BackonJune23, the Albuquerque Tribune published my monthly column. I usually post it here the next day, but I forgot. Sorry, here it is:
An Opinion Sampler
Great Americana Radio Station dream, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s criticism and other topics
By Arthur Alpert
Because Deep Throat outed himself, I noodled a column on journalism. But I have a surprising CD I want to tell you about. And the Libertarian CATO Institute mailed an essay explaining the mesh between every-man-for himself and Christian values. How can I pass that up? So let’s do tapas this month, sampling a little bit of this and that.
o I’m too old to watch the Grammies, but the Tribune said next day that a Stephen Foster CD won. Stephen Foster! I ordered "Beautiful Dreamer" and have listened joyfully. Folks like Alison Krause and Mavis Staples do familir songs like Camptown Races (Doo- Dah!), and tunes I’ve never heard. Coincidentally, KHFM played Krause singing Foster as well as lively classical pieces by Gottschalk and Aaron Copland on Memorial Day. And one day later NPR praised a new Billie Holliday collection. All of which evoked an old dream of mine - a radio station devoted to Americana.
We would play the folks above plus Norah Jones – you sure she’s not Billie’s daughter? – and both Guthries, Hank Williams, George M. Cohan, Gershwin, Elvis and the Ink Spots. Also, Nelson Eddy and Jeannette MacDonald singing Victor Herbert, Bob Wills, Louis Armstrong, Ray Barreto, the Duke and Count, Willie Nelson and the Joplins. Scott and Janis, that is.
You get the idea - the best American music and the heck with genres.
I’d lose my shirt, of course. Radio makes money by slicing a single strain of music and airing it 24 hours for a slice of audience. But I’d listen and so would both my friends. And who knows – if "Dancing with the Stars" can get big numbers with old-timey steps – maybe we’d get ratings.
Besides, I’d love the intellectual challenge - how do I fit Django Reinhardt, Piaf and the songs of the Auvergne into Americana?
o I’m no historian, but I remember Kerensky, the Russian democratic Socialist, was no match for Lenin and his Marxist true believers. And that the Weimar Republic’s ineffectual democrats folded before the Nazi true believers.
Faith trumps skepticism, which may explain, in part, the Democrats’ disarray these days in face of true believers, some religious and some laissez-faire.
Too bad the Democrats can’t find any convictions.
o Speaking of Demo disarray, did you see the big story when Sen. Hillary Clinton criticized the Bush Administration? Why should a Democrat criticizing a Republican be news? What’s that you say? Because she and most Democrats are – shhh - afraid to make waves.
o So Mark Felt was the secret source for Woodward and Bernstein. Makes you nostalgic, right, for the good old days when the press pushed Richard Nixon out of office. It shouldn’t, because that didn’t happen. Nixon was his own worst enemy, followed by the Washington Post (under the extraordinary Katherine Graham, whose memoir I highly recommend.) The press, in general, came late to the party. Many of the corporations that employ journalists were, by Watergate time, squirming in their role as adversaries to power. They just wanted to male money.
o That CATO Institute essay? It argued there’s no great divide between Libertarian ideas of free economic competition (unhampered by government or morality) on one hand, and Christianity, on the other. Hmmm. Is, "No man can serve two masters. Ye cannot serve God and Mammon" outdated?
Yes, probably so. Since Matthew’s account, we have learned to multi-task.
Arthur Alpert, a semi-retired journalist in Albuquerque, may be reached at ArthurAlpert@swcp.com. His column appears the fourth Thursday of the month.
Posted by Arthur Alpert at July 12, 2005 06:26 PM