It's a popular dish where I come from, and it's taken from the perennial cookbook, Louisiana: Recipe for Disaster. And here's how you make Endemic Toxic Stew:
-- Take 300 years of a deviant civic culture out of the bayous of Louisiana. Check to make sure the tolerance of corruption and the get-rich-quick scheme has ripened sufficiently.
-- Add a significantly uneducated and compliant population.
-- Make a roux with BP crude oil and contaminated sediments.
-- Simmer in a cracked pot for many generations in befouled water over tropical heat.
-- Add oil- and dispersant-contaminated seafood. (If you desire, add a number of Louisiana state deadheads for a more robust flavor.)
-- Season to taste with complacency, corrupt politicians, waste, incompetent government and a Gallic shrug.
-- Serve with dirty rice, cancer sticks and too much booze.
(Makes enough to serve as many legislators' brothers-in-law as possible. Serves fewer "unconnected" citizens every year. Eat at your own risk.)
Just sittin' here thinkin' early on a Sunday morning. And for no particular reason, here's a brief timeline . . . of my musical youth. 1966:"Dem goddamn Beatles say dey bigger den Jesus Christ. Dey muss be a bunch a commerniss."
I am 5 and easily bullied by parental units. Original copy of "Meet the Beatles' given to me by Aunt Sybil ends up busted up and pitched into the garbage as some sort of religious act. As opposed to . . . going to church?
1966-67: Take to playing the phonograph in the 1949 Silvertone console, cutting musical teeth on old 78s by Louis Jordan and His Tympany Five, Ivory Joe Hunter, Hank Williams and (yes) Elvis Presley (quite rare, as it turns out). Burn through vintage 45s by the Everly Brothers, Elvis (again), Jerry Lee Lewis, The Kingston Trio, et al.
Unfamiliar enough with the concept of "irony" not to appreciate it in the context of what I've just been listening to from my folks' 1940s and '50s records as compared to their rants about "n****r music."
1971: "C'mon Mama, it's the Carpenters. The Carpenters ain't hippie music." "Oh, all right."
1971: Out at camp in Head of Island, stay awake half the night under the covers, earphone in ear, listening to acid rock on the "Chad Noga Choo-Choo" on Rampart 102 in New Orleans.
1972: Score 45s by Joe Tex, Dr. Hook, Edgar Winter Group and Gallery, among others, at Howard Bros.
1973: Score 45s by George Harrison, Paul Simon, Billy Preston, Wings, Clarence Carter, Dobie Gray, Elton John and Three Dog Night, among others, at TG&Y.
Have a knack for winning stuff on the phone from WLCS.
1975: Divide listening time between WLCS and Loose Radio.
1976: Skip lunch a lot to spend lunch money on LPs. All "hippie music."
Regular midnight announcement from parents' bedroom -- "CUT THAT S*** OFF!"
SUMMER 1977: "It's the Sex Pistols. So what?"
FALL 1977: Radio teacher John Dobbs bans from the WBRH airwaves (and confiscates) the copy of "God Save the Queen" my Aunt Ailsa brought back from London that summer -- just as I begged her to. I get my 45 back after promising never to bring it to school again.
Thus ends the last time ever that Baton Rouge was a trendsetter. NOVEMBER 1977: Special trek to Musicland at Cortana Mall to buy "Never Mind the Bollocks." Lustily sing the chorus to Bruce Springsteen's "Badlands" while playing air guitar.
For the ones who had a notion, a notion deep inside That it aint no sin to be glad you're alive I wanna find one face that aint looking through me I wanna find one place, I wanna spit in the face of these Badlands You got to live it every day Let the broken hearts stand As the price you got to pay We'll keep pushing till it's understood And these badlands start treating us good
1979: Find now-rare "fire cover" of Lynyrd Skynyrd's "Street Survivors" (complete with concert-schedule insert) hiding in the bins of the little-visited Sears record department. Also find "Let It Be" with a rare red-apple label. 1980: Finally get around to replacing that copy of "Meet the Beatles."
