I just got back from a 6-hour trip to eastern North Carolina for a meeting. It feels more like 12 since I came and went after staying only one night at a second-rate Holiday Inn Express. This morning I skipped the complementary and well-known Holiday Inn Express Nasty Cinnamon Buns Soggy Eggs and Gross-looking but probably good Sausage breakfast in favor of one of the South's many, many Waffle Houses. Two eggs scrambled, double hashbrowns scattered, covered and peppered, and black coffee.
The trip was unremarkable and pretty easy, save for one detail. In a mad rush I didn't check if the car I rented had satellite radio. Turns out that they don't all have it these days. I've done the Atlanta-DC run many times, coping with a minimum of 10 hours through some of the worst FM radio in the country and I was ready to cope this time, but this time was the first that it actually got under my skin a little. Maybe it's everyone's endless coverage of the presidential campaign, maybe I've just grown weary of hoping for a Lite Rock or Top 40 station just to give my "seek thumb" a break from preachers and Christian Rock that sounds kind of cool till the guy starts singing about passion and boundless love.
Sometime around hour 2 of the first day, as I got near Augusta, each of the Atlanta stations faded out. First it was 96 Rock, its angry teenager butt rock fading into static, then Rock 100 (or whatever it is), Stone Temple Pilots stuff (I remember from high school so it has to be good, right?). Then the often vaginal but sometimes all right Dave FM gave up its ghostess. Last, the 97.1 The River's classic hits flitted out into a country station with annoying ads for a goofy morning show.
So I moved to talk radio, hoping for something at least a little interesting.
First, there was Rush, broadcasting with great authority coast-to-coast and to anywhere in the world where the US has military presence. He congratulates himself on Operation Chaos, the less-clever-than-you-think march of his followers to the Democratic primaries to cast votes for Hillary Clinton so as to ensure a humiliating victory for the necessary evil for true believers John McCain. Some guy calls in and says he feels like drinking a latte and test driving a Prius since he's temporarily registered for the "Democrat" party. He swears to Rush with great confidence that first thing tomorrow he's going to switch back his allegiance to the party that he favors but probably goes against his economic interests as a guy who works for a living.
Somewhere in the bland South Carolina piedmont I went to the NPR affiliate. Someone whose gender I can't quite figure out from their voice is telling me about all the environmentally friendly appliances that went into their $500,000 gutting of a row house in a neighborhood next to where I lived for a while in DC. They cut to the interviewer, who has a masculine but unthreatening middle age growl to his voice, asking questions about this or that feature of the modern monument to smug sanctimony that the young woman with an expensive sounding accent calls home.
I stop at McDonalds for a Number 2 with a Diet Coke (for here), stretch my legs and climb behind the wheel.
Some guy who I don't recognize is holding court about how "enhanced interrogation" is absolutely necessary to gather information from people suspected of terrorist leanings under any circumstances and in all conditions, declaring in no uncertain terms that anyone who thinks otherwise is a fool who would risk the lives of all Americans (and our children) for the sake of principles that we've subscribed to by treaty with the rest of the free world. The guy's narrow gauge train of thought shifts tracks to something about how he's insulted by the idea that working class Americans might feel "bitter" about how things have been going over the past 8 or so years.
NPR comes in 5-by-5 thanks to affiliates scattered all across the Carolinas. They're running a narrative piece from, a writer in Ohio who mourns after the old growth trees that her neighbor cut down from his land to sell for timber. She understands that it was his land and he had all rights to do as he pleased with his trees. She was especially fond of an old Tulip Popular that they called the Privacy Tree for its shielding of their kitchen from a nearby road. She brightens up about the whole thing, as new growth sprouts from the soil, new birds come to roost in its tender branches, and new sounds echo through the wispy underbrush each spring.
The trip finally ended, and now, as I blog off of my back porch listening to crickets in the dark with cold beer, I have time to reflect. Most of the trip was a Baptism by Blustering Babble. I'd hit scan more times than I care to remember. I gnawed a sore spot in my cheek as I grew fed up with the irritating opinions that had held me as a captive audience for so long. But from all the static a pattern emerged. The right wing is on the wane for now. They're out of touch with the American zeitgeist. They've lost their mojo. Maybe people's patience for their messiahs is growing thin. It's true that Liberal banter finds its home somewhere in the space between the informative (but safely diplomatic to all parties, well-considered, morally vetted by experts and gently put forth) concerns to the downright milquetoast agitprop that passes for advocating for the most important issues of our day. It's also true that people are gravitating towards those messages, if the messenger.
I think some big changes are near for our world, our country and me. Well, for me anyway. I know I'll get satellite radio when I can afford it.
