Sour Grapes, Forever

I remember when radio had no great import in life.

Oh, that's not entirely true. When I started in radio, it was a place you went for baseball games, for local news (back in the days when most radio stations had a newsman puttering away in a back corner, somewhere), for the weather and the time, and background noise.

Even talk radio - which, in rural North Dakota back then was mainly ghostly-sounded transmissions from big cities caught on the skip on clear nights, people like Larry King and other long-forgotten voices talking to the insomniacs and the drunks after bar closing - was a fairly neutral thing, pretty much just background noise.

We didn't get public radio in Jamestown North Dakota until I was in college (unless you count CBW in Winnipeg, which was what my Mom pretty well locked the radio on to until KDSU in Fargo upped its signal enough to be heard). I had other things on my mind, and didn't listen much - but I was alternately wowed and bored stiff; the breadth and depth of topics covered, even in a lowly newscast, was as astounding as the bored pretentiousness of the people presenting it.

I moved to the Twin Cities, and started working in talk radio - ironically, the much-maligned (and unlamented) "Fairness Doctrine" was responsible for putting me, a 23-year-old kid with much zeal and little talent, on the air as the station's only conservative; they needed someone to balance the station's three soft-left daytime hosts. In the days of the Fairness Doctrine and before Limbaugh, talk radio was much as it had always been; a place for cranks and the lonely and gluttons for punishment.

Which brings us to Garrison Keillor's poison-pen screed to the talk radio world.

Keillor:

I am old enough to be nostalgic about radio, having grown up when it was a stately medium...I am rather fond of radio as it is today, full of oddities and exceptions. It is an unmanageable medium. Management is at work trying to format things, but reality keeps breaking through the bars. You twiddle the dial, and in the midst of the clamor and blare and rackety commercials you find a human being speaking to you in a way that intrigues you and lifts your spirits, such as a few weeks ago when a man spoke about his mother, in Houston, who as she was dying of lung cancer made a video for her severely retarded daughter to watch in years to come, which the daughter does not watch, being too retarded to comprehend death, which in itself is a mercy. It was very graceful, a fellow American telling a story unlike all the other stories. Pretty amazing. And all the more so for showing up on a dial full of blathering idiots and jackhammer music.

Y'see, I could almost learn to like this Garrison Keillor. He enjoys the same things I do, at least at a conceptual level; Radio, being a essentially a do-it-yourselfer's medium (despite the big radio conglomerates on the one hand, and big corporate Public Radio on the other, trying to homogenize it in their own images) is a wonderland of things to discover, if you dig around a bit.

In fact, I can identify with this bit here:

My taste is catholic; I don't go looking for people like me (earnest liberal English majors) [Or earnest conservative ones! - Ed.]. I am a fan of the preachers on little AM stations in early morning and late at night who sit in a tiny studio in Alabama or Tennessee and patiently explain the imminence of the Second Coming--I grew up with good preaching, and it is an art that, unlike anything I find in theaters, has the power to shake me to my toes. And gospel music is glorious beyond words. I love the mavericks and freethinkers and obsessives who inhabit the low-power FM stations--the feminist bluegrass show, the all-Sinatra show, the Yiddish vaudeville show. Once, on the Merritt Parkway heading for New York, I came upon The American Atheist Hour, the sheer tedium of which was wildly entertaining--there's nobody so humorless as a devout atheist.

True.

Also wonderful - radio you can't understand. No, not Nick Coleman - I'm talking about foreign language radio. Whether listening to Chicago's Polish stations, or the Twin Cities' various Spanish-language outlets, or KFAI's Cambodian and H'mong and Vietnamese and Somali programs, it's always fascinating, trying to divine bits and pieces of stray English along with tone and delivery to figure out what the various immigrant communities are really thinking.

And there's nothing quite like pulling in a rugged little indy station on the skip while driving across the prairie late at night, playing something that you've never heard before and will never hear again - ethereal little moments that you remember more for their feel than for what you heard.

This much, I'm on board with. Which is disconcerting.

Fortunately, Keillor gets back to familiar ground:

I love the great artists of public radio who simulate spontaneity so beautifully they almost fool me--Terry Gross, Ira Glass, the Car Talk brothers--all carefully edited and shaped, but big as life on the radio, smarter than hell, cooler than cucumbers.

Maybe I'm jaded. Or maybe I spent enough time working with the nuts and bolts and technique of audio production. Either way, though, Gross and the Tappet Brothers remind me of Milli Vanilli; highly-manufactured product designed and marketed with painstaking care to fit a niche, edited to within a shred of its life to expunge all sense of originality and spontaneity.

Simulated spontaneity? The only thing simulated on these shows is breath and blood.

