Lately, I have been listening to way too much talk radio, which is to say “I have been listening to talk radio.” A friend of mine has been guest hosting a local NPR talk show, so I bought a radio to listen to that at work, and the show acted as a gateway drug to the hard stuff. After a few innocent experiments with Morning Edition and St. Louis on the Air, I started alternating between NPR and 97.1 The Shout. The Shout is the station responsible for our local broadcast of Bill O’Reilly/Sean Hannity, as well as some equally enthusiastic locals. I have learned a lot of things from 97.1, primarily that I am a terrorist sympathizer who, like Cindy Sheehan, would like nothing more than see the United States violently destroyed by lesbians.

Or maybe Mexicans. Reception isn’t the greatest at work.

It might have even been the Mexican Lesbians, which is either a subminority or a ska band.

This flirtation with hardcore talk radio has taught me something interesting about myself. I cannot stand to listen to it for more than a few minutes at a time, but it’s not because I disagree with everything I’m hearing and am offended by the way it’s being said. On the contrary: it doesn’t bother me at all to listen to Sean Hannity screaming (and I do mean screaming) that fully half the American population is anti-itself, but I cannot stand to sit still through all those f***ing commercials. This is what Tivo has wrought.

The commercials drove me to freebasing: I started downloading “podcasts” of Air America Radio from some online angel who is kind enough to record the streaming RealAudio every day and edit out the ads. I will suckle his teat until the day the liberal hippies of Air America Radio show their true stripes by suing him. So far, it has been a jarring experience to switch from Bill O’Reilly to his hated nemeses Al Franken and Janeane Garofalo, but not nearly as jarring as you’d think. Though they come at the issues from completely different directions, 75% of the time they say the exact same things.

• the american people don’t have access to the truth without alternative media
• the NYTimes is totally carrying water for the Other Side and “craps on the truth on a daily basis”
• nobody else is going to tell you This, because they’re too afraid of the Other Side
• They have no real honor or principles; it’s just a zero sum game with These People
• when are we going to open our eyes? something has got to be done about these people! (banging shoe on desk)
• at least three other things an hour that make me go, “holy Jesus! settle down!”

Every one of them is in a race for a stroke. Part of the reason I listen is just to see if they can sustain it for yet another day. I picture them starting each day reading the same news I do, muttering, “What can I work myself into a froth about today… gotta be something, gotta be something… come on false outrage, poppa needs a new pair of jackboots….” I used to see the Sex Pistols’ Johnny Rotten on TV snarling like he was still twenty, ranting about the plastic MTV sinkhole music has gone into, and I’d think, “That’s got to be an act. You can’t possibly be that rude and unpleasant and angry about everything all day unless you live in a trash can or wait tables at Steak ‘n’ Shake.” Johnny’s sensibility is the bread and butter for a lot of people. Bill O’Reilly is going to have a cardiac episode, and he is going to do it on purpose.

And Janeane Garofalo has found her perfect job. For a while, I would see her on TV and think, “Wow, the current political climate has really shredded her sense of humor right off the bone. She’s not telling jokes so much as kind of hissing and spitting like a wet cat. She sounds like some kind of talk radio host or something.” Yes, as it turns out. Exactly right. In that role, my God, it’s like dropping chocolate into peanut butter.