relabels a can of coffee with pictures of happy Colombians holding hands and dancing barefoot in the rain forest, and charges you two more dollars for it, are you stupid or something?

We use words like existential, ethnic, fusion, diversity, and fair-trade a great deal because that makes us sound, like, you know, smart and stuff.

And now, commentary by grumpy old Daniel Schorr, who disapproves of everyone.

In the end, we at NPR are just a bunch of otherwise unemployable white liberal arts graduates who play old records and subtly sneer at people who have real jobs and love America. We even think Al Franken is an intellectual. So why would you send us money?

Mack Hall is a resident of Kirbyville