They got a name for the winners in the world I want a name when I lose They call Alabama the Crimson Tide Call me Deacon Blues
-- Steely Dan
From the June 29, 1959, edition of Broadcasting magazine, we have printed evidence that the 1950s were a strange era, and stranger yet south of the Mason-Dixon Line. I can understand mythologizing a lost rebellion in defense of a discredited institution and exploitation as a way of life -- I am from the Deep South, after all. I suspect people in the Balkans understand this primal impulse as well.
WHAT I'M more loathe to understand is the use of the Lost Cause and a catastrophically failed military adventure as fodder for an advertising campaign . . . one ostensibly intended to convey the notion that you're conquering a market and winning sales for your advertisers. I mean, really?
For a TV station in . . . Georgia?
Why not just bang out some ad copy along the lines of this?
We're WRBL -- Wee ReBeL in Columbus -- and our half-starved, underequipped (and underage) advertising staff is going to run out of ammunition right when you need it most and let your competition blaze through Georgia just like Sherman's army!
WELL, maybe it sold some fried chicken for Lester Maddox up in Atlanta.
Scratch many "progressives," and what you'll find is . . . Glenn Beck tripping on Viagra.
Replace the "Ground Zero imam," Feisal Abdul Rauf with Christine O'Donnell, the Republicans' nominee for U.S. Senate in Delaware, and you basically have folks like Media Matters and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow doing Glenn Beck's schtick -- just not quite so craziliciously well as Beck does it.
O'Donnell is a tea-party candidate. She has Sarah Palin as a patron. She has a financially checkered past, with allegations of lying, hypocrisy and cheating former campaign workers thrown in for good measure.
That's a lot for a liberal to work with, politically. SO WHAT do "progressives" think O'Donnell's Achilles' heel is? She's against masturbation.
Well, so is the pope. It's called Catholic moral theology. In fact, lots of Christians are foursquare against pleasuring oneself, and fornication of all sorts. So are Muslims.
But you don't see Maddow, or Media Matters -- or, in fact, any other "progressive" voice -- crying out against Muslims' horrible intolerance of whacking off. What you instead hear is a cacophony of "progressive" voices condemning the likes of Beck, Newt Gingrich and all manner of tea-party nutjobs for their bigotry toward American Muslims.
You hear them condemning the intolerant right for holding Muslims, and their faith, in the same sort of contempt "progressives" reserve for the long-established, orthodox Christian approach to sexual ethics.
Americans, it seems to me, might take the left's pleas for tolerance a lot more seriously if "progressives" weren't such contemptible hypocrites.
If so, say goodbye to Louisiana which, during tough times, will give away the fiscal farm to land an iron- and steel mill as it systematically starves higher education and research.
The latest blow to what passes for intellectual capital in the state came Wednesday, when we found out what it would mean to LSU if it cut $12 million less than what state budget officials asked it to plan for. What it would mean is carnage.
Job carnage.
Academic carnage.
Student carnage.
Enrollment carnage.
And, ultimately, economic carnage for Baton Rouge and the rest of Louisiana. YOU KNOW what, though? Any state that sows the kind of carnage on its flagship university described in this Advocate story today deserves every bad thing it will reap:
LSU would axe nearly 700 employees and lose close to 8,000 students if forced to cut about $62 million from the flagship campus’ coffers next year, according to an LSU estimate.
The hypothetical budget cuts released late Wednesday are part of a state-mandated, budget-cutting exercise of higher education and other state agencies in preparation for the loss of federal stimulus dollars and some state revenues next summer.
The $62 million represents about 32 percent — reduced from 38 percent by the state — of state general funds and stimulus dollars going to the flagship LSU campus.
Higher education statewide would lose nearly $437 million.
“It would be a catastrophic impact,” LSU Chancellor Michael Martin said. “The (academic) core would be seriously harmed.”
In July, LSU released a budget scenario featuring $45.8 million in cuts and the loss of more than 260 jobs.
