A Pig in the Zoo

Benton, TN

August 17, 2019

Men may rise on stepping stones of their dead selves, to higher things.

– Tennyson 

David and I are with his Boy Scout troop for a snorkeling trip in the Conasauga River. Tonight we will camp back inside the Georgia line, near the town of Calhoun. 

The weather and scenery in the Tennessee mountains are beautiful, the water is clear, and the fish are abundant. We are staying in the moment, enjoying the present. 

But, a few days ago, a long-lost discovery took me briefly to the past. When sifting through some old files, I found a unrecognized recording. Not knowing what I was in for, I leaned back…right arm outstretched, left arm tucked to my chest, both eyes squinted…and pressed play.

This week in 1992, someone we all know was served up as the token right-winger on KQED radio’s Forum program in San Francisco…less to appease the audience than to indulge its revulsion, like a pig exhibit at the Tel Aviv Zoo.

Our polemicist was young…out of college only three years, still five months from meeting his wife. Over the next 27 years his youthful shots of certainty would be shaken in the tonic of time, poured over the rocks of experience, and diluted into doubt.

Some of the interview strikes us as being of an entirely different age. Television, newspapers, and radio were the predominant sources of public information. The Internet was almost unimaginable, and still a few years from dial-up adoption. 

A few political observations seem incredible now, but were true when I pontificated on KQED…which was not that long ago.

After all, then as now, The Simpsons was on the air, US troops were in Iraq, Donald Trump was making news, and The Rolling Stones were touring as an over-the-hill rock band. Plus ça change, and all that. 

Except, as if from a parallel universe…

Republicans were entrenched in the California Governor’s chair. They were majorities in the state Assembly and Senate, and held both of its US Senate seats. And an arrogant conservative white guy could still be part of a civil conversation with three young Lefties on the flagship public radio station in America’s most liberal city.

On the August 13, 1992 broadcast of KQED’s long-running “Forum” program, Youth Activism was the subject. Topics were not unlike those bandied about today, albeit tinged with a little less lunacy and a lot less hysteria. 

Education made its obligatory appearance. Multi-culturalism stopped by. Immigration had a cameo. As would be the case three decades later, environmental hypochondriacs were warning that we had only 10-15 years till the world “dies”.

Our young debater expressed many opinions that embarrass his older ears…homelessness no worse than it’s ever been, oil was a valid rationale for a dumb war, the “system” was fine – just needed “better people”…(wince). 

In fairness, the “Geek from the Young Republicans”, as one caller referred to him, was to some degree speaking for the San Francisco Republican Party. Still, it is hard for a fifty year-old not to occasionally grimace when he hears a pompous 23 year-old speaking in his name. 

Members of his family no doubt recall hearing this youthful zeal, ignorance, and naïveté spouted at them from across many a dinner table.

Regarding political opinions, most people are like baseball umpires. Once they make a decision, they rarely change it. 

So it is interesting in this interview to detect how our immature disputant was already starting…ever so slightly…to evolve from boilerplate conservative into the reactionary radical traditionalist he eventually became.

For that, the fifty year-old son is proud of his 23 year-old father. Despite espousing conventional ideas with the enthusiastic condescension of one who thought he was the first to discover them, he did retain sufficient humility to realize not all of his notions held water. 

Over time he threaded old ideas so they could be coupled with new ones, and helped fix the faulty plumbing of his leaky mind. The mental pipes continue to rust, but he hopes they are less clogged, and more open to the refreshing flow of original thoughts. 

Some of these move in different…or even contradictory…directions. And most are unceremoniously flushed into the septic tank of ideological nonsense. 

That includes more than a few effusions from this interview, which lasts about an hour, and is attached below in two parts. The second part begins with about twenty seconds of dead air, which will no doubt be welcomed.

 JD