This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at for further information. ROBERT SIEGEL (Host): You're listening to ALL THINGS CONSIDERED from NPR News.Ĭopyright © 2005 NPR. It's the world nothing you can do about it.īLOCK: Andrei Codrescu teaches at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge. I made a rat on this table and let him loose in my chest, where he gnaws at my heart.
INTERNAL DEMONS SONG FREE
These people are hoping to free themselves into the cliches of our mediated reality and leave behind their seat at the table of doubt and confusion.
INTERNAL DEMONS SONG TV
They clamber up on the table of doubt and confusion, compress themselves into a little ball and roll right into the small window of the TV or squeeze themselves right between the sentences in the news paragraph or wedge themselves like spinach right between two soundbites. If sufficiently banged so their heads will let go (unintelligible) like so much beach sand stuck in their hair.Īnd then there are the weird ones.
Some take it a step farther and bang their heads on the table to drive out any news that they might have heard in the past. Other people yet take their head between their hands and refuse to look at the TV, hear the radio or read the news. Some people dismantle their beliefs and their principles like watches and try to put them back together by incorporating what they have learned from disaster and disappointment. Some people take another approach and use the table of doubt and confusion to build something: a Weblog, a death ray, a letter to the editor, a plan of escape, a get-rich-quick scheme or cave furniture. The walls collapse, and there is no avoiding the fact that you're sitting there with your elbows on the table of doubt and confusion, unable to do anything about any of it. The little window of the TV grows bigger. Unfortunately, the utilities, the spouse, the children and the pizza fail uncannily and simultaneously as the engine of the nation sputters, chokes and runs out of gas. The tissue of scandals and mini disasters that make the republic run could be contained in the small window of the TV and made bearable by the peepholes in the paper. Now if that pizza showed up on time or the children or the wife or the husband or the check in the mail, there would be no cessation of water, electricity or gas and no bad weather for a week all would be almost right with the world.
They've worked all day and they are tired. Some people are content to lean their elbows on the table of doubt and confusion and stare out at the world through the tiny window of their TV or through some holes cut out in the newspaper. What you choose to construct on it is another matter. Let's just say that a table of doubt and confusion which is lodged wobblishly in the shifting sands of early childhood psychology is there, solid as you or I. The table itself and its construction is an interesting story, but I won't get into it now because you, my listener, are not my shrink and I am not your patient. I know this rat because I've created him at my work table of doubt and confusion. It's a wooga-booga rat collaged from newspaper articles, soundbites from TV, bytes from the blogosphere and shifting existential sand. Now an offering from commentator Andrei Codrescu.