The additional $17 million cut in the latest scenario almost all comes directly out of classrooms and the faculty ranks, increasing the amount of lost jobs all the way up to 690, nearly 630 of which are currently filled.
About half of the hypothetical layoffs would be faculty.
AT THIS RATE, we need to start calling Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal by his given name, Piyush. As in "Piyush the state right off a cliff, gubna!" LSU's student paper, The Daily Reveillecontinues the tale of a state's intellectual deleveraging:
If the scenario becomes reality, then 154,299 undergraduate credit hours and 31,506 graduate credit hours will be eliminated.
Chancellor Michael Martin said he doesn’t know the likelihood of the cuts materializing because the projections were created at request of the state.
“If it actually came to pass, it would be catastrophic,” Martin said. “The very conversations we’re having will do some harm because the conversation causes people to look for other jobs elsewhere.”
Among Wednesday’s predictions, the University did not specify what faculty and departments would suffer, but it did announce general material effects.
“Roughly 50 degrees will be lost, impacting approximately 8,000 students, almost one-third of degree programs,” according to reduction descriptions prepared by the Budget Crisis Committee. “Diversity in career opportunities will be severely limited; campus buildings will be closed.”
Martin said residence halls, dining halls, classrooms and labs would be closed because fewer faculty and students require fewer facilities. Martin did not mention any specific buildings.
The Level Three description also indicated revenue from grants, contracts and tuition will suffer from the cuts, and a reduction in the student population will have a “dramatic impact on the viability of auxiliary units such as athletics, residence halls and the Student Union.”
Martin said the budget cuts will have a cyclical effect, and the University hasn’t even looked into the future effects of losing so many faculty and students.
“How many hamburgers wouldn’t be sold, how many gas stations wouldn’t sell?” Martin asked. “Just start thinking about the multiplier effect of that number of jobs lost and the spending in the community. This will reverberate not just in this campus, but across the community and the state.”
Martin said the effects among degree programs will be severe. While some students will simply change their majors if their degrees are cut, many students will transfer or not come to the University, Martin said.
“No matter how you cut this, you’re going to be forcing upon the students an education of lesser value,” Martin said. “A university has to have a certain breadth, hence the term university and not ‘monoversity.’ It will not only be a much narrower institution, it will be a much more mediocre one.”
"MUCH more mediocre?" Why, that sounds right up Louisiana's alley!
Because if it follows that stupid is as stupid does, then the Gret Stet will keep Piyushing until it's the most mediocre of 'em all.And when you're good at bad, that ain't good.
How do Republican women pass a good time when they have their national convention in Charleston, S.C.?
Oh, something along the lines of a Kappa Alpha nightmare at a Southern college. Only when I was a student at LSU, I don't remember hearing that the frat-boy Old South devotees actually stooped to hiring "happy darkie" minstrels for any of their ridiculous Lost Cause formals.
Then again, I could have missed something. The Republican belles of Charleston, however, didn't miss a thing.
By "miss a thing," I mean miss a single opportunity to be as clueless and offensive as humanly possible. The National Federation of Republican Women called the social event "The Southern Experience," according to South Caroline political website FITSnews.com. The rest of the country calls it "What the hell were you thinking?"
OBVIOUSLY, they were thinking it's 1862. And that they used to be Democrats . . . before they seceded and declared war on the United States.
That unavoidably adds a certain ominous je ne sais quoi to what NFRW President Sue Lynch (no, really . . . you can't make this stuff up) said in the call for its national meet:
This Fall Board Meeting has an exciting agenda. With election season upon us, it is vital that we continue to support Republican candidates who will bring our country back to the core values and principles that we hold dear. Let’s work together to Take Back America this November! We have already begun to see a shift in our direction, with outstanding and competitive primary races across the nation that prove that Americans are ready for a change. This is our opportunity to regain control of the House and Senate, as well as important Governorships, and we are ready for the challenge! This Board Meeting will give us the opportunity to get focused and energized for the months ahead, and provide us the tools we need to be successful in November.
I welcome you to what will be a productive and exciting Board of Directors’ Meeting. This election cycle is critical, and we must take the tools and knowledge we gain here and use them to reach our goal — to Take Back America!
