Radio Rant

My next door neighbor is one of the most amiable and neighborly folks I have ever known. She is kind and generous, a delightful woman. I was surprised to learn that she tunes in every day to right wing talk radio: Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh. She listens to these toxic asshats all day long and is still a decent human being. I can’t vouch for her smarts, and her listening habits suggest that she falls somewhere on the left side of the Bell Curve. You can’t listen to those jackholes without losing a full standard deviation in I.Q.

I used to listen to Air America during drive time, but they are now on 1600 AM and apparently have a very weak signal. I can’t even get the station at all until I am in southern Westchester. At my house, 1600 AM has the insufferable Armstrong Williams and some right wing Jewish guy. Now there’s nothing worth listening to except maybe NPR.

I used to listen to sports radio a lot. My planned dissertation involved sports and the relationship between competence and salience, and I viewed listening as “fieldwork”. The truth was that I was a sports fanatic and that I was entertained by sports talk. I knew I would never don the pinstripes and play for the Yankees, but I might become one of those super knowledgeable fans who could wax eloquently about the prospects for the team. I would blow the dilettantes out of the water. Sports radio, at least the call in shows, involved having fans call in with their half baked opinions which the hosts, with their superior knowledge and competence, would debunk. The challenge for the callers was to avoid being humiliated and to have at least a plausible argument. I don’t follow sports these days, so it’s all gibberish to me now. It was, in retrospect, a complete waste of time and energy that I spent on sports radio.

For the life of me, the appeal of the right wing jackholes is a complete mystery to me. The three I named have the combined intelligence of an amoeba, and their every utterance is toxic trash. Listening to them is the intellectual equivalent of playing a recording of Pop Goes the Weasel a hundred times in succession. Do their listeners wake up in the morning and say “I feel too smart today and need a little dumbing down”? I suspect that the jackholes are entertaining to their listeners in some sick way. They are certainly not informative. Then again, some folks like cock fighting or bull baiting or watching snuff movies, so it shouldn’t be too surprising that the jackholes have an audience. I am depressed that it seems to be as big as it is, that my nice neighbor exposes herself to a daily dose of toxic spew.