Rick Brown, Phillip Raines and I have been kicking around alternatives for me if I cannot get my hosting service to work and Just Above Sunset has to go dark.  Much of the talk is of no interest to anyone else, but this might amuse you.

Phillip suggested Rick and I combine out sites – Rick’s site is City-Directory Atlanta - and we talked about that, but then Phillip suggested Rick and I combine forces – on the radio!

Phillip: Both of you guys can write in a voice that isn't snide but is persuasive, which takes some literary restraint, and again is unusual enough to be marketable. A web magazine that is also a weekly radio show broadcast on Air America. Bit ambitious but not outrageous.

Rick Brown: Hmmm!!  Maybe sort of like a "Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers" of politics? Call us up and ask how us how to fix your broken political system, to which we make fun of each other - and of course, you! - and laugh a lot?  You may have something there!  Just kidding about the "Car Talk" part, of course, but in fact, you may actually have something there!  A radio show that surveys the press, including from overseas, with a definite liberal tilt?  I like that, but I'm not sure Alan (or Alan and me) are the dudes that could do that.  Still, that's a nice idea!  Worth considering!

I like the Car Talk model.  Amusing.  We'll try that after my next lay off.  But see David Niewert on who owns really the radio waves in America.

People listen to their radios a lot in rural America. Maybe it has something to do with the silence of the vast landscapes where many of them live; radios break that silence, and provide the succor of human voices.

If you drive through these landscapes, getting radio reception can sometimes be iffy at best, especially in the rural West. Often the best you can find on the dial are only one or two stations.

And the chances are that what you'll hear, at nearly any hour, in nearly any locale, is Rush Limbaugh. Or Michael Savage. Or maybe some Sean Hannity. Or maybe some more Limbaugh. Or, if you're really desperate, you can catch one of the many local mini-Limbaughs who populate what remains of the rural dial. In between, of course, there will be a country music station or two.

That's what people in rural areas have been listening to for the past 10 years and more. And nothing has been countering it.

... It has to be understood that rural America is hurting, and has been for a couple of decades now. Visit any rural community now and it's palpable: The schools are run down, the roads are falling apart, the former downtowns have been gutted by the destruction of the local economies and their displacement by the new Wal-Mart economy.

People living in rural areas increasingly feel that they have become mere colonies of urban society, treated dismissively and ignored at best, the victims of an evil plot by wealthy liberal elites at worst.

Liberals, largely due to their increasing urban-centric approach to politics, have mostly ignored the problem. And conservatives have been busy exploiting it.

It's important to understand that they have been doing so not by offering any actual solutions. Indeed, Republican "solutions" like the 1995 "Freedom to Farm Act" have actually turned out to be real disasters for the nation's family farmers; the only people who have benefited from it have been in the boardrooms of corporate agribusiness, which of course bellied up first to the big federal trough offered by the law. Even conservatives admit it has been a disaster.

No, conservatives have instead employed a strategy of scapegoating. It isn't bad policy or the conservative captivity to agribusiness interests that has made life miserable in rural America -- it's liberals. Their lack of morals (especially embodied by Bill Clinton), their contempt for real, hard-working Americans, their selfish arrogance -- those are the reasons things are so bad.

These audiences are feeding on a steady diet of hate. And as with all such feedings, they never are sated, but only have their appetites whetted for more. So each day, people come back to get a fresh fill-up of hate.

This is a dead end.

Rick Brown:

Yeah, but...

I mean, I think he has a point, but I also think we overplay this idea that the yokels are just sitting out there, suckers for whatever them big city conservatives want to plant in their brains. In truth, when I flip through the radio dial while driving between hinterland cities - and, to a certain extent, even in the cities themselves - what I hear more of than anything is Christian programming, often mixed with Christian music. In other words, you can forget the sour economy and an ill-managed war; these folks are predisposed to pay no attention to any smartypants who, they suspect, doesn't even believe in God. As I've always said, the real commercial appeal of all these Limbaughs and Hannities is not that they're conservative, it's that they're anti-liberal.

I was amused by the upper-left corner of the New York Times front page this morning (11/23/04), where can be found the headline, "Americans Show Clear Concerns on Bush Agenda," about a NYT/CBS poll showing most of them "are at best ambivalent about Mr. Bush's plans to reshape Social Security, rewrite the tax code, cut taxes and appoint conservative judges to the bench. There is continuing disapproval of Mr. Bush's handling of the war in Iraq, with a plurality now saying it was a mistake to invade in the first place."