TAKE BACK America from whom? And taken back by whom?
That a major GOP organization will go down to the heart of the Confederacy and play along with Lost Cause homages to America's original sin -- a traditional "ode to evil" favored by a certain sort of in-denial Southerner -- makes those questions tragically pertinent.
Once again, the first episode of Mad Men explains everything. Or at least many things.
Take the new marketing campaign of my college alma mater, Louisiana State University.
The university -- and I assume we can still call it a university for now -- has taken grievous budget hits over the past 20 months or so as Louisiana continues to slash its bloated budget . . . in all the places it cannot afford to slash. As it turns out, the $42 million in cuts is just a warm-up for the $75 million butchering the state demands it outline by today.
And now, with all this going on, LSU is trying to figure out how to sell a shell of its former self . . . which, frankly, already was puny compared to many state universities around the country. They're calling it "Love purple, live gold."
In other words, university leaders are rolling out a new ad campaign designed not only to use purple prose to spray paint a dessicated turd gold, but also convince prospective students all over America to take a big bite out of what just might hurt their post-collegiate prospects. NO, REALLY. After reading this story in The Daily Reveille, the LSU student newspaper, I'm thinking they better have found someone as sharp as Don Draper to sell a suspecting public the academic equivalent of cancer sticks:
People often associate budget cuts with the University, but administrators are looking to create a new, hopeful image to brand the University: “Love purple, live gold.”
Herb Vincent, University associate vice chancellor for University Relations and senior associate athletic director, said the campaign was focused on the color gold, which represents excellence, achievement and prestige.
“Purple, passion — we love what we do, and we’re excited about research. Band is excited about sporting events,” said Jewel Hampton, University art director, who coordinated task force efforts for the campaign. “Gold is about hitting the gold standard of excellence. It’s more focused on presenting who we are to prospective students.”
In such a difficult economic time, Vincent said it’s difficult but necessary to brand the University with a new image now.
“The campaign is mostly about who LSU is and trying to define LSU based on the community that makes up this University,” Hampton said. “In that sense, the challenge we have in communicating for LSU every day is this private market of 16- to 20-year-old prospective students.”
Chancellor Michael Martin said it’s an ideal time to brand the University with a new message.
“People are trapped with old images and old phrases,” Martin said. “[The new campaign] is to recognize the place is always changing.”
Martin said once people mull over “love purple, live gold,” they’ll reflect on what it means to them.
“To me, if you embrace and invest yourself here, you’ll live better as a result of it,” Martin said. “Invest in a great education experience, and every part of life will be enriched.”
"AND YOU KNOW what happiness is? Happiness is . . . a billboard on the side of the road that screams with reassurance that whatever you're doing, it's OK."
Company's coming . . . from way up yonder in New York state.
And now the Gret Stet of Louisiana -- infamous for almost electing a neo-Nazi nuttwo decades ago -- can muster enough people for some kind of crazy-politician 12-step meeting.
After which, of course, the Bubbas from Louisiana and the angry white suburban people from New York will go to a Nazi biker bar to solve the problem of the Black Menace. Or the Mexican menace.
Whatever. HERE ARE the details fromThe New York Times on how -- if there is a God -- things are looking a little brighter for the Obama Administration tonight, what with all the tea-party victories in all those Republican primaries. (It's not that I'm thrilled with Barack Obama, it's just that the alternative is soooooo much worse.)
Carl P. Paladino, a wealthy Buffalo businessman and political neophyte, won a stunning victory over his rival, former Representative Rick A. Lazio, in New York’s Republican gubernatorial primary on Tuesday night.
The victory for Mr. Paladino, whose agitating campaign strategy and attacks against Albany earned him a late surge in the polls, marked the second major triumph on Tuesday night for the Tea Party movement, which backed the businessman against Mr. Lazio, a dyed-in-the-wool Republican mainstay.
