(HEY NEW VISITORS. Please read and comment on this article over at
my new blog. THANKS!)
On Sunday afternoon, I was listening to
KCRW, our local
NPR channel, as I was driving to my Frenchman's house. I was drawn into a story being told by journalist Kelly McEvers about
an "international private investigator, a bounty hunter and bail bonds enforcer" named "Zora", who had dreams since adolescence about being a super hero and made mega-lists of "things to master" by certain ages.
Zora claims that, by 21 years of age, she had finished her coursework for her Ph.D. in Geopolitics. She also claims that she had a list of skills to master by age 23:
martial arts
electronics
chemistry
metaphysics
hang gliding
helicopter and airplane flying
mountain climbing
survival
weaponry
rafting
scuba diving
herbology
CPR
first aid
mountain emergency medicine
throwing stars
compound bows
throwing knives
Kelly McEvers then says the following of Zora by age 23: "And the most incredible thing about all of this is that Zora accomplished nearly every item on the list."
Huh?
Zora's story doesn't add up -- not in minutes and years, and certainly not in finances. Zora claims her father is a professor at University of Minnesota. It's possible if her father is a professor that she could have gotten her education for free, but U of M does not offer a Ph.D. in Geopolitics. How then could she afford, even with grants, her entire education in addition to helicopter lessons and archery equipment? Was her family rich? She doesn't say, but it's not likely if her father is a prof. These are very expensive sports. Also, my Frenchman is a Ph.D. from Princeton. He tells me stories of geniuses who finished their Ph.D. in three years. BUT...these geniuses are only good at maybe one other thing, not
twenty.
Yet, McEvers never questions this. She lets Zora tell us a story -- a fun story, one we wish were true -- that is just flatly unbelievable, yet lets it lay as if it were God's truth. It would be one thing if McEvers winked even briefly at the audience, letting us know that she knows it's all a bit too much. But instead, she gives Zora wide berth to weave multiple unlikelihoods without anything but a gee-golly narration. (Zora missed her calling as a fiction writer, truth be told. But if she's remotely as strong as McEvers claims she is, and she reads this, she might be inclined to hunt me down and kick my ass.)
To be fair, maybe McEvers took some liberties with how she pinned together a much-tamer story told by a somewhat adventurous person. Still, you'd think that she could, um,
add.
I'm not sure why this bothered me so much this weekend. Maybe because this kind of "storytelling" in regular life causes too much heartache and hurt. Or maybe because journalism is already so problematic. The media is suffering so badly from credibility these days. Why exacerbate it, even for entertainment's sake? Lord knows, we've got plenty of entertainment these days from other sources.
It turns out that McEvers story is dated February 23, 2001. Less than seven months before 9/11. She created a great many of these audio stories for NPR since then, and for subjects about the Middle East that I know far less about. As a diehard NPR listener, I wonder what I've really been hearing. And how much of it I can rely on...
