dan, calling from a car on the kennedy....
One of my bad habits related to doing a once-weekly long commute by car is indulging in talk radio. As in, calling in and having my say. Or, at least, trying to have my say. Or, at least, trying to not sound like an idiot. The other day, for example, I called in twice. In the afternoon I called in to the inaugural broadcast of WBEZ's Right Now with Richard Steele. That show was about wrongful convictions (a real problem in Illinois, especially at the capital offense level!), and all related problems such as evidence tampering and untruthful testimony. As some people know, I happened to have been an eyewitness to a murder more than ten years ago, around the time I first moved to Chicago. So I called in to share my story.
My basic point was that even eyewitness testimony, the supposed gold standard of evidence, is not reliable. But the words that came out were not terribly coherent, to put it mildly! For one thing, the show was in its last minutes and I was rushing to get my words in. And then, I was mixing up the information. One the one hand I was telling the story of how I felt somewhat railroaded by the coaching of the state's attorney, and, on the other, I was emphasizing the fact that uninvolved witnesses to an act of violence are almost never, in that moment, paying attention to the kinds of details that prosecutors are looking for, and have to do quite a bit of memory reconstruction. It came out jumbled, so if the Richard Steele's inaugural show went a little lame at the end, I'll take the blame.
On the way home to Madison that evening in heavy traffic, I called up Bruce DuMont's Beyond the Beltway show, which was a special 'instant reactions' broadcast following the ABC Clinton/Obama debate. The topic at hand: the Rev Jeremiah Wright controversy. My point: the mass media's fixation on the Rev Wright video clips reveals some serious ignorance about black church life, and, further, proves that we still live in a segregated society in which black and white don't really know much about the details of each other's cultural and religious lives. This time it came out more coherently: "Anybody with any knowledge or experience with black church life would recognize the Rev Wright clips (even taken out of context!) as belonging to the black Christian prophetic tradition, which is in the mainstream of black church life!" Maybe I was too coherent–Bruce DuMont, who didn't seem to like the several consecutive calls defending Barack Obama's association with Trinity Church, went straight to a break, without comment.