The result was a potentially destabilizing blow for New York Republicans. It put at the top of the party’s ticket a volatile newcomer who has forwarded e-mails to friends containing racist jokes and pornographic images, espoused turning prisons into dormitories where welfare recipients could be given classes on hygiene, and defended an ally’s comparison of the Assembly speaker, Sheldon Silver, who is Jewish, to “an Antichrist or a Hitler.”
Are you suffering from a Jimmy Carteresque "malaise"?
Are you experiencing discomfort of the lower gastrointestinal tract brought on by excessive exposure to conservative talk radio? Did watching Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin at the Lincoln Memorial have the same effect on your system as Colon Blow -- the tasty cereal with all the prunes and twice the fiber?
Is John Boehner's tan making you a little queasy, Bunkie?
Have you had it with "socialists" . . . and "patriots"? And wasn't it you who swore she saw Keith Olbermann's head do a complete 360 during a "special comment"?
Is that what's getting you down, ma cher 'tit fille?
WELL, BUBBELA . . . you're looking at the answer. Right here. Right now.
It's simple. We can cure what ails us -- and "take America back," too -- by convincing the networks to adopt a simple format change for various talking-head programs, which tend to attract a high proportion of policy wonks and policymakers.
And I have reason to believe it would lead to an exponential increase in viewing audiences for broadcasters and cable networks, which itself would prove attractive to them in a Diana Christensen kind of way.
Three words, Sweetums: the Farm Film Report. (Don't count the "the.")
Just adopt the Farm Film Report format for Meet the Press, This Week, Face the Nation . . . and every program on the Fox News Channel.
OVER ON CNN, Larry King Live would become a deliciously ironic title. And -- at long last -- we'd get to see MSNBC's Keith Olbermannreally blow his top.
Think about it. Write a letter to the network. Start a petition.
I'll get back to you. Don't call me . . . I'll call you.
Is missing glorious programming of SCTV from years ago.
Capitalist boot lickers is making television unwatchable today. Program now is counterrevolutionary offense to people's humor over the collective airwaves.
CCCP1 better than running-dog swill people must endure today. Bring on glorious Soviet minicam!
Things is bad bad in da Gret Stet of Loosiana, cher.
Dey so bad don't nobody know what ta do, baby!
An' one uh da congressmens say evuhbody laughin' at Loosiana. He say things has gots to change, 'cause da stet can't be goin' on like dis.
Mais no, he serious as a heart attack, cher. Lissen. . . .
"Ninety thousand of our citizens have left Louisiana in the last three years trying to find jobs and opportunities somewhere else."
As long as the oil-patch jobs were there, it was easier to tolerate children getting a substandard education, he said. Foul air and dirty water could be ignored as long as the oil money kept rolling in, added the congressman.
But he said the state could no longer put up with the chicanery and behind-the-scenes dealing of its politicians.
"When the oil fields were booming and we were all making money and we were all prospering, we might have been able to tolerate some of the kinds of images we created in our political institutions," he said.
DON'T BE LOOKING for that article in your morning paper. It won't be there.
The story is true. The congressman was Billy Tauzin. The date of the newspaper containing the Associated Press piece . . . Dec. 5, 1986. It was the State-Times in Baton Rouge, which ceased publishing in 1991.
Here's how the AP story ended almost 24 years ago:
Tauzin said the severity of the crisis means the state is ready to change.
"People are desperate," Tauzin said. "We're desperate enough now that we might think some new thoughts.
YEAH, LOUISIANA. How'd that work out for you?
Tauzin's fatal fallacy was in not realizing that in order to think new thoughts, you first have to think at all. And a quarter-century later, virtually nothing has changed in the Gret Stet.
The only change after the oil bust of the 1980s was that, in 1991, Louisiana had "changed" enough to almost elect a Nazi as governor. It dodged a bullet by electing Edwin Edwards -- who now is an involuntary "houseguest" of the federal government -- to yet another term.
Then, in 2005, Katrina came, and New Orleans almost disappeared forever . . . but not before exposing exactly how bad things had gotten on any number of fronts. Talk about a clarion call for "change."
