The Good Old Days

When the crazy of late-night radio was heard only at night.

There was always something soothing about the voice that seemed to ease out of the pink 1940s radio my mother gave me to fight through my childhood bouts with insomnia. Every Sunday, without fail, the dread of returning to school the next day held onto the past week, not letting my body and mind relax. The radio was supposed to help me focus my thoughts so I could fall asleep, but thanks to that raspy voice that seemed to be filtered through cotton balls stored in a jar lined with cork, I instead listened intently to the late-night DJ.

With four siblings sleeping soundly in their respective beds and my father snoring fitfully on the other side of the wall, I conversed with my stuffed animals and beckoned sleep to come. Minutes seemed like hours. Every creaking groan of the old house or spastic waving of shadows from tree branches in our backyard seemed like hands reaching for me. Not until my father would waken to have one of his in-the-middle-of-the-night smoke breaks, which usually roused my mother, would she come storming in and demand I “get to sleep.”

By switching off the radio, she was depriving me of that voice and that honey-colored light emitting from the old, paint-splattered box. I was again alone with my thoughts, which by then were swirling around what I had heard.

The late-night DJ’s ramblings were on topics I never heard about during the daytime. Anything that seemed obvious or inevitable by day on those Sunday nights, gradually being eclipsed by the anxiety of Monday, was open to any theory or opinion. We landed on the moon, or did we? Women’s rights were good, or were they? Lee Harvey Oswald killed JFK, or did he? Every truth was fair game, but because it was a New York radio station, the DJs could only hint at the “alternative truths” because they weren’t allowed to stray too far from the agreed-upon programming. Not being educated enough to understand the tongue-in-cheek and sarcastic comments to read between the lines, I would eventually doze off, lost in thought guided by someone else. On or off, the radio did what it was supposed to do.

It wouldn’t be for another 10 or 12 years before I was relieved by the soothing sanctity of the radio dial and the unexpected twists and turns of nighttime radio programming. In April 1987, after finishing my Russian language training at the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, I took a bus to my next training station to see different parts of the country and different people — what I called “bus people.” My next duty station was in San Antonio, Texas. The bus would head down to Los Angeles, weave eastward across Arizona, New Mexico, and then into Texas. In 1987, that journey took roughly 48 hours.

I was out there during those endless nights, slipping unseen across the desert, that I let the offerings of late-night radio DJs lead down into the rabbit holes of America’s future. I had purchased a small transistor radio and loaded up on batteries. At times, the voices were crystal clear, making the nonsensical words seem much more powerful, thanks to the cactuses and rock formations silhouetted against the endless desert sky. At other times, usually during the day, the voices were barely audible, lost in static.

I began to sleep by day and await the messages of those alternative truths. I was 19 and craved to be transformed by someone wiser. Even though I had a knee-jerk reaction then also to conspiracy theories, I was open enough to listen to the rationale behind them. What was compelling this man speaking into the microphone to say what he was saying? What did he know? Older than me and so smarter, he obviously had insights that I could not have. I stared at my radio dial and mined the words for something I could take into my next political discussion with more experienced, older soldiers at my next base — with only a high diploma and one semester of college, I was drawn to people more intelligent and wiser. I wanted to impress them with some “non-standard” angles on common truths.

The late-night radio voices fell silent after the bus arrived in San Antonio, and I was settled into my living quarters. A large city, San Antonio had way too much going on radio-wise just to let radio airtime be filled with the gristle off-the-wall theories — which I would later learn they were after just one injection of some of them into a conversation. From time to time, when working the late shift, I would use my satellite-powered army radio, the one I used to listen to Soviet soldiers in the field cursing each other out and seek out those New Mexico and Arizona night owl DJs. They were still selling the crazy to anyone open, bored, and marginally educated enough to listen.

Thanks to Reagan’s gutting of the Fairness Doctrine, Rush Limbaugh would become nationally syndicated. Ten years later, Fox News would take hold of our brains, and the lunacy of late-night radio, supported by the all-pervasiveness of the internet, would replace commonly held truths. As conservatives wage war on schools and education, the foundation for our nation’s civics now falls on the shoulders of right-wing media. America has become what I noticed Russia was when I first went there in 1990.

In 1990, it was still the Soviet Union. The people I met during my first trip were stunned by how they viewed world history differently. Quite proudly, I would tell Russians then that while Americans loved to argue politics, we at least had a foundation on which all of our common stood. Arguments were built around those truths, like columns for the American house. Russians were impressed and even envied that common truth we once shared.

That common truth is long gone. As I have been saying for decades now, the rise of Fox News will go down in the history books as the moment Americans turned off the path of normal, intelligent evolution and opted for the easy way out — the lowest-hanging, sweetest, and even poison fruit.

The lunacy of late-night radio has become our nation’s voice. I think it is time to take a bus ride back to California, maybe I will hear some sane truths out there in the desert of New Mexico.