798: Leaving the Fold
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A quick warning. There are curse words that are unbeeped in today's episode of the show. If you prefer a beeped version, you can find that at our website, thisamericanlife.org. People are complicated. That's my radical message for you today, America. People contain their opposites. I personally, for example, could be a good listener, helpful to others, and also, exactly the opposite, totally inattentive, and running a very unusual when it comes to all that. In fact, something I always find kind of annoying is when people say, "I'm a good person." "Oh, yeah, sure, I did whatever, but, you know, I'm a good person. He blah, blah, blah, but he's a good person." Really? I think it says nothing real about you, at all, because most of us are a mix of good and bad, right? We have thoughtful days, and we have annoyed days. To me, somebody who says, "I'm a good person," is somebody who is not taking a very serious look at everything they do, who they look out for and who they neglect, and all the things they could be doing for others if they really were so good. To be clear, there are good people out there. There are genuinely generous, good people that I've met them, we've all met them, but in my experience, one thing they have in common is that they know better than to sum it up with the words, "I'm a good person." One of the things that makes them good people is that they know that they contain kindness and awfulness, light and dark, depending on the moment. Years ago, I had the unusual experience of having dinner with Tom Hanks, and one thing I loved about Tom Hanks is how annoyed he was. At this reputation he has in the press of being such a nice guy, you know, journalists write entire articles about him, and that is the angle. He's such a nice guy. If I had to sum up his attitude towards this, like we expressed in that one conversation, he said basically, "I'm normal, and so when I meet a stranger, when I'm in a work situation, I do what normal people do, and I try to act pleasant." And then, there are other times in my life when, like, "It would normal, I get irritated, I get angry, I'm not so nice." People contain their opposites, which brings me to Jerry Springer, the king of trash TV. When he died two weeks ago, it made me think of the story that we did about him years ago, about this whole other side of him than the one most of us think of, and that's his political career. This was early in his life. He was deeply idealistic, and a kind of John F. Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, kind of way. And I actually found this very moving. There had a hard time walking away from that part of himself. That part of him, as you'll hear when you hear the story, stayed very much alive inside the trash TV host as the years passed. So today on our show, what we're going to do is we're going to play you that story, which was first broadcast 20 years ago when Springer was still in the prime of his daytime TV career. This was part of an episode that we called back then, "Leaving the Fold," all about people leaving some world that they had once inhabited, leaving some part of themselves behind, and now they missed it once they were gone.
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