Yet politicians from Slidell to Shreveport are still answering to that standard introduction Tauzin so fretted over in 1986 when it was put to him as banquet humor -- "Will the defendant please rise?"
And Louisiana children still receive inadequate educations, in many cases inside facilities unfit for animals.
And Louisiana people are still some of the poorest anywhere in the United States.
And "Cancer Alley" is still there between Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
And long stretches of the coast are now fouled, thanks to a different kind of "oil boom."
And Louisianians -- scores and scores of them -- are still leaving in search of something better.
THIS BEGS a rather obvious question. Exactly how desperate is desperate enough that Louisiana might think some new thoughts?
When I was a student at Louisiana State some 453 years ago, one thing was impossible to escape.
No, not Mike the Tiger.
No, not parking tickets.
No, not a bunch of Kappa Alphas, in their finest faux-Confederate regalia, re-enacting the Battle of Gettysburg by attempting a cavalry charge up North Stadium Drive armed with beer bongs and astride Trans Ams their daddies bought them before they left for the Ole War Skule. Well, actually, this scene was pretty hard to avoid, but it could be done.
THERE WAS just one thing that couldn't be dodged or ignored. And that was the word "HAWKWIND" spray painted on just about every flat surface on campus.
I would like to think this was the result of a proto-guerrilla marketing campaign by the space-rock band, targeting underachieving Southern universities as a means of growing its redneck demographic. I likewise would like to think that the disyllabic graffiti poet/artist was none other than the trippy hippie dancing chick who performed with the band.
In an ideal world, she crept onto our benighted campus in the middle of the night, clad in a tight, tie-dyed T-shirt and a pair of well-worn Daisy Dukes. Blowing bubbles as she spray painted HAWKWIND here, there and everywhere, maaaaaaan.
I'd like to think that.
MORE LIKELY, it was LSU's former student-government president, Ted Schirmer, who preferred the Grateful Dead but went about -- theoretically, I reiterate . . . he's a lawyer now -- tagging everything with HAWKWIND just to piss off the fascist, totalitarian university administration. Which just wanted to keep the people down, man.
HAWKWIND.
It probably wasn't about space rock and shimmying hippie chicks at all.
HAWKWIND.
It probably was just another protest against the counterreactionary forces of in loco parental repression.
If we all paid as much attention to making actual good products as we do to bullshit, we wouldn't have to worry about how we'll ever manage to learn Mandarin.
So we can converse with our new Chinese overlords.
This is the Windows Phone 7 team celebrating, no doubt, the inflicting of yet another so-so Microsoft product upon the world. Oy. So geeks think they can dance?
THEN the WinPhone peeps had a "funeral" for the iPhone. And took pictures with an Android phone.
Oops.
Thus, the story of America today. All hype, no substance. All hat, no horse.
All bullshit, no side of beef.
How about this for a revolutionary, countercultural thing for tech hipsters to embrace? How about, when you make a new product, you make sure it's a good one, OK? And then you could, like, shut the hell up about it.
Celebrate by lifting a couple at the neighborhood tavern. Tell someone "Attaboy!"
Or "Attagirl!" We're not sexist.
JUST QUIT giving us reasons to think your mad tech skillz may be, in reality, just as lame as your choreography. And your parade planning.
This is the 3 Chords & the Truth episode of Sept., 10. 9/10, as it were.
I can't do an installment of the Big Show on 9/10 without immediately thinking of the Big Win 910, WLCS . . . the radio station of my adolescence.
Likewise, I can't think of recording 3 Chords & the Truth on 9/10 without doing some sort of tribute to radio's 910. Or at least the only 910 on the radio that matters to me.
So there you go. Now you know where we're going on this week's musical odyssey that we call the Big Show. I've said pretty much what I have to say about WLCS before in this space, so I won't belabor the point.
But I will rerun something I wrote a little more than a year ago, on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Big 91's demise. Read on -- and remember . . . it's 3 Chords & the Truth, y'all. Be there. Aloha.
* * *
ONE THING kids today will never know is what it was like to have your own radio station.
