Radio Ga-Ga
by Kerry Joyce
illustration by Opie
God I miss the Commies. I miss everything about them. I miss the nuclear sword of Damocles, dangling from the slenderest of threads. I miss the domino theory. I miss the Falcon and the Snowman. I miss Tom Clancy. And I especially miss all the tin horn Third World dictators we propped up to save the world from Soviet expansionism. Ever since the Berlin Wall came down, life just hasn’t been the same.
Sure, we still have the technocratic Chinese commies, the up-your-nose-with-a-rubber-hose Cuban commies, and the in-your-ass-with-a-nuclear-blast North Korean commies. But I miss the real Commies. The Russkies. Now there was some commies.
From mass murder, to nuclear meltdowns, to cheating at the Olympics, Boris and Natasha did it all. And then they had the nerve to insist that they were going to save the world from us. Ha!
It was a Cold War, which means it was mostly a war of words. And even ordinary Americans could play the home version via talk radio. You could hear all about how bad they were, and how good we were in comparison. Those elitists in the press were always making excuses for the Commies, but fortunately there were tough talking talk show hosts and in-coming callers like Bob from Billerica to clue us in about what was really going on.
“Let’s try to play nice with the commies and maybe they’ll play nice with us. We’ll have cultural exchange programs,” the accomodationists suggested.
Yeah right. We’ll teach them particle physics and they’ll teach us to dance the ballet. You’d have to be an editorial writer at the Boston Globe to fall for that Russkie ruse.
O.K., so the Moscow McDonalds, export Pepsi and CNN had more to do with the demise of the Soviet Union than sea launched cruise missiles, but Reagan was still right. They were an evil empire.
It’s all over now though. Bob from Billerica is in exile. He’s laying tile in another state. And if he’s still calling talk shows from his clients’ telephones, the programs he calls are not aired in Boston.
So what’s a tough talking talk show host to do? Enemies, enemies, enemies. We have met the enemy and they are US. Well not us exactly us, but THEM. Blacks. Sure they’re Americans too. But look at all the grief they cause us. Their leaders are always asking us for something, and we’re so generous, we’d gladly give it to them, only they don’t deserve it, and they’re not properly grateful. You can’t go a week without hearing some Black leader complaining about the White establishment for at least 45 seconds to a minute.
Those elitists in the press are always making excuses for the Blacks, but fortunately there are tough talking talk shows hosts and callers like Jack from Dedham to clue us in about what’s really going on, for hours on end.
For over a year, the talk on TV and talk radio new programs has been dominated by questions of race, or more specifically, complaints about the Black community, just as they once were about evil commies, back in the good ol’ 80’s.
Between noon and midnight on A.M. news talk shows in Boston, at least half the air time, it seemed, was devoted to a one-sided discussion of racial questions. Much of this discussion centered around O.J. Simpson. But it was Simpson’s status as a Black defendant that dominated the “dialogue.” The accused murderer became a convenient metaphor for long-suffering, tax-paying White men with car phones.
For the last 30 years, racial questions were not a polite topic of conversation. When that changed, it became just as tittilating a topic for talk show listeners, the hosts, and their anonymous callers as sex had been in more Victorian times. The ratings were glorious.
This latest preoccupation with skin culminated with the Million Man March. Four hundred thousand Black men gathered at the seat of government and didn’t ask government for one damned thing. “The Black community has to take responsibility for itself,” the White talk show hosts and their callers have been saying for over a year. “We have to take responsibility for ourselves,” the men at the Million Man March said. Did that satisfy the talk show hosts and their callers? No. Instead they dwelled on the moral turpitude of the march’s lead organizer, Louis Farrakhan, who detonated his own messianic dream with a silly, long-winded speech.
Time marches on, and it’s a little amazing that a country that gave Richard Nixon more votes than anyone in its history should expect Black people to wait around for leadership that is moral enough.
Now O. J.’s on the golf course, Farrakhan is back under whatever rock he crawled out from under, and Black people have a renewed sense of purpose. The whole Black/White thing is becoming a bore. Enemies enemies enemies.
Well, let’s not forget that there are not two, but three kinds of Americans. White Americans, Black Americans and Damn Foreigner Americans.
Luckily, we have Bob Dole, the Republican Congress, and tough talking talk show hosts like William F. Buckley, of the TV program Firing Line, to the rescue with a proposal for making English the official language of the United States.
Aside from more high ratings, this measure is destined to have about as much real impact as making Rusty Jones the official auto undercoating of the 1996 Summer Olympics. But for talk shows, the topic of foreign tongues in our midst can be another great clanging, if false, alarm, and a springboard to related subjects like immigration (legal and illegal), culturalism (uni- and multi-), and when things get a little boring, back to race.
With a proposal to make English America’s official language, the Republicans prove they aren’t satisfied telling us what we can put into our mouths anymore, now they want to tell us what comes out as well. The son of a Texas oilman, William F. Buckley loves English so much, he speaks it as if he grew up in England. He accuses those who oppose making English the official language of “faux cosmopolitanism.” (Hint to Bill: I think you’ll be a lot more convincing on this one if you refrain, for once, from peppering your insults with French.)
I appreciated Buckley’s concern though, when he wrote in his syndicated column: “I have experienced a 15 year old boy who speaks English with difficulty even though he has lived with his mother in New York for five years.”
Experienced a 15 year old boy? Bill, I thought we put those nasty rumors to rest back when you wrote to former F.B.I. director J. Edgar Hoover about joining you in a libel suit along with David Niven and a bunch of other alleged celebrity closet cases. Instead, Hoover started a file on you. For the love of clarity Bill, cast off those Latin derived phrasings and go with a good, short Anglo Saxon word like “know” or “met” next time.
English is, in fact, one of the world’s great growth industries. When the president of Hamilton College embarked on a European tour at the turn of the century, he was asked how he would cope with the language barrier. He replied, “Anyone I want to speak with understands Latin.” English now serves a similar role, as the common language of the educated and scientific community the world over. There are more students of English in China than there are in the United States. You have to take four years of English in college to get an engineering degree in Germany.
The percentage of Americans who speak English is now greater than it was a hundred years ago. Still, it would be nice if more people learned the King’s English, (even though a dozen Kings of England never bothered). Then they could make seven dollars an hour, before taxes, answering a telephone, instead of ten dollars an hour under the table for painting a wall or cleaning a bathroom. The choice of language is based on need, not on government edict.
The proposed federal law follows measures passed in 18 states making English their official language. When you consider that the list includes Nebraska, New Hampshire, and Indiana, it becomes obvious that these laws are just yet another way for one group of people to feel good about themselves at a less powerful group of people’s expense. Except these days, the targets are our friends and neighbors. Unless your neighbor is a grain silo in Nebraska.
Communists of the old evil empire unite! America needs you.