I love the good-neighbor small-town radio of bake sales and Rotary meetings and Krazy Daze and livestock reports and Barb calling in to report that Pookie was found and thanks to everybody who was on the lookout for her. Good-neighbor radio used to be everywhere and was especially big in big cities--WGN in Chicago, WCCO in Minneapolis-St. Paul, WOR in New York, KOA in Denver, KMOX in St. Louis, KSL in Salt Lake City--where avuncular men chatted about fishing and home repair and other everyday things and Library Week was observed and there was live coverage of a tornado or a plane crash and on summer nights you heard the ball game. Meanwhile lawn mowers were sold and skin cream and dairy goods and flights to Acapulco.

I started at a station like that. A 1,000 watt station that "produced" one-hour newscasts at 7AM, 8AM, Noon and 5PM, and reported Jamestown Fire Department calls (brought to you by Moran Insurance!), and covered not only all the Jamestown High School hoops games, but all the Medina and Kensal games as well (sponsored by Knetter Medina Cheese!).

It's a shame that medium is gone - or, more accurately, shifted elsewhere.

The deregulation of radio was tough on good-neighbor radio because Clear Channel and other conglomerates were anxious to vacuum up every station in sight for fabulous sums of cash and turn them into robot repeaters. I dropped in to a broadcasting school last fall and saw kids being trained for radio careers as if radio were a branch of computer processing.

That, indeed, is a jarring sight. I didn't set foot in a radio station from August of 1992 (when I left WDGY, a station that ran almost exactly like KEYJ had run in 1979) until March of 2003, when the NARN show started on AM1280. I felt like Rip Van Winkel; no cart decks, no reel to reel tape, no cassettes - just computers and ethernet and ISDN and boxes blinking and screens flashing and things that, geek though I am in my current career, were as foreign to me as the IBM PC must have been to my father, ten years ago.

They had no conception of the possibility of talking into a microphone to an audience that wants to hear what you have to say. I tried to suggest what a cheat this was, but the instructor was standing next to me. Clear Channel's brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and Internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed. Training kids to do that is like teaching typewriter repair.

After the iPod takes half the radio audience and satellite radio subtracts half of the remainder and Internet radio gets a third of the rest and Clear Channel has to start cutting its losses and selling off frequencies, good-neighbor radio will come back. People do enjoy being spoken to by other people who are alive and who live within a few miles of you.

Well, one can hope.

People like Tommy Mischke, a nighttime guy on a right-wing station in St. Paul [Hah! He thinks KSTP is "right-wing"! - Ed.] and a free spirit who gets into wonderful stream-of-consciousness harangues and meditations that are a joy to listen to compared with the teeth-grinding that goes on around him.

Wow. Who'da thunk it - Keillor and I agree on something else!

Not that it can last:

Not that teeth-grinders are to be disparaged: I enjoy, in small doses, the over-the-top right-wingers who have leaked into AM radio on all sides in the past twenty years. They are evil, lying, cynical bastards who are out to destroy the country I love and turn it into a banana republic, but hey, nobody's perfect.

Sigh.

And things were going so well.

Garry! We are the country you love. We are dissent. We are the raw nerves of 51% of your fellow citizens - the ones that you and your network look down their noses at, the ones that bring out your inner dyspeptic!

I suppose I could be personally hurt by being called an "evil, cynical bastard", but, as always, consider the source. Behind Keillor's facade of gentility, humor and cornpone, he's known as one of the most ruthless, exploitive employers in town; obsequious to his superiors, tyrannical to his employees, devoid of social skills to strangers - the very opposite of all he claims to exalt.

Ye shall know the cynical bastards by their actions.

And now that their man is re-elected and they have nice majorities in the House and Senate, they are hunters in search of diminishing prey. There just aren't many of us liberals worth banging away at, but God bless them, they keep on coming.

Au contraire, Garr. I don't know that we're any more interested in "banging away at" liberals than you are in converting conservatives. Talk radio isn't a missionary - it's sunday school.

But no mind. He's on a roll. The reason you find an army of right-wingers ratcheting on the radio and so few liberals is simple: Republicans are in need of affirmation, they don't feel comfortable in America and they crave listening to people who think like them. He's actually right.

Sort of.

Conservative talk radio filled - and fills - a vaccuum, supplying a nexus to a community that had none before. The left has, for at least my entire lifetime, had places where their community passed on their tribal stories; colleges, unions, the mainstream media, not the least of which is National (and Minnesota) Public Radio, places where the left-of-center can go to listen to and talk with others just like them; where people can celebrate the diversity of listening to, thinking like, and being in tune with other people just like them.

Alan Dershowitz once scolded the Harvard faculty (possibly apocryphally): "Your idea of diversity is someone with black skin or wearing a skirt, who think just like you".

