Forget television: I love my radio

A recent TV documentary said the sun will burn out in 35 billion years, destroying our entire solar system. But that’s OK with me, since I couldn’t live in a world without Jack Daniels, garlic and women, in that order. Only 35 billion years? Hey, I’d better hurry up and make my peace with the Lord.

Television has become a prime source of unhappy thoughts, negativity, agita (hope I spelled it right) and there’s no sign of a let up.

National Geographic magazine had been my childhood version of Playboy; photo captions reading “Native women bending to gather wood,� or “Native women just bending,� were memorable bends in the memory of Maggie Maguire’s sixth-grade Brooklyn classroom and the magazine’s other photos were wonderful. Years later my time spent at the pyramids in Mexico were a glorious moment to touch the carved stone of an Aztec god, a realization of a dream trip imagined by the pages of a magazine.

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So what happened to that wonderful magazine when it landed on television? What happened to the National Geographic Society? Hey, they said on TV that there’s a super volcano in Yellowstone National Park that’s gonna explode and destroy most of this country. Of course, they also said global warming will drown our coastal communities, will kill most of us, and great whales and polar bears will be killed off, and now they’re moving on to tell us about the sociopathic behavior in the American prison system.

Gee whiz, I ain’t never been to jail, know nothing about drugs, shanks (homemade knives) and gang rape in prison, but good old National Geographic, the sensual adventure magazine, is offering horrific pictorial graphics — of the prison system on the (rightfully nicknamed) “boob tube.�

Of course they’ve mentioned asteroids that destroyed the dinosaurs and are destined to return to earth and then there are tsunamis and rogue waves to make us cancel those romantic beach barbecues, and when you get past the televised documentary part of natural disasters you’ve got the prime time gore of network programming. There are three different versions of the Crime Scene Investigation subject, graphic depictions of bloody murders and autopsies with the impossible plot of coroners playing detective and making arrests but... hey, cops investigate and detect, not coroners ... the plot thins!

Then we’ve got “House,� a looney-tunes doctor/diagnostician. This unhappy, creepy psychotic specializes in vicious manipulation of an entire hospital staff. His voice is the rasp of a rusty hinge, his gangly appearance is Ichabod Crane on crack, which is coincidentally written into the script as House being hooked on pain killers. If given the choice of viewing a “House� episode or volunteering for root canal work, remember that his drug horror is in the script but your administered anesthetic is real, which is a very good thing.

Then there is a TV detective called “Monk.� He’s almost as unhappy as “House,� you’ll drown in his misery.

“Monk� has OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). He lives in fear of everything, including “fear itself.� His wife was murdered (of course) and he stumbles through life as the world’s greatest mentally unbalanced detective who solves crimes while rearranging and cleaning everything within sight; this makes him the first fictional detective who actually does floors and windows. He was removed from the San Francisco police force because of his mental instability: believable? Only if you’ve never been to San Francisco. This is a town that gave a murderer a light sentence on a manslaughter charge because he ate junk food, later described as the “Twinkie Defense.� That’s all, folks, no more TV, I’m returning to radio!

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The great thing about radio is you can’t be dumb on radio, ya gotta have some intellect! One must have the ability to cohesively position words into sentences that are worth hearing — in short, you can’t be Hulk Hogan on radio! Or the “Real Housewives� whose dramatic skills, as a great critic once said, run the full gamut of emotions from A to B and like all reality programming rates a special “Duhhh� award.

In radio we’ve got regular guest shots by Ella, Billie Holiday, Sinatra ...  all of that talent allows me to continue daily chores with classic background sound. In short, with the possible exception of Rush Limbaugh, radio is a relatively happy event.

Limbaugh is an occasional listen for me because of his creative ability to turn everything into a Communist plot. The story about a woman jogger who had been killed by a mountain lion was classic Rush. (Actually, this happened a while back when he might have still been involved in drug use.)

He spoke of the woman’s obviously terrible death with a sincere tone of sadness in his voice, offering a condolence speech to her husband and two children, then (anger) he told of the men who hunted down and killed the lion (lioness) and discovered there were two orphaned lion cubs in a cave. He was flabbergasted (I love that word) by the fact that money in the form of donations was pouring into the wildlife services to care for orphaned cubs, about 50 grand so far, and what about this poor woman’s husband and her two children, now left without a mother?

He immediately launched into a broadcast campaign to get donations for the woman’s family and blamed those tree-hugging, bleeding-heart, liberal commie pinkos for caring less for that poor woman than for two wild animals. He dragged this on for days until the victim’s husband was buried in donations and begged Limbaugh to call it off.

Well, it was entertaining for a while, a masterful crafting of B.S. by a radio entertainer who even in an (alleged) drugged-out condition proved radio to be a kinder, gentler form of entertainment. Hmm...l wonder what ever happened to those lion cubs. I think I’ll send ‘em a check....

Bill Lee is a professional cartoonist who divides his time between Sharon and New York City.