Not what it's like to be a bazillionnaire and own your own big-time broadcast outlet but, instead, what it's like to be devoted to a radio station, this hometown entity that plays cool tunes (well, mostly) and becomes your window on a world much, much larger than the hick burg in which you find yourself trapped. Face it, unless you're a kid growing up in New York, L.A. or Chicago, you think where you're from is That Which Must Be Escaped.
And I'll bet L.A. and New York kids probably want to flee to Paris or Rome. Maybe London.
You see, long ago, radio stations were living things. They were staffed by live human beings whose job it was to entertain and enlighten other live human beings. These were called "listeners," something radio has radically fewer of these days.
Oftentimes, way back deah den (as my mom says), people would find one station or another's personalities and music so compelling that the station, in a real sense, became "their" station. Listeners took emotional and figurative ownership.
They listened day and night. They called the DJs on the "request line." (And note, please, this was an era when "DJ" immediately brought to mind a radio studio, not a dance club.)
Listeners went nuts for the contests, whether it was the chance to win $1,000 or just a promotional 45. They'd pick up a station's weekly survey to see where their favorite songs ranked this week.
They'd wake up to the "morning man" and boogie down to the groovy sounds the afternoon drive guy was spinning out through their transistor radios.
Boogie down to the groovy sounds? Ah, screw it. You had to be there.
THE REAL business radio was in back during its second golden age -- the Boomer age of Top-40 AM blowtorches . . . and of laid-back, trippy FM free-form outfits, too -- was the business of making memories. That stations sold some pimple cream while selling even more records was just a happy accident, at least from the perspective of their loyal fans.
Back when the Internet was more like the Inter-what?, radio was the Facebookof its day. It told us about the world . . . and about each other. It served up new music for our consideration.
Likewise, a station's listeners formed the pre-social-networking incarnation of what became Facebookgroups and fan pages. In short, between the hits and the ads, between the disc jockeys and the contests, radio was community.
All you needed to join was an eight-transistor job, or maybe a hand-me-down table radio in your bedroom, its tubes glowing orange in the darkness as the magic flowed from its six-inch loudspeaker.
AT ITS BEST, radio comforted the afflicted, afflicted the comfortable, lifted downcast spirits, was a friend to the lonely and provided the soundtrack for the times of our lives. To this day, I can hear a song and immediately think "WLCS, 1975," or "WTIX, summer on the Petite Amite River, 1972."
And every early December, my mind will drift back to a late night in 1980 when I was studying for finals at Louisiana State, with my head in a book and WFMF on the stereo. Bad news through the headphones, and -- at least for my generation -- "something touched us deep inside."
It was the Day the Music Died. Again.
Tonight my mind drifts back to Aug. 31, 1984. That was the night a close friend passed into that good night of blessed memory.
That night, the Big 91, WLCS, played its last Top-40 hit and left the Baton Rouge airwaves for its new home in the youthful memories of aging teen-agers like myself. Two-and-a-half decades later, it just doesn't seem right that it's gone.
OF COURSE, lots of things don't seem right nowadays.
That WLCS isn't there anymore -- hasn't been there for more than a generation -- is just one of them in the mind of one Boomer kid from a middling city in the Deep South. You can read about why that is here.
But a couple-odd decades in retrospect, it seems to me that Aug. 31, 1984, was in a way about as profound as the deaths of Buddy Holly and John Lennon -- the intangible end of something we still haven't quite gotten our minds (or our culture) around.
It's not that the actual deaths of Holly or Lennon, or of the "Big Win 910," precipitated some sort of musical or cultural cataclysm in themselves. It's just that things were happening.
And being that things were happening that more or less coincided with each instance of "bad news on the doorstep," it's handy to use these events as markers.
For me, the demise of WLCS -- and the deaths of many stations that were nothing if not actual life forces in their own cultural rights -- signals The Great Unraveling.
The unraveling of a common culture is what I'm getting at, I guess.
