As a public radio addict, I am ashamed to say that I have long found one program unbearably tedious and mawkish: the essay series "This I Believe." I usually switch off the radio whenever I encounter it, but while driving on the D.C. beltway recently, I happened to hear the tail end of someone's self-absorbed philosophical spouting. Before I could switch stations, I heard an announcement about a forthcoming live taping of the show, with Bob Edwards himself, on Oct. 15 in Louisville.This prompted me to go back and re-read Walker Percy's delightful skewering of the series (which, famously, originated in the 1950s) in his novel The Moviegoer. Speaking of the "This I Believe" essayists, the book's narrator muses:

If I had to name a single trait that all these people shared, it is their niceness. Their lives are triumphs of niceness. They like everyone with the warmest and most generous feelings....Everyone on "This I Believe" believes in the uniqueness and the dignity of the individual. I have noticed, however, that the believers are far from unique themselves, are in fact alike as peas in a pod...On "This I Believe" they like everyone. But when it comes down to this or that particular person, I have noticed that they usually hate his guts.

There's more in this vein (including some snippets of what must be parody), for any other "This I Believe"-o-phobes out there. (And, by the way, for a really terrific public radio program, I recommend the consistently fascinating, usually timely, sometimes eccentric hour-long show "On the Media." It's appointment listening.)