NPR Should Be Axed Because it's Anti-Thought, Not Anti-Trump

NPR is a small piece of a vast subsidized groupthink bureaucracy, which needs to be cut

After reading Madame Bovary in college I bought the unfinished novel Bouvard and Pécuchet, one of the last things Flaubert wrote. It’s a furious satire about two bourgeois clerks with no ideas of their own who come into a fortune, travel the world and live through great events, and ultimately return home having learned nothing, despite seeing everything. In American terms, it’s Dumb and Dumber for pseudo-intellectuals. I was too young to appreciate it (it was an older man’s final middle finger to the world’s unrepentant stupidity) but there was a prize at the end.

The Dictionary of Received Ideas is often tacked to the back of the novel. It’s believed Flaubert meant to publish it either as an appendix, or as a fictional creation of the book’s two idiot-heroes, whose conversations are just exchanges of clichés (“In the long run, solitude is very sad,” or “The beautiful is the beautiful, the sublime the very beautiful”). The “dictionary” is just a monster collection of these empty sayings, sometimes written as instructions on how and what to say in society, as in:

• AMUSING – Must be attached to all remarks: “How amusing!”

• HEAT – Always unbearable.

More often, entries explained what views to hold:

• DISSECTION – An outrage against the majesty of death.

• ICE CREAM - It is dangerous to eat it.

• LEGALITY – Legality is killing us. With it, no proper government is possible.

Flaubert was nearly driven mad by these ear-piercing snippets of conventional wisdom. He said he wrote Bouvard and Pecuchét to “vomit back onto my contemporaries the disgust they inspire in me.” To be trapped in a world of clichés would seem tyrannical enough to that kind of mind, but what if all those dead phrases and canned non-thoughts were mandatory? What if they were factory-produced as part of a state enterprise? What if “received ideas” were dumped on the public with military regularity, and in conjunction with prohibitions against saying anything else?

From a Friday story about National Public Radio in the Washington Post:

President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday evening seeking to prohibit federal funding for NPR and the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS). The order, which could be subject to legal challenge, called the broadcasters’ news coverage “biased and partisan…”

An NPR spokesperson said early Friday that “NPR’s editorial practices and decision-making are independent and free from outside influence…”

The zany, sociology-prof-on-molly vibe at NPR is no longer the big story in America. Donald Trump’s unprecedented “assault on our most fundamental rights” is. Just ask NPR, which of course is the problem.

Once a great American institution, NPR has become a state-sponsored version of Flaubert’s nightmare. Why it has to go: