Radio

Listening to the Mike Malloy show from 9:00 to midnight almost every day.  The voice transmitted through the air into the otherwise silent personal space of whatever room I happen to be holed up in, fending off the impressions of the world outside.

Malloy is playing the songs of the seventies group, America, in between segments of his show.  Even though I recognize and remember almost all the songs, listening to them now is like hearing them for the first time.  The chords sound simpler, and the construction of the songs is much clearer than it was when I listened to them in the past, on the [car] radio.  But as clear and comprehensible as the America songs are, I don't like them now any more than I did then.

So Malloy talks about the right wingers like he always does, a singular voice penetrating the barriers of space and buildings to talk to the Truthseekers about the reality behind the political headlines and the tv newscasts.  His animate, energized persona materializes right beside me, behind his torrential voice, rising and falling, shouting and whispering, laughing and cursing, and holding mind and matter captive with sound!

He's many hundreds of miles away in his home studio outside of Atlanta.  But his voice--in between the music and commercial breaks--is in my room, talking to me as clearly and comprehensibly as an America song plays on my iPhone.  But this time he's talking about something of paramount urgency for everyone:  the new IPCC report on climate change.

Apparently the new findings are that by approximately 2040, we'll pass the final output of CO2 that represents the maximum volume allowable if we're to keep the warming below 3.6 degrees Farenheit.

This is coming through the radio after 10:30 PM on Friday night.

When I first discovered radio I was still sharing a room with Ed.  I heard from Dan Baker that if you put a transistor radio under your pillow, you could hear it really well, but nobody else could.  I was in fourth grade, the last year of my unqualified academic ascent--even though I got caught smoking that year and that changed my life forever--when I listened to the Dave Clark Five and the Beatles after nine o'clock on a school night with the lights out and my head comfortably suspended on the music and voices coming through my pillow, I discovered that communication opened the doors to a reality beyond Ed's and my little bedroom.

There was a world, a universe beyond the world under my parents' roof, even beyond the fences surrounding our school yard.  It was a world created by my imagination, listening to radio.  But it was a world of music, romance, hip speak,   It was a world of connections, where we all understood each other and the universe made sense.  It was a world we were all in together.

Before the flight of the Apollo rocket, nobody knew exactly what the world looked like when one took in the whole thing from a distance.  We had drawings, artists' conceptions, but no accurate photos.

We had the maps drawn in our minds from the information we understood to be true.

Likewise, The Wizard of Oz, Rupert Murdoch has materialized in living rooms and assemblies all across America by his control of Fox, The Journal, and the Mail, not to mention his worldwide media empire.  So when his listeners and his readers speak about the world as they perceive it, it's his world, his cosmos, his reality they're speaking into existence.

His is the voice of Mr. Kurtz, controlling the ignorant through fear.  He's supplanting their minds.  That's why one wants to own a media empire, after all.