Your faithful correspondent has been listening to talk radio since he was in knee pants.
The talkers at that time were such long forgotten men such as Marv Grey, Joel A. Spivak, Joe Pyne and Ray Briem. Their politics ranged from left liberal to right conservative. But they all had something in common. They had a knowledge of an English language culture that seems to have been long forgotten and they used that knowledge as a short hand that they presumed was understood by the listener. References to lines from the Bible, Shakespeare, Twain, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Maugham and Hemingway were not unusual. Occasionally there would be references to films such as Casablanca or Citizen Kane, but rarely.
This is a round about way of stating that in days past there was a common language of culture that seems to have been abandoned in public discourse. The present talk radio hosts (Dennis Miller being and exception) seem to have no knowledge of or feel that their listeners have no knowledge of, a literary tradition that at once made up the canon of the English speaking people. And by this ignorance (I may be making an unfair assumption here, but I think not) the hosts of the various talk radio programs have, in effect, denied the wisdom of the past. It seems that everything that is of importance is immediate and new when, in fact, there is really nothing new in the heart of man. To quote Solomon, "There is no new thing under the sun." Technology may change, but the point of technology hasn't changed. Much of the Internet is really nothing more than a method of a Babylonian scribe scratching notes into a tablet of moist clay. Plastic is nothing but a substitute for bronze, tin or iron. The construction of a Boeing Dreamliner is nothing but a faster version of a horse and cart. But to talk radio every damn thing is new. Illegal immigration is new despite the fact that the Romans suffered and fell from the same thing. Bad behaviour by the rich is new despite the writings of Richardson in the 18th century. The invasion of the West by the Islamic monster is new despite the Song of Roland.
We seem, according to the chatterers on talk radio, to be ever made new when in fact we have a tradition in the English language of having faced almost every problem that talk radio addresses many century ago. The most powerful local talk station, KFI, has made a big deal of the sexual abuse of children by Catholic priests while not knowing that the same problem was addressed by the Lollards in England during the 15th century. The yakkers think that they have found something new, when in fact, they have found the same old sins and concerns that Chaucer, Shakespeare, Dickens and Conrad addressed. And these same talkers complain about the state of the governmental educational system not teaching the basics while revealing themselves to be not only half educated, but uneducated in what used to be called the "canon" of English Literature. If a caller were to refer to Lewis' novel The Monk while discussing the abuse of priests the caller would be greeted with either one of two responses: "Huh?" or "You're an idiot" because the talk show host is, in reality, an uneducated boob who has no idea of, let alone to have read, the novel.
My whole point is that, in the United States, it seems that there has been a loss of a common cultural touch point that spanned several generations and the idea that the loss of this touch point has resulted in a lack of communication between not only generations, but segments of society. The talk radio example has been used to illustrate this fractionalization. To abandon literature for a moment, ask your local person between the ages of 40 and 15 what he or she thinks of the music of Stephan Foster, Irving Berlin or George Gershwin and you'll get a blank stare despite the fact these composers works were the background music for much of the 20th century. Instead you are expected to know the "nigger" rhythms of rap and hip hop which have done nothing to add to the culture Americana for the simple reason that what is hot this week is dead the next.
It's enough to make a guy want to drink Sterno.
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