air america

It's so weird, because I find commercials physically revolting. I just cannot tolerate them anymore. I'd be interested to find out if there are other people of my age group who feel the same way. It would help support a theory of mine. My generation is not the first to have grown up with a television on in the house all the time, but we were the first to really be carefully marketed to, from birth. Our commercials were loud, jumpy, in colour, and not scared to manipulate the basest desires of greedy, status-obsessed children. Child psychologists were hired by Madison Avenue to figure out and recommend (indeed, to sanction) ways of making latchkey kids want something, anything, besides the comfort and love of parents, and to want it now, goddamnit. My theory is that after twenty-five, thirty years of living in this terror, we are sick of it. We know they're in our head, we know they know what we really want, we know they know how to control what we really want, and we just don't freaking care anymore. The receptors have zapped out, like space heaters in flooded basements.

That's my theory.

And there are no more offensive commercials that the ones you hear on the radio. It's as if in order to compensate for the lack of visuals, radio announcers are stomping up and down in front of the microphone yelling, bleating, to be heard. This, delivered via a feed that is already compressed to the tits. It only takes one fifteen second spot to make me absolutely nauseous with apoplexy. Thirty seconds is a dull buzzsaw in the back of my neck.

Yet every day it seems, I log on to Air America, the (apparently beleaguered) leftist radio network that broadcasts sickeningly cheerleaderesque Kerry bull yards, sandwiched with ads for weight-loss pills, ambulance chasers, commercials for Steve Earle's yawny new album... I'm not even American. What the fuck is going on? Sure, it's anti-Bush which is only right and proper, but it's talk radio! And Al Franken's voice is so completely annoying... they all are, really. Everybody on it is so nasal. Yet I'm listening to it right now.

Someone needs to recommend good internet radio stations to me. Talk ones... I don't need to be turned on to the hot new musics anymore. Get me the hell off this zeppelin!