Conservative talk radio justifiably makes no claims to being excessively diverse. Either should Public Radio, whose audience - lilywhite, middle-class, college-educated to a fault - is if anything vastly more homogenous than Talk Radio's, which at least mixes blue collar workers, entrepreneurs and well-off professionals.

Did I mention Keillor was a cynical, evil bastard? Well, I was being hyperbolic, but this next bit...:

Liberals actually enjoy living in a free society; tuning in to hear an echo is not our idea of a good time.

Although it is what National Public Radio is all about, anyway.

I go to church on Sunday morning to be among the like-minded, and we all say the Nicene Creed together and assume nobody has his fingers crossed,

Which, incidentally, is more or less the same role talk radio plays in the conservative movement!

...but when it comes to radio, I prefer oddity and crankiness.

...which is odd, coming from a man who has created a self-perpetuating radio product which, enjoy it weekly though I do, is as predictable and homogenized as the playlist at "HOT ROCKIN' 95.5FM!".

I don't need someone to tell me that George W. Bush is a deceitful, corrupt, clever and destructive man--that's pretty clear on the face of it.

That's right. What I'd like is a couple of former Prairie Home Companion employees to come on MPR and talk about what a deceitful, corrupt, spiteful, arrogant, socially-challenged, personally ugly man Garrison Keillor is.

That would surprise!

What I want is to be surprised and delighted and moved. Here at the low end of the FM dial is a show in which three college boys are sitting in a studio, whooping and laughing, sneering at singer-songwriters they despise, playing Eminem and a bunch of bands I've never heard of, and they're having so much fun they achieve weightlessness--utter unself-consciousness--and then one of them tosses out the f-word and suddenly they get scared, wondering if anybody heard. Wonderful. Or you find three women in a studio yakking rapid-fire about the Pitt-Aniston divorce and the Michael Jackson trial and the botoxing of various stars and who wore what to the Oscars. It's not my world, and I like peering into it. The sports talk station gives you a succession of men whose absorption in a fantasy world is, to me, borderline insane. You're grateful not to be related to any of them, and yet ten minutes of their ranting and wheezing is a real tonic that somehow makes this world, the world of trees and children and books and travel, positively tremble with vitality. And then you succumb to weakness and tune in to the geezer station and there's Roy Orbison singing "Dream Baby" and you join Roy on the chorus, one of the Roylettes.

Well, hey, Garr. Pop on out to a NARN show some weekend. You'll have a ball.

I don't worry about the right-wingers on AM radio. They are talking to an audience that is stuck in rush-hour traffic, in whom road rage is mounting, and the talk shows divert their rage from the road to the liberal conspiracy against America. Instead of ramming your rear bumper, they get mad at Harry Reid. Yes, the wingers do harm, but the worst damage is done to their own followers, who are cheated of the sort of genuine experience that enables people to grow up.

You know when you're standing at a bus stop, or in the produce section of the grocery store, and you dimly notice something's not quite right? And that sense transforms into a person, someone obviously troubled and disturbed, someone whose eyes have the burning fierceness of the person troubled by sounds only they can hear, ideas only they have? And that person walks up to you and starts talking to you, quietly, in a conspiratorial voice, trying to let you in on the little secret they have - but only so far, of course, or at least only for the half-life of the idea, which keeps changing, shifting too fast even for the burning-eyed stranger to keep track of?

And maybe for the first couple of times, when you were a teenager or twentysomething, you tried to engage that person in conversation; you didn't know what you were up against, or you genuinely cared, or thought you could do some good. Experience eventually taught you; there was no point to it. They had their idea, and nothing could change it.

So too with Keillor's hatred for all things and people to the right of Paul Wellstone. It's dug in there, solid to the point of pathology, hot to the point of religious zeal, too broad to find a vulnerable flank of reason.

Why bother? It's a world where all people are caricatures, fitting broadly into two camps; People who think Ira Glass is a genius, and people who vote Republican.

The best of what you find on public radio is authentic experience. It has little to do with politics.

But then, the same is true of all radio, whether it's an oldies station or a slapdash conservative weekend show or the "Good Neighbor", for that matter. But in Garrison Keillor's world, only public radio and its sympathizers get the dignity of human breadth and depth.

That's why public radio is growing by leaps and bounds. It is hospitable to scholars of all stripes and to travelers who have returned from the vast, unimaginable world with stories to tell. Out here in the heartland, we live for visitors like those. We will make the demented uncle shut up so we can listen to somebody who actually knows something.

If I had a demented uncle, he'd probably say "Public Radio is growing by leaps and bounds", too.

Relax, bigfella. Work on the inner Garry for a while. It needs a lot more help than conservative talk radio and its audience do.

Posted by Mitch at May 13, 2005 05:26 PM | TrackBack