Radio Wonders

Last night, driving back to LA from a quick jaunt below the Orange Curtain, I decided to do as the Romans do (and as the billboards command) and listen to talk radio. First I went to 1150's Air America where Garofalo and Seder were doing the majority report. I really hate to say this, as I love Garofalo's comedy and acting, but I find her totally unlistenable on The Majority Report. She's shrill, mean to her callers (and here I'm talking the liberal ones, conservative interlopers get called "douches"), and just grates on me. On the bright side, she's well informed and good at staying on point, but I'm just not able to listen for more than ten minutes at a time.

So off I go to 640, "More stimulating talk radio!" It's some white guy named Ron filling in for some white guy named Z-Man. They're bashing the Nation of Islam, which is a bit like me sticking rhetorical knives into the Ku Klux Klan, but whatever. Very good caller choice, the host is a talented talker, and the opinions are fairly unobjectionable (black men calling in to say black men shouldn't commit crimes is the basic structure), so I turn my attention back to the asshole who's been tailgating me since Long Beach.

But then Ron -- the pinch-hitting white guy's name, or so I think -- goes over to gas prices. The interesting thing about conservative radio is that they constantly pretend they're shattering your biases, telling you what you don't want to hear. Ron promises that he'll tell us who's responsible for high gas prices, and it's not who we think!

According to him, we think it's the oil companies, though I don't actually know anyone who thinks that. Whatever. In any case, those straw men are wrong! The culprit for exorbitant rates at the pump over the last year?

Taxes and regulation. The one element of oil exploration, extraction, and delivery that hasn't changed in the past 365 days. So Ron spends a little while calmly, slowly, logically attacking Gray Davis for misusing oil taxes in the past and telling his listeners how angry they should be that they're paying for government services at the pump. Also, government regulation has left the oil companies unable to refine, explore, work, whatever, It's all the government's fault, in any case. Then we went to a KFI-640 NEWS BREAK!!!! where a Glendale city councilwoman was smoking crack, Bush was defending his policies, some crimes were committed, and a government agency had screwed up.

If you ever get some time in the car, I highly recommend you listen to these folks. NPR may be more informative and Air America more ideologically compatible, but turn on conservative talk once in awhile: the Republican worldview is perfectly understandable when you hear what they're beaming into their brains during every car ride. The news is full of addicts, criminals, and steadfast Presidents while the opinions are rational, calm, authoritative explanations of why everything wrong in your world is the government's fault, even if it didn't seem that way on first glance.