In other words, although most of us voted for him and seem to want to have a beer with him, we don't necessarily like anything that he does or even wants to do! This may be because we didn't know that there was any logical connection between, on the one hand, Bush, and on the other hand, what Bush does. This inability of ours to draw a straight line between those two little dots might be laid to the fact that we don't read newspapers or magazines, since the folks who publish all that news trash probably don't even believe in God anyway.

(I suppose it might be appropriate to go back and read the preceding text with the background strains of "O Canada!" cranked up on the Victrola.)

Yep.  Folks be dumb these days.  Connecting dots is hard work.

And starting up in radio is hard work, according to Phillip –

I did some research into starting a radio station about six years ago.  It was before satellite radio, which really does change everything.  An AM station in the sticks cost about twenty thousand to get up and running.  You essentially buy the tower and the allotted location on the dial. 

These stations or towers are scattered in fields all over the country and most are looking for a buyer.  There is a huge religious conglomerate called Puritan Broadcasting that is buying up AM stations and running low cost or no cost programming and long infomercials about vitamins.  Puritan is essentially parking the real estate of these towers in a speculative way.  They are also buying FM stations, which are really expensive in comparison, even in rural areas. 

The main guy behind all this is a bushy eye browed right wing nut who delights in overpowering public radio signals and blotting them out specifically when All Things Considered comes on.  Rural public radio stations suffer from old and underpowered amplification systems and the feds have gotten stingier about boosting their funding which all goes to equipment upgrades, but like Jesse Ventura says, if we fund public broadcasting we should also fund NASCAR because that's just entertainment.  Rural listeners are stuck with what they get - classical music or neocon hate radio, or religious radio.

There is nothing out there called reasonable radio except the farm report interspersed with country music, and if the guy who owns the tower is conservative, so is the station, and at best there is a policy of not being all that political except to be patriotic.  It is an underserved market that is huge in proportion. 

There is a place for radio theater, press analysis, ten minute science reporting and exposés on government that can be delivered in a non-incendiary way.  Making a buck on it all is dicey.  It's like the old joke "how do you make a million bucks in the night club business?  First you start with two million bucks". 

Making a radio show, like Motley Fool, is another matter.  In Just Above Sunset you talk about articles you have found which can be referenced on our website, and point out quotes, start comments on content, even style or quality of writing or the author, and chortle away as we all do.  What do people think all over the world?  We can offer some insight to that through our correspondents.  Religion?  We don't touch it cause it puts people in too much of a rile - a policy that even the Glutton Rush maintains. 

It is a challenge to put such a show together, and working it in conjunction with a website is now technologically possible, and as I see it essential to broadcast journalism - and turning written journalism into broadcast journalism, then into cyber journalism is so possible it is yearning to be done. 

Oh, and by the way, to buy an AM tower in Atlanta cost about ten million.  An FM tower costs about 150 million - which is what stopped me in my tracks from the research project.  Putting together content for satellite radio is much less.  I did know a guy who bought a AM station in Atlanta for forty thousand and sold it to Puritan for ten million in ten years, so finding investors to park capital in such a speculative property isn't unfeasible.  This is chocolate cake in the food for thought menu.

I shall save my pennies.  I sense a wave here. 

Like many, I have long subscribed to The Surfer Theory of Career Development, even before I moved to California twenty-five years ago. 

What is that theory about? 

Career planning is a silly exercise, and what you actually do in real life is catch the incoming wave if it looks like a good ride. 

For someone who started out in pre-med chemistry in college, thinking I might someday become a doctor, and playing in jazz and rock bands, and in a classical ensemble or in the pit band for a musical now and then, for the cash, simultaneously thinking I might become a musician, I somehow found myself in graduate school studying Swift and Pope, then teaching at an excusive private school in upstate New York – think Dead Poets Society – then somehow found myself in the aerospace boom out here training managers, then programming HR systems, then managing programmers – and then somehow I was running the systems shop at a General Motors locomotive factory in Canada, then managing the financial systems for a chain of hospitals back here, then when the economy went in the weeds publishing an internet magazine, and now managing another group of programmers setting up healthcare claims processing systems, and of course, now also keeping the website running in my spare time.

Maybe the radio thing is the next wave.  It is food for thought, as Phillip says.  Or in my terms, an interesting swell on the horizon.  Surf’s up?  Not quite yet.