March 22, 2008 01:00 pm I was driving my 19-year-old son somewhere the other day when a Neil Diamond song I liked came on the radio. It was an out-of-town oldies station, so there was a little bit of static as Diamond sang "Play Me." It's a nice song, and I didn't mind the static. But my kid wasn't having any of it. "I can't stand radio," he said, pushing a cassette into its dashboard slot and replacing the fuzzy broadcast with a clear-sounding, pre-recorded soundtrack. It was one of those golden moments between father and son in which the elder participant in the sketch realizes that he is a geezer, and not just because he likes Neil Diamond songs. My son doesn't know about static, but I do. I grew up with it, and if you want me to be perfectly honest, it kind of gives me a warm glow to think about it. My boy will never know what it was like to move the rabbit ears (antenna, for those of you under 45) back and forth in a fruitless effort to get a clear picture on a black-and-white TV. All too often, the signal was best caught by standing on one leg with your right arm at an impossibly painful angle while your companion tells you, "That's perfect. Keep it just like that." Radio was little better. Back when I was a kid, transistor radios were as nifty and omnipresent as cell phones are today. Again, you would have to maneuver them at just the right angle to hear anything, and there was always static. But, to sneak one into school and listen to a baseball game without the teacher catching you was considered a high art form in the circle of scholars I ran around with. Parents could be conned, too, by placing the transistor radio under your pillow and listening to the scratchy broadcast of a game when you were supposed to be sleeping. Static was a part of our lives. We didn't much mind because we didn't know any better. Like my son with the car radio, everyone today seems terribly impatient and perhaps a bit intolerant, wanting instant gratification before going on to the next thing and the next and the next. To me, that's static of a different sort, the kind that prevents us from taking the time to step back and realize what is important and what is just noise. As we gaze through our increasingly static-filled prism, our attention spans have gotten shockingly short. If a news story breaks in the morning, it seems old by that very evening. With our iPods, laptops, BlackBerrys and who knows what other gadgets, we have access to an enormous amount of information, but we might not know what we are missing. We seem reluctant to take the time to savor, to mourn, to ruminate about the events large and small, local and international, that surround us. There was all kinds of static in 1969 when we watched the grainy images as Neil Armstrong stepped down from the lunar lander onto the moon, but we were just grateful to witness the event on television. We were grateful, too, for such broadcasters as Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley to provide the commentary for those grainy images. Today, the TV pictures are uniformly clear, and the sound quality is generally perfect. The static comes from the illegitimate heirs of Cronkite and his colleagues. Today, it seems, to be successful as a cable television or radio pundit, all you need is to be a loudmouthed, opinionated cretin. There are, of course, exceptions. But the E.J. Dionnes, Wolf Blitzers and Tim Russerts are getting increasingly rare. Sadly, each week, we encounter a static-filled media world of selected sound bites and tortured logic used (to quote the late Andrew Lang) "as a drunken man uses lampposts _ for support rather than illumination." The static originates from the chowderheads who control those media outlets. From high atop whatever corporate tower they happen to infest, they fill their airtime with what they think we want. That's why we get a steady diet of Britney Spears' life falling apart and breathless coverage of female teachers who had sex with their male middle school students. Today, it's our brains rather than our TV screens that are filled with static. I'm pretty sure I liked it better the other way. ___ Sam Pollak is editor of The Daily Star. He can be reached at spollak@thedailystar.com or at (607) 4 32-1000, ext. 208.
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