Last night, driving back to LA from a quick jaunt below the Orange Curtain, I decided to do as the Romans do (and as the billboards command) and listen to talk radio. First I went to 1150's Air America where Garofalo and Seder were doing the majority report. I really hate to say this, as I love Garofalo's comedy and acting, but I find her totally unlistenable on The Majority Report. She's shrill, mean to her callers (and here I'm talking the liberal ones, conservative interlopers get called "douches"), and just grates on me. On the bright side, she's well informed and good at staying on point, but I'm just not able to listen for more than ten minutes at a time.
So off I go to 640, "More stimulating talk radio!" It's some white guy named Ron filling in for some white guy named Z-Man. They're bashing the Nation of Islam, which is a bit like me sticking rhetorical knives into the Ku Klux Klan, but whatever. Very good caller choice, the host is a talented talker, and the opinions are fairly unobjectionable (black men calling in to say black men shouldn't commit crimes is the basic structure), so I turn my attention back to the asshole who's been tailgating me since Long Beach.
But then Ron -- the pinch-hitting white guy's name, or so I think -- goes over to gas prices. The interesting thing about conservative radio is that they constantly pretend they're shattering your biases, telling you what you don't want to hear. Ron promises that he'll tell us who's responsible for high gas prices, and it's not who we think!
