Flipping the dial

There's a little known anachronistic crowd out there, a small group -- only about two (plus) million of them -- who still have one love in common. It's a love that's passed from most people's minds, having waned in the 80's, died in the 90's, and virtually disappeared in the 00's. That love?

AM radio.

The beauty of radio has been far eclipsed by the dazzling, always-on smorgasbord of information that is the Internet. But most people, my generation being particularly at fault for this, have forgotten what it is to have dozens of choices -- mostly local -- that are founts of the one thing that the Internet is generally missing: the human factor. From Kasey Kasum to The Shadow to Rush Limbaugh to Art Bell, AM radio has become the dying soapbox of America's last technological generation.

A mass address system essentially encompassing hundreds of miles, AM Radio is the mono, old-school version of what XM and Sirius beam straight into your cars for fourteen ninety-five a month. It's broadcast audio: We still do it today. Like TiVo and TV, Podcasting is Radio with timeshift -- all the information and chatting, none of the waiting or scheduling. But Podcasting loses the luster of live, always-available DJs: Feel up to calling a man sitting in the middle of the Mojave at three in the morning? There's a decent chance you'll be heard by millions. Half of them believe that George Bush was secretly a reptilian plotting to take over Earth, but they'll hear you, dammit.

It's the last easily accessible forum for Joe Public. Twitter and Blogging and emails are certainly gaining "in vogue" status on channels such as CNN, but they're all read by the same dry, well-hairstyled men and women that you see twenty-four hours out of the day. From NASCAR afficianado to former Top Gun pilot to San Franciscan transvestite, these cement-faced pundits transform any emotional plea into a short, slighty snide sound byte to be heard and forgotten in a matter of seconds.

But on AM you have a voice. Whether the station you're calling into has four listeners or four hundred thousand, your voice is most certainly behind the words you express, and your opinion is out -- bouncing off of clouds and solar radiation, drifiting through walls and under static. During the day, AM radio waves travel along the ground, but at night, broadcasts jump into the ionosphere and start "skywave" broadcasting -- allowing distant stations to be heard hundreds, maybe thousands of miles away.

84 WHAS out of Kentucky. 800 AM occasionally out of Montreal. Boston. Cleveland. In the dark of night, in the weaker stations, voices from all over mix and mingle in an overbearing static, arguing overtop of arguments and laughing overtop of tragedy. Small town voices fly the world for all to hear. Flip the dial, and when it focuses in, you never know where you'll be.