Talk Radio on the FM

Lincoln's 95.1 recently switched from classic-rock to news-talk.

The differences between the audiences for the two are subtle but important. Classic-rock radio caters to middle-aged white men who take it for granted that they are the center of the universe, so of course "The Grand Illusion" is still in heavy rotation, keep rolling down the street with a song in your heart and without a care in the world.

Talk radio is for middle-aged white men who have suddenly awakened to the fact that the rest of the world doesn't know that it is here to serve them. This creates a profound frustration in our ruling class, so they use talk radio to take out their frustrations by screaming at each other about how everyone else is a communist/faggot/dyke/tree-hugger/freak/wetback/communistnazifaggot, etc.

Of course I do oversimplify. I do not mean to give the impression that things can be neatly divided between the laid-back middle-aged white man who never listens to talk radio and the angry middle-aged white man who never listens to classic rock. We all go through moments of great calm and great rage, and there is in fact quite a bit of overlap between the audiences of the two radio formats.

Neal Boortz was railing against a statement on global warming released by a group of Irish churches a couple days ago. The report apparently says, (Though I'm sure the main premise of the report was simplified and strawmanned by Boortz) that rich industrial countries are primarily responsible for global warming, they therefore should bear primary responsibility for alleviating the problem.

They may not sound terribly radical to you sitting there reading this. Rich countries are the ones that have historically had the most factories and the most cars, and are the only nations that actually have the money to do something about the problem.

But there is no global warming don't you know? Conservatives, you see, pride themselves on moral certainty. It is fascinating to hear a right-winger, on the surface an adult, say words like "doubt" and "confusion" in the same tone of voice that the rest of us use to say "death" or "rape". But the right-wing has made it very clear that they are dead-serious in their belief that moral confusion and self-reflection are the worst things in the world. War, double-think, frothing hatred for at least two-thirds of their countrymen and a solid ninety-five percent of the human race, all of this is preferable to the soft yonic waters of ambiguity.

So there is no global warming you see, because capitalism is good, and there is no "good but" or "bad but". To say a thing is good is to say that it is perfect, and to say a thing is bad is to say that it is pure evil. So to "believe" in global warming is to believe that capitalism, through industrialization, has caused a serious problem, and anyone who denies the perfection of good things doesn't really believe in them.

So no, there can't possibly be any global warming, it makes far more sense to believe that the entire scientific community not working for Exon is part of a gigantic communist/pagan/lesbian conspiracy to destroy modern civilization and force us to bow down to the Earth Goddess at gunpoint. Being absurd is far better than being womanly.

In bashing the Irish church report, Boortz never actually used the word socialism, there was no need to. His listeners understood that the churches were motivated by nothing more than envy for those who have worked for success and power, and that they want to force the rich "achieving" nations to give money to the poor, "unacheiving nations."

The report, needless to say, was an attack on the very concept of working for a living, and everybody who does work for a living should take it as a personal insult. Irish churches hate your willingness to provide for your family.

As proof that there is no global warming, Boortz told his listeners that the polar bear population is five times what it was in the 1950's. This is true, it isn't legal to slaughter polar bears at will anymore, and corporations are politely asked to mind where they spill their waste, which wasn't so much the case in the fifties, this has been helpful for the polar bear.

Of course, the fact that there are more humans alive today than there were during the Black Death doesn't mean we have nothing to worry about does it? Melting icebergs are a problem for the polar bears who live on them, as are the environmental stresses put upon seals, their main prey.

"If children were getting any kind of an education, this global warming hysteria would be over yesterday."

MMmhmm. There are more polar bears than there used to be, therefore global warming cannot possibly be real. This is precisely the kind of clear-headed, rational thinking that a good education provides. We must teach are children that there are certain things that they must assume in order to be good Americans/people, and, when necessary, to use backwards logic in order to justify these things that God's chosen people must believe.

And oh by the way, Al Gore made a movie about global warming, and he totally thinks he's better than you.