RADIO REVIEW: I read recently that if you drove west from New York City and across New Jersey, you would eventually get to a roadsign that said: "Welcome to Pennsylvania - Where America Begins".
Of course that's in part a racist sentiment directed at the dark-skinned denizens and assorted goombahs who reside east of that border, but it's one many of us on the receiving end have been prepared to accept, even to embrace, as a mark of our difference. If there's any truth in it, then this column spent the last week not in the US, but on the independent offshore islands of New York and New Jersey. With the US radio environment overwhelmingly local rather than national, there was every reason to feel isolated from any larger American whole.
Mind you, those do look a bit like American flags hanging from occasional porches, windows and car antennae, their prevalence or otherwise yet another visible marker of the racial make-up of a community. In white-ethnic Bay Ridge or Garfield, the flags have often been integrated into gloriously garish red-white-and-blue Christmas-light displays; in black Paterson or Flatbush, they're altogether scarcer, mostly appearing as little stickers on shop windows.
This week I watched Michael Mann's messily brilliant Ali in Brooklyn with a 90 per cent African-American audience. When Will Smith as Muhammad Ali charged out of a courtroom declaring that his enemies and oppressors were right here in the USA, and that he wasn't prepared to travel thousands of miles to kill other poor people, cheers and applause rippled around the cinema.
Most of the interesting sounds of New Year's week in maybe-America were off-the-air, like the dusty silence near Ground Zero, punctuated by the sounds of heavy equipment and tourists jockeying for a photographic vantage point. Again, we were reminded that the September 11th act of attempted "urbicide" still has the effect of a serial killer, with 13 bodies pulled out of this hole in the city on New Year's Day alone.
Ordinary conversations abound with September 11th stories and lessons, none of them involving the need to kill Afghans. (The New York Times managed to publish a big Year in Pictures supplement that didn't include a single photo of Afghan civilians affected by US bombing.) On a bus, I heard a suave black man share his Christian conclusions with a stranger: "September 11th reminds us: you may put on your shoes in the morning, but might-be it's the coroner gonna be taking them off at night" - it's a vivid image, though horribly inapt for the World Trade Centre occasion, in which people, including their shoes, were evaporated. The message? "Be right with God, and use the precious days He gives us to serve him."
On the air, however, there's "The War on Terrorism". On popular talk station WABC, there's a little prerecorded snippet with portentous music and an echo effect: "The War on Terrorism - all the news from the War on Terrorism . . . Everything you need to know about the War on Terrorism . . ." But it sounds like an old jingle that they don't know how to replace. Thus the "War on Terrorism" link is played, then the announcer comes on to say: "After the break, we'll find out what Mayor Mike is up to today, but first let's go to Don for the traffic."
That's not to say the "war" is absent. On the contrary, Osama sells: the New York Post puts bin Laden on page one with the rather dubious story that the bags under his eyes prove the war has been worthwhile; the Daily News goes, days later, for a "STILL ALIVE" poster.
On WABC's Curtis and Kuby morning phone-in show, they mention Osama every five or 10 minutes, whatever the subject. Osama Alive may possibly be of some benefit to the Bush hawks; he's clearly of huge benefit to tabloids and talk radio. Curtis and Kuby are a highly popular political double-act. On the right, you've got Curtis Sliwa, godfather of the Guardian Angels, who reckons he sounds "street" if he talks like the Sopranos - "Sez here that bin Laden reached out to Eye-ran to have a sit-down." On the left is Ron Kuby, a lawyer who gets teased about his beard and pony-tail, and reckons if the US government is going to shift its targets so readily, it ought to set up a "Ministry of New Evil Ones".
Kuby is sharply left-wing by US standards, though not overtly anti-war that I heard. This week, Sliwa sounded browned off about the lousy Osama-hunting and also a bit disappointed that his new mayor, Mike Bloomberg, has been a bit liberal. (Sliwa was a member of Giuliani's ill-fated Commission for Decency, a concept that definitely belongs west of New Jersey.) So Kuby was getting all the good lines: on Bloomberg's cuts in city staffing: "That's what's known as sacrifice when you're a billionaire - you fire one out of five workers"; on the failure of Egypt to arrest a bin Laden supporter: "You would think that as an ally of America, the least Mubarak could do to show his commitment to democracy would be to arrest this guy for speaking"; or on the inevitability of the angry Argentine reaction to their IMF-supported hunger: "much as they were enjoying sacrificing their children for the great capitalist experiment".
Then, suddenly, Kuby would start talking to Curtis about Special K cereal, on and on, chatting about its yummy taste, dietary benefits and the like. Or Curtis would start talking to Kuby about how if you're really concerned about your health, Ron, you should check out (or rather, be checked out by) Executive Health Exams in Rockefeller Centre.
In other words, they'd do very loosely scripted, conversational advertisements for these products and services, which must surely earn more money and retain more listeners than a two-minute break in the show with prerecorded adverts.
No, I'm not recommending this to RTÉ as new adventure in public-service broadcasting. However, and nevertheless, I wouldn't mind hearing an imitation of this sort of pairing of politicised presenters. (Eamon Dunphy and Ann Marie Hourihane don't count.)
This isn't the sort of radio I grew up with. However, time-warps being what they are, my teenage years are still roughly available on Fordham University's public-radio station, WFUV. This excellent station, which features a host of terrific Irish-related shows - that's Fordham for ya - also hosts old WNEW-FM DJs Vin Scelsa (of whom much here previously), Dennis Elsas and Pete Fornatale. Once, when I was 15, I was lucky enough to get through on the phone, oh-so-briefly, to Vin in the studio. This week on his distinctly minority-interest Idiot's Delight, he was eating a turkey sandwich when a couple of fans showed up at the studio, over from New Jersey, and he brought them in for a lovely on-air chat.
There's something to be said for being off the major-media radar. On WFUV this week, Dennis Elsas could do a whole wild show free-associating from the concept of "cover versions"; while Pete Fornatale, on his end-of-year show, recalled September 11th, and how hard it was to find words and songs to convey sadness, as opposed to fear and anger. He settled on Juliet Turner's staggeringly beautiful version of Julia Wilson's Broken Things: "You can have my heart, if you don't mind broken things".
And for a few thousand listening New Yorkers, it was a chance to cry all over again.
hbrowne@irish-times.ie