I'm So Awesome and Brave

    It’s going to take me most of the weekend to write another post on The Reddit Thing, so here’s a quick-and-dirty about something I’ve been pondering:

    How important to you is it that you be ideologically heterodox? Furthermore, is being annoyed by people who agree with you, but do so in the wrong way, a part of your life? Because it is for me.

    This has come up a fair amount since I’ve started working at KBOO, the community radio station here in PDX. KBOO, as you’d expect from a decades-old community radio station, is an extremely groovy place, where people who are more committed to causes and communication than money tend to gather. Part of its mission, at least as it’s self-described, is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, which is something I admire. But sometimes sitting in the newsroom drives me a little bit nuts.

    Whycome nuts? I’m in sympathy of a great majority of the political causes that KBOO advocates. I guess part of the problem I have there some times is that I don’t think the kind of communication that it does is terribly effective at the “afflict the comfortable” part of their mission. KBOO, like a lot of very groovy places, also adheres to a very rigid orthodoxy that is pro-labor, anti-establishment, deeply suspicious of anything and everything to do with money, and ultimately not terribly complex: issues that require a lot of deep consideration, issues like Israel, or the use of US military force in humanitarian crises, have pat, proscribed answers. These answers foreshorten the need to think. Sometimes I suspect that’s kind of the point.

    Anyway, despite the fact that, after deep consideration, I land in the same place most of the time as this orthodoxy, it drives me nuts to hear people sitting around agreeing with one another on a bunch of lefty talking points. Or — or — substituting suspicion, raised eyebrows, and innuendo for journalism. A lot of people in congress hold stock in the company that owns Phllip J Morris. So the fuck what? I can see how that might be a problem, but is it? Has their behavior been materially changed by these stock holdings? I submit to you the following theses, which are neither mutually exclusive nor proof of one another:

    (a) It is entirely possible, in fact probable, that their behavior has been materially changed.

    (b) It is not good enough to assume any such thing, and loudly being like, Eh? Right? I mean, how evil ARE these fuckers? is not a form of argument and will never convince me.

    Anyway. The actual news that ends up on the air at KBOO doesn’t really consist of that kind of thing. But, in the manner of people who spend a lot of time simmering in a sauce of righteous and agreed-upon opinion everywhere, the people who work there talk about that kind of thing a lot. And that’s fine. But holy hell does it get on my nerves.