Satellite radio

Before there was Facebook and Twitter there was radio.  Not the old time radio where soap operas and baseball games were aired, but the more recent vintage of talk radio, where mere sports and news was a prelude to talk shows about sports and politics.

When this changed exactly I'm not sure.  But sometime in the last thirty years, talk radio exploded. Sports talk shows probably ran neck-and-neck with political talk shows, although to call them talk shows would be a little bit of a misnomer.  Sports talk often involved more shouting than anything else, and were it not for the medium political talk shows would have involved deaths, given the vitriol often heard on those shows.

From Wikipedia I see that satellite radio in the United States began with an application to the FCC in 1990, but that it wasn't until 2001 it began broadcasting (and of all people, Tim McGraw was the first artist aired on satellite radio.  Tim McGraw?  Seriously?).  Subscribers have been slow to transition to satellite radio, mostly because it's not free, but automakers have been including the service in their cars for limited periods upon the purchase of new vehicles, and some buyers have renewed their subscriptions when they expired.

That's what happened with Karen.  When she got her new Chevy last year, it came with a free subscription to Sirius/XM radio.  Sirius/XM has so many channels it's inconceivable that a person could listen to all of them sufficient to decide which are good and which are crap.  It's easy to pick out the favorites pretty quickly, but to listen to every offering would take far too much time.

This past weekend we made another six hour trip in the car.  This time we took Karen's Chevy, because my Volvo is still in the shop awaiting a transplant or two.  Although I prefer my car for several reasons, the one feature about Karen's Chevy that I really enjoy is her Sirius/XM radio, to  which we listened the entire time.

What's interesting about satellite radio is its diversity.  One can listen to music from every era, from the 20's all the way through the present day.  There are more sports channels than one can reasonably listen to and political radio has staked its very territorial claims stridently.  We even discovered that there's a Mel Brooks channel that features songs from his movies.  Perhaps it even airs interviews of the comedy legend.  Who knew?

The most fascinating channels are the political ones.  Given my conservative bent, I don't find much on the conservative channels that offends me, except for the occasional condescending attitude of the hosts.  I don't enjoy debates where people talk over each other, belittle each other and make snide, sarcastic comments.  This is what passes for rhetoric on the conservative channels.

What's most entertaining about the conservative channels is the callers themselves.  More often than not -- with notable and very infrequent exceptions -- the callers are wired, antagonistic and condescending themselves.  More than anything they're ill-informed, citing statistics that would make Ronald Reagan's reliance on Reader's Digest positively academic.  There is nothing like a liberal to make a debate go because their mantra, as I've often said, is Do as we say, not as we do.

But whatever the conservative channels may be, the liberal channels are that much worse.  I've never heard such cloyingly mawkish, self-righteous, cluelessly strident balderdash in my life.  Some young radio host on one of the liberal stations was talking about the recent bombing in Boston and invited people who agreed with him to comment on the AP's decision to remove Islamophobia from its working lexicon.  First of all, I don't know what good removing a word from a dictionary does; people are either going to use the word or not, and if AP writers use the word in defiance of their employer, does that mean they can be fired?  Second, the thrust of the host's argument was that by removing it, the AP was treating it as if there was no more hatred for Muslims when, obviously, there still was.  His argument was that the word needs to remain in circulation to more properly describe the situation as it's portrayed by the Left.

There are a couple of things that are amusing on this front.  First, is it wrong for people to fear a group that has declared its intention to destroy those same people?  To be sure, we can't generalize, but it makes sense that if Islamofascists (I can only imagine how the Left would react to that word...) are bent on our destruction, we shouldn't welcome them with open arms singing Kumbayas.  Second, if we're trying to be more accurate in our descriptions of things, shouldn't the term pro-choice be replaced with the term pro-death?  Whether you believe the fetus is a human being or not, it's a living something, and by terminating the pregnancy you are killing it, i.e., making it dead.  So if one is going to contort oneself about the use or meaning of the word Islamophobia, we should strive to be more accurate in all our descriptions, and what is more fundamental to humans than life or death?

The First Amendment guarantees the right of all Americans to free speech, whether they pay for it or not.  I certainly follow the Voltairean approach to free speech and will willingly die to protect another person's right to say something I find distasteful, but I will also acknowledge the abject hypocrisy of certain people who insist on foisting their mores on me.

Plato descried democracy because its natural evolution brought it closer to anarchy.  Liberals often forget that even in a democracy, brakes need to be applied at times lest the whole system go careening off a cliff.

But if it does, Sirius/XM will be broadcasting along the way.

For a monthly fee, of course.

(c) 2013 The Truxton Spangler Chronicles