Case Study: This American Life - Getting Away With It

This episode of This American Life is woven around an engrossing theme that while consistently entertaining touches on more serious aspects of life to varying degrees. In Getting Away With It, Ira Glass shares people's stories of sneaky plots and schemes that yield fun and sometimes dangerous and unexpected results. The stories range from a mother and son forced to help his father smuggle $2,000 worth of cannabis across the Mexican-American border, to a couple of pre-teen girls who gleefully sneak a free flight to New York City, to an Oklahoma state representative's ingenious scheme to twist a previously unacknowledged tax loophole into an reason to convince legislators to funnel state funds into a public pre-kindgergarden program, an idea which otherwise would have been written it off as socialism. Although most of the stories were just emotionally stimulating and entertaining, the pre-k story reveals how one person in a position of power, when willing to investigate the truth, can make sound decisions which directly and dramatically affect the education of the next generation across the state. Overall the episode does a great job of coloring the theme with everything from immature trouble-makers to well intentioned criminals to state-sponsered detectives pushing for educated leaps in evolution. It makes me wonder if other state legislatures could redirect their resources more efficiently into education so we could potentially reduce the need for, to take another example from the show, time/money-stretched fathers to commit criminal acts for the sake of their family's survival. In the end I appreciate how the episode illuminates the trickster's perspective as sometimes sinister, sometimes wise, and with good taste, sardonically hilarious.