My reading, listening and viewing habits are broad. I tend to read magazines like the New Yorker or the Atlantic, listen to NPR, and watch the BBC America. Liberal stuff? Sure. But when you work in Republican politics day in and day out, Lake Woebegone is a welcome change of pace.
So last night I was pulling a turkey out of the oven and listening to Air America. When I lived in Los Angeles I was a regular listener of the Pacifica Network, which is your basic run of the mill far left craziness mixed with ‘global’ music. Nutty and dated? Yes. But it was entertaining. Last night I listened to Air America for nearly two hours and I can truly write, with no qualms, that it was not entertaining.
Now understand, I’m not judging the programs I heard based on ideological content. I don’t listen to get angry, or educated, or whatever. I listen for entertainment. And the quality of the entertainment was just low. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t sharp witted. The format of the programs were difficult to keep clear, the individuals talking talked over each other, and there was no attempt to stick to a topic for more than a couple minutes. It actually was like having a martini then walking into a crowded coffee shop in San Francisco and trying to get the details of a gist of a conversation from group of bickering, stoned hippies three tables away.
The production as a whole was just college radio station at 3am, at best. Now, of course, some of the lacking production might be because the advertising revenue doesn’t exactly keep the network in chewing gum, let alone fancy electronic equipment and talented employees. I believe it was announced that the second HOUR of the time I listened was paid for by a public employee union, rather than your run of the mill talk show advertisers like itch cure powder, various mattress stores, and gold sales. All very strange, but all paying customers. For those of you who buy talk radio ads you know they are not cheap. But I’d wager to bet that I could buy a whole day of Air America in whatever markets they remain, nationally, for less that the cost of a 12 pound bag of dog food, a handful of of pixie stixs, and a used Best of ABBA tape.
But there was another problem, and one I’m actually writing about today. What I could catch of the show was really shrill and militant. It made anything (ANYTHING) I have heard on conservative talk radio or Pacifica sound tame. I mean the folks on these shows made Ann Coulter at her worst sound like William Buckley at his best.
Let me cite a specific example that, last night, irritated me enough to write a note to myself to publish on this topic today. On one program it sounded like comedian Rosanne Bar was filling in for the host (after an hour of listening it still wasn’t clear if this was the case but she was acting like the host so I assumed this was the case). At one point – and again there were no themes in this conversation and I couldn’t really even figure out how many other people were actually on the show so I literally mean ‘at one point in the show with no obvious relationship to any other point on the show’ – when she and her co-host or she and the co-hosts were on a rant about one conservative politician or another Bar said she wanted to bring the Guillotine back.
Now, normally, no matter how tasteless, this could be a remark intended in good fun. Anyone who knows me know that I can hardly be the arbiter of what is and what is not refined speech. But Bar’s tone was the same as you would use to say ‘I’d like to have Chinese food for dinner’ or ‘Boy I wish we had enough money to pay off our mortgage’. Dead eyed. No humor or intent at humor. I know it’s a hackneyed phrase but sometimes its not just what you say but how you say it.
It’s no secret of history that the Guillotine was used during the Great Terror in France as a tool of political repression to murder some 40,000 people, largely royalty and defenders of the monarchy. If similar numbers of people were murdered in today’s France we would be talking about hundreds and hundreds of thousands of deaths. It was a tool that was used in an attempt to purge not just a political idea, but the humans that believed in the idea.
What I took Bar and her co-host(s) to be saying, and this was the tone throughout much of the show, was that it would be just rosy if the police powers of the State could be used to arrest, imprison, and maybe murder people who did not agree with them. Although difficult to ferret it out, their justification appeared to be that the Republic really didn’t exist any more, and that in order to restore it – their version of course – extreme and probably bloody measures were called for.
This is heady stuff, and in my mind not to be taken lightly. Human institutions, particularly popular governments, are vulnerable to decay in times of cultural, economic, or political stress. The decay of a popularly elected government (and by government I mean the United States of America, not whoever happens to be holding the reigns of it’s political organs at any given moment ) can only be sped along if large parts of the nation’s intelligentsia are openly arguing that either a given reign or the institution of the government as a whole is not just incorrect in a particular policy, but actually illegitimate enough to be opposed by force.
I have heard both arguments now several times from mainstream members of the left, with Bar’s comments only being the most recent example. While I have heard similar arguments from the right, such voices are usually removed from the mainstream of dialog by public and private outcry, largely from the within right itself. I see no such process working to keep the left’s mainstream mainstream, and while I roll my eyes at the ideology of America’s liberal wing, I believe that having two healthy political parties, self policing and policed by the voters in ideology, both of whom believe that, when an election is over or a policy voted on, regardless of the venom of partisan wrangling, it would be beyond the pale for either side to consider political actions which would violate the sanctity of our Republic or that such violation has in fact occurred.