Big Brass Ones

You may have to forgive me for a personal indulgence on this one, but I just have to comment on the discourse I’ve been hearing lately. I don’t listen to the radio when I’m working but I do listen when I’m driving to work and back home, or when I’m out heading to a meeting or something. Our town lost its progressive talk radio station about a year ago so any political talk I listen to is ultra-right wing stuff. You know what I’m talking about- Limbaugh, Hannity, Levin, et al, and even a local guy named Fitzsimmons. I used to listen to this ranting on purpose so I would know what people thought on the other end of the ideological spectrum from me. But my wife began to notice it was really affecting my personality (not in a good way) to listen to such negative and caustic stuff all the time. So I stopped doing it and found a more progressive message. Alas that’s gone now and I find myself drifting back to the old radical right- wing stuff because it’s the only political talk I can get. I listen less now than I did before, but I find the language and hatred is so much more concentrated, that a little of it goes a long way.

Over the last few weeks the rhetoric is really heating up to an all-time high over the sequestered automatic cuts in the Federal budget. The blame game is on, and to be fair it’s being played by both sides while all of us would just prefer the Congress and the President would do their job and actually govern.  But after listening to those self- proclaimed ”national voices of conservative common sense” go on for hours on the radio, I’m not sure it’s even possible for governance to happen. You have to remember that conservative talk-radio outnumbers progressive talk ten-to-one. It may be possible that the tone of our discourse has become so vile that a minority of people who religiously listen to that non-stop crap have convinced the Republican Party that they must follow the dictates of the Hannity’s and Limbaugh’s because they “speak for the base”. I don’t think that’s really true because I still believe most of us are just better than that- but such is the power of media. Clearly the very dedicated conservative "base" is a very small minority of people in the country, but they are just enough to effectively obstruct any progress.

Let me give you just a small slice of what you can hear all day (relentlessly repeated) on talk-radio. I'll have to paraphrase because I just can’t take it all down verbatim while I’m driving. If by chance you don’t believe me you can verify my take on this trash by listening yourself, provided you have the intestinal strength to do it. In just the last couple of days I heard the President is running a “crime family”; I’ve heard the President just hates America; I’ve heard the President is “addicted” to taxing and spending with no purpose other than to just take our money- he likes to steal; I’ve heard the President is engaged in a plot hatched in another country (presumable a Muslim or African) to literally destroy America; I’ve heard that the President isn’t a smart person and couldn't to run a small organization or couldn’t govern a small town (this is interesting because this comes from the same guy who claims the President is managing an international plot to destroy us all- but at the same time is a very stupid and incompetent man); I’ve heard that the President wants us all to suffer because he enjoys the powerful feeling he gets from that; I’ve heard that the President should be jailed because he won’t agree with the Republicans and is therefore being treasonous. You get the point. I could sit here and write them all day. It’s interesting that every right-wing talk show host has the same points, almost verbatim- like they all come from the same place. Hmmm? I heard our local talk show guy say that Vice president Biden is “an idiot”, and he meant that Mr. Biden is literally mentally deficient- and said so. The folks I’m referring to aren’t the idle callers who have nothing better to do than sit on the phone all day so they can engage in this cynical trash- they are the hosts.

After listening to these ridiculous statements repeated over and over I suppose I could get angry at the lack of real intellect being displayed, and concerned that so many people get their information from these dubious sources. But lately I’ve become amused instead. It amuses me that radio hosts, entertainers-showmen really, hold themselves up as being superior to people of real accomplishment. How does a Hannity or a Limbaugh really compare to a President (good or bad)? These radio shills have no academic credentials. They have never held office. They have never had to shoulder real responsibility for people’s lives or livelihoods. Other than a life in radio, what have they done? How do their life stories inspire us, or inspire our children? For instance, Limbaugh’s life story is train wreck- married 3 or 4 times, drug addict, racism, sexism, you name it. This man's character is so poor even the NFL wouldn't let him in. Would we teach our children to follow his path as a role model? Yet he’s the ideological leader of the conservative movement, and not one Republican would dare cross him. I was particularly amused by our local radio host. Here’s a guy who has a three hour-a-day talk-show gig in a small radio market saying he’s more knowledgeable, accomplished and has better judgment on the direction of government than a man who served honorably in the U.S. Senate for 36 years and is Vice-President of the United States. It takes some real big brass balls to say that- as it does for any of these talk show blow-hards who only talk and do nothing. It takes someone who doesn’t know the difference between ego and substance to make that claim. How many of us hope our children or our grandchildren will someday be the next Sean Hannity? Would we be more proud of our kin if they were Harvard Law graduates, constitutional law professors and President of the United States; or if they had the afternoon drive time show to spout mindless propaganda five days a week?

These demigods hold themselves up to be our voice and I suppose we’ve let them by giving them a very rich medium to practice in. My point is that we have allowed those who do nothing but talk their “talking points” to be more important than those who do the real work of governing- and that goes for our officials from both parties. Even those whose ideas are very different from mine are worthy of respect because they have put themselves in the real line of fire. They are not pretenders, or entertainers making  big bucks from their pseudo-intellects and a bunch of guys calling in to hear themselves say “mega-dittos Rush” on the radio.

I’m not an educator, but I am married to one so I often think about the public behavior of adults in leadership positions (by virtue of the office they hold or their place in mass media) in contrast to what we teach our children. I believe the way we teach children and the standards we try to instill in them ought to be the way we expect them to act as adults later in life. Isn’t that the point of education? For instance, I wonder what a teacher would say to a child in school who continually berates other people? I wonder what a teacher would do with a child who turns in a report containing blatant lies or misrepresentations of facts, knowing they are false? I wonder what a teacher would do with a child who refuses to pay attention or is disrespectful to classmates and faculty, then encourages other children to behave the same way? I believe that teacher would not accept such behavior. I believe that teacher would employ their skills to correct such children and we would all expect them to do just that, because for most of us such behavior is unacceptable. The same behaviors we call childish and unacceptable in young people seems to get rewarded in this political environment, and by an entertainment medium that values misbehavior and rancor in place of thoughtful discussion and truth seeking. Conservative talk-radio is the intellectual equivalent of professional wrestling. It’s phony, and designed to get the crowd riled up instead of encouraging better communication and clearer thinking.

The unfortunate fact is that the talk radio market and all its hate-filled rhetoric has taken hold because we’ve stopped doing a couple of very important things for our children in the last thirty to forty years. We stopped teaching civics in school and we stopped teaching critical thinking skills. Civics is the study of how our government works. If you don’t know civics-and know it well, you can’t distinguish the crap you hear from the way government is supposed to work.  Without critical thinking skills you can’t tell the propaganda from legitimate intellectual thought because you don't have the intellectual tools to analyze it. When those things are missing we tend to fall for the message that comes from the loudest voice, repeated over and over.  

I will try to remain amused. I take heart in knowing that as hard as they tried last year, the poison talkers and their ditto-head followers lost the battle. Even with a ten-to-one advantage in the radio market- they lost. Better ideas and better hopes for the country prevailed over the empty rhetoric of these charlatans and their coordinated talking points. I’m hopeful that thoughtful progressives and thoughtful conservatives will emerge once again find a way to lead and govern us. That’s what really takes big brass ones.

Thanks for looking in.