...in anything other than very small doses. By "talk radio" I mean political personality radio, 24/7 sports radio, and religious radio; NPR is a different sort of animal.
(1) They aim to get you emotionally involved; to get you worked up; frequently, to get you angry when things aren't going your way. In team sports, there is always a 50/50 chance that things aren't going your way. In right-wing talk radio and on right-wing bulletin boards, things are never going your way; it wouldn't matter if Dick Cheney became Emperor of the Universe.
(2) All this emotional involvement and anger leads to feelings of frustration and impotence, because there seems to be nothing for you to do to influence the outcomes that matter so much to you. This is what a friend of mine has dubbed "futility of action." Either there is no action for you to take, or the actions you could take would be futile. Now, political talk radio could be activist in its orientation if it wanted to: It could tell you that there are things to do and that those actions would be meaningful. But it really only wants you to feel, and to shout "Ditto!" It creates free-floating, intense emotion without a real outlet.
The impotence of fans in the world of sports is even greater. At least in politics there is the ballot box. But fans have essentially no power whatever. Oh sure, 50,000 shouting, cheering fans in a stadium can maybe get the home team a little more pumped up (like they're not already), but that is a teeny effect even though it sometimes feels like more. Otherwise, "rooting" or "pulling" for a team or an individual athlete is a dubious exercise of your emotional energy. And getting concerned about all the side issues in sports is even more ridiculous. To take an example close at home, for all the millions of spoken, printed, and electronically transmitted words that have been wasted on Brett Favre and Ted Thompson in Green Bay the past few years, the net effect on those two gentlemen has been...nothing, nada, zero, zilch. Favre is gonna do what's he gonna do; Thompson, the same. It is a somewhat entertaining spectacle, to be sure, but all the analysis, speculation, and directive it spawns is the equivalent of millions of infertile men shooting blanks: no offspring will result.
(3) As if this wasn't all bad enough, there is the little question of air-time. Talk radio, cable news, and the political cycles are a round-the-clock endeavor; so, too, sports and sports talk. But usually, very little of any import is actually happening, and yet there is all this air-time to fill...Once every possible reaction, analysis, speculation, rant, and suggestion has been advanced, which doesn't take long, there is only one thing to do until something else happens: Repeat them. Over and over and over. Jim Rome, cannily, has turned this necessity into a sports talk style; he repeats each of his insights and opinions at least five or six times, but he is so darn good with his delivery that the fifth or sixth time is much funnier than the first. Rome is gifted, though, so this is a rare instance. Most of the repetition on talk radio and 24-hour cable news has a hamster-on-the-wheel effect: it's fast spin to nowhere.
Does the unhealthiness of this stuff matter to anyone other than those addicted to it -- such as this local putz that I know, a Packer fanatic and a Rush Limbaugh fanatic and a member of a nutball religious sect (trifecta!), who seriously injured his foot and wound up in the emergency room because he was pumping his leg up and down so hard while watching a frustrating Packers game on TV? I would argue that, yes, it does matter. To pick on one group: As the wingnuts and Freepers who increasingly constitute the only "base" the Republicans have got become increasingly irrelevant demographically and increasingly impotent politically, they are only going to get angrier still. And some of them are going to want to break out of their futility of action and, well, act. What actions will they choose? How many thousands of potential Timothy McVeighs are out there? It scares me to think.
UPDATE (6/12/2009): Glenn Greenwald has a great post about "tribalistic self-absorption" that is well worth reading; all the phenomena I discuss above rely heavily on this emotion. I confess that I sometimes have a hard time understanding it, since I am very non-tribal and, to an appreciable extent, anti-tribal. Woody Allen famously quipped that he would not want to belong to any club that would have him as a member -- the implication being, that would prove the club's unworthiness. Me, I just don't want to belong to clubs. There are very few tribal identifications that have any sway with me; I'll admit to being quite proud of being a Yale graduate, and very happy indeed to have gotten to go there -- but for all that, I'm not terribly involved in the institution as a graduate, apart from interviewing high school applicants on behalf of the Alumni School Committee. Probably one reason I'm more apt to identify with being a Yalie is that is an earned distinction, not a given one.
Breakfast is being served
2 years ago
