I eat pieces of AM radio for breakfast.
Posted on 7 Jan 2008
I’ve been taking peeks at good ol’ AM talk radio lately and my two favorites are 770 “The Truth” and 1090 “Progressive Talk”–and by favorite I mean most ridiculous. Their rhetoric is absurd and clearly thrives on the demonization of the other. I wonder if the fever has risen simply because they sense their Modern categories of “truth” and “objectivity” are fading; life and politics just aren’t as simple as they would like us to believe. To stand in perfect solidarity with a single political system or party is just asking for ridicule too: we’re always right, they are always wrong. Why did parties ever come to be anyway? Anytime I hear that a bill or policy was voted down party lines I want to throw something. Of course, categories are attractive as they make life and voting simple and it seems to be how the system works: we vote for reps and then expect them to rep us, and usually within the ideology of their party. How boring.
These thoughts and hopes found me again connecting to the political philosophy of Obama; particularly those discoursed in this great article by Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic.
Do resist the urge to tick a political box on your social-networking bio page, you’re so much more interesting than that.
Dan Hauge
7 Jan 2008 (10:24)
Welcome to the club! I’ve been flipping back and forth between 770 and 1090 in my wee little cubicle for years now. What is most entertaining, to me, is how both sides can rant, with equal passion and equal straight faces, how it is only the other side who ‘spins’ and ‘twists facts’ and ‘operates on ideology’, while their own opinions are of course rational, balanced, well thought out assessments of facts. It’s funny, and then kind of scary, how easily we are blinded to our own ideologies, how blinded we are to our emotional presuppositions. Shee-heesh.