Family Feud

Except for sports stations during the baseball season, I've never been a big fan of talk radio. (This despite having an association with several of the bigger national hosts.) I've always assumed the average listener to be a shut-in seated in a wheelchair, busying himself until it's time to watch the nightly news and then Wheel of Fortune.

But, last spring, the Dodgers were moving back to their old radio home, KABC. To get set for the season, I made KABC a locked-in button on my AM dial in the car. I must have been practicing my speed in punching up the station because I found myself starting to listen to it. Before I knew it, I was sucked in like a piece of carpet lint under an Electrolux.

While most would call KABC a conservative-leaning station, their daily hosts offered me enough of a variety of opinions that this moderate and centrist didn't feel dirtied more or less in any one direction. For instance, their morning guy, Doug McIntyre, is closer to a moderate than you would expect to find on such a station. Moreover, the guy is very funny and married to actress Penny Peyser, who I always thought was a fox. Doug is a geek when it comes to Presidential history and the show is always an education for me.

Their afternoon drive guy is another delicious story. Larry Elder is a liberatarian, but always seems to make an awful lot of sense from that very extreme end of the spectrum. More importantly, Larry is that rare Black guy who calls out his own race. Indeed, Elder's contention is that the only racism in America for the past twenty years has been Blacks hating Whites. As a result, you mention his name to Black people and they snarl uncontrollably. When I was purchasing one of his books at Borders, "Stupid Black Men," a Black man on the checkout line behind me actually called me for reading such trash. Meanwhile, the book makes thousands of salient points, and Elder actually was writing about the rantings and raving of Reverend Jeremiah Wright two years before anybody knew who he was.

Their midday guy is somebody named Al Rantel, and I am less familiar with him. He was off the air for a long while recuperating from cancer, but, when I finally sampled him for a bit, I found his opinions a little wishy washy. He seemed like the kid at the school lunch table who would always side with the one who was winning at the moment.

Yet, over the last seven or eight months, I felt I learned an awful lot about the political scene in this country. Some of it I bought. Some of it I didn't. But, it was all compelling radio nonetheless.

And then there was Election Night. While I eschewed much of the TV coverage to watch some Popeye cartoons from the 30s, I did dial into KABC for their roundtable wrap-up featuring McIntyre, Elder, and Rantel. And I was horrified to hear the level of vitriole between these three guys. It seems that, while they did not subscribe to any of Barack Obama's stances on the pertinent issues, both Doug and Al confessed to voting for him. When pressed as to why, they both raised the obligatory flag for "change." To say that this did not sit well with Larry Elder is an understatement. He pressed them for a better rationale. They had none. This erupted into a live on-air argument that sounded like a bunch of uncles fighting at the Thanksgiving dinner table. As engaging as it was, it was also incredibly unsettling.

Of course, they all took this into separate corners on their respective shows. Doug called in to Larry's show the next day in an effort to explain himself a bit more coherently. No dice. The anger from both guys surfaced all over again. I wondered to myself how much fun it would be to go to this year's KABC Christmas party. Now, all three guys are referring to each other with nasty nicknames and I am thinking that KABC's general manager will be blowing a whistle very shortly. Indeed, Elder has even gone as far as to say that McIntyre and Rantel have softened their political stances because they don't want to be targets for unemployment if the Democrats put the Fairness Doctrine in play during 2009.

Of course, I thought about my own surroundings. I considered those friends that I can discuss politics with and those that I can't. I remembered an argument during coffee house at my church just one month ago. Crazy statements of intolerance from my nutty pastor that had some congregation members scrambling for the door. I know of one person whose McCain/Palin bumper sticker prompted his car to be keyed and doused with coffee by a well dressed Black woman who also screamed that this complete stranger was a racist. Unfortunately, none of this went away the day after Obama's election win. And none of it will be gone anytime soon.

Healing at both KABC and our nation will take a long, long while.

Dinner last night: Ribeye steak at Morton's in Dallas. Right across from the Texas School Book Depository. Photo essay on Dealey Plaza coming next week.