Lookit. As much as we kids claimed stations like 'LCS as our own, we can't forget that many of our parents listened, too. Or that Top-40 radio of old played what was big, period -- be that Jefferson Airplane or Frank Sinatra. Because of WLCS, I think I could comprehend more than my own little world of teen-age angst and teen-age fads.
And it's why I feel just as comfortable with Andy Williams and Tony Bennett -- and, yes, Ol' Blue Eyes -- as I do with (ahem) "harder" fare. My world is bigger, richer, more diverse because of a 1,000-watt AM station in a midsized Southern state capital too often prone to calling too much in life "good enough for government work."
Thank God, that couldn't often describe the Big 91.
And because "good enough" wasn't often good enough at WLCS -- because the men and women who worked there just did what they did and did it well -- I owe its memory more than I can repay.
If, after these 25 years, somebody were to require that I pen an epitaph for my long-dead friend, I'd write just this: WLCS played the hits.
And now it seems that Nuts for Jesus down in Florida may be reverting to Plan A in their "terror by proxy" scheme -- provoke overseas Islamic radicals into full-blown Götterdämmerung. What a no-lose scheme this constitutionally protected terror by proxy be! HERE IS the latest, from MSNBC:
The Florida pastor whose plan to burn Qurans on Sept. 11 generated worldwide outrage among Muslims and pressure by the U.S. government to relent said late Thursday that he might not call off the protest after all.
Pastor Terry Jones told NBC News that "we are a little back to square one" after a supposed deal involving a proposed Islamic cultural center in New York evaporated.
At a press conference Thursday afternoon, Jones had said he was canceling the Quran burning because a Muslim imam had assured him that the proposed Islamic center could be moved away from the World Trade Center site in return.
But the imam proposing to build the Islamic center near the World Trade Center denied that a deal had been struck to move the project.
"I am glad that Pastor Jones has decided not to burn any Qurans," Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf said in a statement. "However, I have not spoken to Pastor Jones or Imam Musri (of Florida). I am surprised by their announcement. We are not going to toy with our religion or any other. Nor are we going to barter. We are here to extend our hands to build peace and harmony."
After that statement, Jones said the Quran burning had only been suspended.
"Given what we are now hearing, we are forced to rethink our decision," Jones said. "So as of right now, we are not canceling the event, but we are suspending it."
Jones wouldn't say if the church would burn Qurans but said "I'm praying" to decide what to do next.
At Jones' first press conference, he appeared with Imam Muhammad Musri of the Islamic Society of Central Florida and said that Musri had told him that the mosque would be moved.
MARK MY WORDS, the whole world -- particularly nuts all across these formerly-United States -- are watching this play out . . . and many of them are way smarter than a bunch of self-important, hateful bumpkins down in the swamps of Florida.
When they take the concept of terror by proxy and run with it, it will end with concrete strictures placed on our rights as Americans if, of course, by that time there are any Americans left to crack down upon.
As I said before, John Adams was right:
"We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other."
WHAT THE late president didn't see coming was it being the "religious" who'd help so much in bringing the whole thing down. The 9/11 hijackers were "religious." Fred Phelps' "God Hates Fags" cultists from Kansas are "religious," as are the asshats in Gainesville.
The world is filled with "religious" people. Everybody thinks God is on his side.
What's in much shorter supply are those who humbly seek to be on God's side. There's a difference, one that John Adams seemingly didn't take into account.
And that's what's going to be the end of us all.
UPDATE:Nuts of a feather burn sacred texts together. Yes, the "God Hates Fags" contingent has weighed in. And they're stocking up on matches, reports the Ocala Star-Banner:
Westboro Baptist Church, the small Topeka, Kan., church that pickets funerals of American soldiers to spread its message that God is punishing the country for being tolerant of homosexuals, has vowed to hold a Quran burning if Gainesville's Dove World Outreach Center calls its off."
WBC burned the Koran once – and if you sissy brats of Doomed america bully Terry Jones and the Dove World Outreach Center until they change their plans to burn that blasphemous tripe called the Koran, then WBC will burn it (again), to clearly show you some things," the church announced in a news release this week.
