Home

     Morning Sedition is Toast

                                      ...A Remembrance

                              

 

Heed my words, Idolators...

                 

First they came for free and fair elections, and I did not speak out because George W. Blow-Monkey seemed pretty ineffectual at the time, and though I voted for Gore, I did so unenthusiastically. In my defense, he probably would've given Deepak Chopra a cabinet position.

                

Then they came for America's prestige as a reluctant warrior and an honest broker in the Middle East, and I did not speak out because even though the Iraq invasion was clearly an immoral sham, I get a total jingo-boner watching spec-ops guys fuck stuff up in night vision.
               
Then they came for the concept of responsible, competent governance in the face of disaster, and I did not speak out because I underestimated the height of the country's tolerance ceiling, and it just never occurred to me that the filthy sons of bitches might not be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail, or maybe something comparable but not quite so anachronistic.
                
Then they came for my morning drive-time radio show.
            
Okay, so it was a different they, but when you screw with my routine, you're they, buddy.
             
If you're unaware of the radio renaissance that is--or has been--Air America's Morning Sedition, you have no right to consider yourself a discriminating media consumer, unless you're using "discriminating" in the civil-rights sense of the word. To wit: "I ain't much for some faggoty Jew's densely-layered topical humor."
            
Host Marc Maron is a brilliant riff-spitter who not only speaks his mind but drives you around in it while he does doughnuts in the parking lot, and with the help of avuncular knowledge-font Mark Riley, he's managed to frame the debate as well as anyone, all while playing ringleader to some of the greatest comedy creations in any medium. If you've never made the acquaintance of the Milfington clan, you've got a Jim Earl-shaped hole in your life that simply can't be filled with Hank the Angry Drunken Dwarf or Daniel Schorr.
 
And as of December that hole shall remain gaping.
 
I'm surprised I didn't see this coming. Air America's programming decisions seem intended to make Al Franken seem less tedious by network-wide comparison. To be fair to the guy, AAR couldn't exist without him, and that would hold true even if he never got involved with the network; back when most of us still thought Rush Limbaugh was a harmless fad, Franken saw what was really happening and single-handedly set the terms by which the right-wing media putsch could be countered. Plus he's great on the page. Having said that, his radio show is unlistenable; he's like Garrison Keillor without the air of danger.
 
And I'm just as in love with Janeane Garofolo as any guy in his early 30s who wears canvas sneakers and t-shirts emblazened with ironic sentiments, but she hasn't said anything in the past year and a half that she didn't say before the first commercial break of the first broadcast.
 
As for the radio pros that fill out the lineup, I suppose they're fine as far as it goes, but having your belief system reinforced by monologists wears pretty thin after an hour or so. And then there's advocacy fare like "Ecotalk," which totally fucking rocks, provided you stretch the definition of "rocks" to mean "punishes the listener with relentless earnestness punctuated by bumper music played by strident folkies competing for the Least Oblique Lyricist Grammy."
 
Word has it Maron got in the door by way of fellow self-loathing genius Lizz Winstead, whose unexplained removal was aptly described as "Stalinist," and the pall cast by that incident, for me at least, has never been dispelled.  One could write a dissertation on the shortsightedness of replacing her show "Unfiltered" with "Springer on the Radio," and by my count, roughly one-third of the people who post comments on left-leaning blogs have done just that. Lizz's pelt was new boss (as in "meet the") Danny Goldberg's first; you might know him as the author of "How the Left Lost Teen Spirit," and while I can't blame the guy for riding Kurt Cobain's cardigan-tails to a prominent place in progressive media, I don't think much can be said in defense of a man whose first act as CEO was to unperson the creator of "The Daily Show."
 
I guarantee you Kurt'd be a Sedition fan if he were alive today. And then he'd probably kill himself again, because some people are so screwed up inside that even Marc Maron can't save them. You might even say they can't "deal with it." But that's neither munkasa nor konchata.
 
The soon-to-be-extinct morning anti-zoo was broadcasting live today from O'Neal's restaurant in Manhattan, and though I'm a zealot about the brain-theater aspect of radio (I went to one of their shows at Maxwell's in my hometown of Hoboken but I made a point of sitting in the back and staring at the wall, which I admit is a little odd, but my imagination tends to get invested in these things, and I've never really gotten over the finding-out-what-Terry-Gross-looks-like debacle of '02), I just had to be there for the last hurrah. For the record, the Cardinal doesn't look at all the way you want him to, but when you see him, you sort of go, "Okay, that makes a certain kind of sense, I guess."
Sidebar: As of this writing I remain optimistic that the listener uprising will be successful, but it's that dumb kind of optimism that's really just an advanced form of denial, like when you see your ex dry-humping somebody at a party but cling to something ambiguous they said to you a week ago, like "We'll always be in each other's lives" or some such. In my heart of hearts I know MS is dead because of one telling off-air utterance: During a commercial break, one of the crew implored the crowd to sign up to receive "e-mail blasts" from AAR. When this was met with palpable awkwardness on the part of the audience (we're talking record-scratch sound effect), he said, sheepishly, "They made me call it that."
 
"E-mail blasts." When shit that doesn't need to be renamed starts getting renamed, you know you're dealing with soulless corporate scumfucks of the highest order. I've waited tables at chain restaurants and I know from soulless corporate scumfucks. Anyway, back to the fairly upbeat anecdote.
There were all kinds of people there from all over the place--a woman at my table had left her house the night before and driven 'til dawn--and if you were there you were among friends. I ended up sitting with a suburban retiree, a Wall Streeter, a '60s burnout, an ex-soldier, a college kid, and a non-profit administrator, all of us strangers, and during commercial breaks we were like the cast of the Big Chill, Marc Maron being Kevin Costner's corpse (the fact that Costner's scenes ended up on the cutting room floor may or may not underscore my analogy). I don't think we even got around to properly introducing ourselves, we were so busy commiserating and relating our favorite moments from bits gone by.
 
At the end of the gig Marc got a spontaneous standing ovation right out of the credibility-straining climax of a formulaic studio film. I love these fans, I love these characters, I love these hosts, I love this weird little world they've created.
 
I love Morning Sedition like it was my father.
BA pa PA ba baaaaa

BA DA LUM BUM!

bum bum bum bum. . .*

*I wanted to use the iNews intro at the top but it doesn't lend itself to a phoenetic transcription