Bi-Polar Radio

by Pa Rock
Citizen Journalist


I have written about the maddening situation with regard to American radio on Okinawa before, either here or in my other blog:  www.okinawanodyssey.blogspot.com.

Basically, the situation is this:  There are two American stations on the island that try to accommodate every single one of the troops, dependents, and civilian workers who make up the American community.  One of those stations is an FM catastrophe which has a play list of twelve or fifteen songs, mostly rock hits from the 1980's, along with a couple of rap numbers and one or two sobbing country tunes  about patriotism and beer.

The other station, an AM train wreck, was described to me on the evening that I arrived on-island as "the NPR station."  Would that it were!  I could survive on a steady listening diet of NPR, and have done so in several locations.  I have heard NPR at its best, KJZZ, for instance, in Phoenix which has wonderful jazz well into every night, and at its worst from a station out of Nashville that spent every afternoon droning on and on with really slow and painful violin classical music.

Unfortunately, our local AM station is NPR only in the mornings - when it broadcasts NPR's morning programming from the previous day.  The rest of the day it is talk radio, truly nasty talk radio.  Driving to work this morning was wonderful because I was treated to NPR's standard insightful news and commentary.  Coming home tonight:   Rush Limbaugh!  (I don't turn the car radio off because all of the knobs and buttons are labeled in Japanese, and I can never get it turned back on - but, praise Jeezus, I have learned which button controls the volume!)

Limbaugh, who is deaf, yells - incessantly.  He is also drug-addled when explains his lack of coherence.  But I am somewhat puzzled by his raging hatred of the President.  Could it have something to do with growing up as a privileged white boy in largely impoverished, and mostly black, southeastern Missouri?  Does his seething contempt for President Obama have anything to do with the notion that certain races have certain places of acceptability in society, and our President has ventured into the wrong social strata?  Or is it just mental illness?

I am home now.  It is evening, and my head hurts, and my bi-polar radio needs a good therapist!