Air America has never seemed to grasp that the the world extends beyond Manhattan.

My wife refuses to watch murder-mysteries with me anymore.  Three minutes into a program I can tell her how the victim is going to die, who the bad guy really is, and what clue will give him/her away.  What’s worse, I taught her how to do it too, so now I get to ruin the suspense for her even when I’m not actually there to do it in person.

There’s really no trick to doing this.  Like most things in life of any real value, it’s an accidentally-acquired skill.  You set out to accomplish one objective, and discover that the process of achieving this goal teaches you more about the world, or yourself, than the original purpose for doing it in the first place. 

Twenty-five years ago, in one of those “just for the hell of it” moments, I decided to write a novel.  Twenty years later I was finally published.  Along the way I hooked up with John William Galt; an actor, voice talent, and screen writer.  John, who had ghosted a number of scripts and had been in movies from JFK to Forrest Gump, was thinking about writing a novel.  A mutual friend put us together, since by that time I had learned two valuable things about my own novel-writing efforts.  I had great plot ideas.  And I couldn’t write worth a damn.

So with John in the “first chair,” we wrote a few short stories to get our writing style down, then tackled a novel together.  John taught me about character development, dialogue, plotting, and showed me all the little tricks of the trade that go into the Hollywood formula.  From this I learned how to spot “plot points” and recognize the subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) clues that foreshadow the development of a story.  When Mrs. McMurtry picks up a cigarette with her left hand instead of her right, I know immediately that the guy down the street is going to get hit by a passing car when he wanders outside in his bathrobe to retrieve his morning paper.

Well, not really.  I promised my wife I wouldn’t ruin it for you too, but it is a truism in the movies and TV that no action or dialogue is wasted.  Every word, every motion, is there for a purpose.  But if you really want to ruin your entertainment experience, start to look for little things that don’t need to be there, or run contrary to “common sense.”  Pretty soon you’ll pick up on where the plot is going, and you too can impress your friends and neighbors.

Which brings us to the rumored, timely demise of Air America.  I’m a self-admitted talk radio junkie.  I was listening to talk radio instead of music back when I was a teenager, which was a very long time ago.  I’ve heard enough horrible local programs, as well as enough horrible national programs, to recognize a good one when I hear it — and understand why it’s good.

Fortunately, no radio station within my listening area plays Air America, so I wasn’t exposed to its truly awful programming until I was driving through Arizona a couple of years ago and found it was the only station I could pick up.  I stayed with it for about a half-hour more out of astonishment and disbelief than genuine interest, until like the bystander who’s had his fill of a grizzly accident scene, I simply shut the radio off.  The paranoid delusions, unfunny parodies, and Twilight Zone-like commentary told me all I needed to know.  Al Franken, Janeane Garofalo, and the rest of the merry little band of social commentators were not long for this world.

It came as no surprise that Error America had only remained on the air by “borrowing” a million bucks from a couple of New York City charities that went belly up after bailing out the Liberal Talk Network.  This, as you all may remember, followed the abortive start up of the network itself that saw a number of host cities immediately drop off the map as financial commitments to Air America disappeared even before it broadcast its first bit of misinformation.

But the thing that sealed its fate in my mind was the “Mrs. McMurtry” moment — or should I say moments — that permeated the first broadcast I actually heard.  Besides being just plain awful from an execution standpoint, it was the most negative, depressing thing I’d ever heard.

Now bad radio or TV in and of itself isn’t enough to get you cancelled, not even on a national level.  Art Bell never met a meteor he didn’t see as an alien invasion, and Morton Downey, Jr. was perhaps the biggest buffoon I’d ever heard who purported to be on the Right (Michael Savage notwithstanding).  But each of them brought something to the table besides “Bush sucks,” or “I didn’t actually hear what Bush said last night but I’m strongly against it.”  If any of this was followed by a prescriptive course of action, or even the barest hint of a positive plan to correct a perceived problem, then my comments above would become a mere matter of personal taste.  But this was the sum total and substance of the content; and like the right or wrong way to create a story that I learned from John, that told me everything I needed to know about its future.

I checked in on Error America a few more times in the ensuing months.  Except for a different voice behind the microphone depending upon which program I accessed, the message was the same.  Bush is a diabolically brilliant moron who has no idea what he is doing, except for those moments when he’s executing his master plan to take over the world.

You simply can’t repeat the same tired refrain for every situation, for every show, and attract a broad-based listening audience.  They have got to have something of substance to react to, positively or negatively, which explains why Limbaugh, Hannity, Ingraham, Prager and others have liberals in their audience as well as conservatives (paleo, neo, neonatal, left-handed, and/or whatever other brand is deemed important by those reading this essay).

What the airheads at Air America forgot — or more accurately, never learned in the first place — is that the world extends beyond Manhattan.  And just as significantly, the real world demands results, not simply good intentions.  I was fired from a job once for not meeting my objectives.  The fact that I brought in $2 million worth of business that went away because the owner of the firm unintentionally insulted the client (it’s a long story) is irrelevant.  My wife was apoplectic at the injustice.  I just shook it off and found a new job.  That’s the way it works in the real world, and all the lamenting and crying about the “unfairness” of it all isn’t going to feed my family.

So, if you want to be a commercial success in the world of market-driven capitalism, the first rule of thumb is to make yourself commercially viable.  (Please, no lectures in the comment section on whether the U.S. “really capitalist,” or more “socialist than capitalist,” or “not living up to the founder’s vision for this country, etc.  Write an op-ed piece of your own if you feel strongly about that subject).  You do this by putting out a product or service that is appealing, or fills a true need.  Hating Bush and everything he stands for may mirror the prejudices of your target audience, but it still leaves you with two related problems. 

First, once you’ve vented, if there’s no other thought to stimulate intelligent conversation, the only thing left is to vent again.  And you don’t need a radio talk show to do that.  Second, and equally important, unless the company that sponsors you sells Prozac, straight jackets, or easily-ignitable American flags, there’s not much of a reason for sponsors to advertise on your station.  And without sponsors, you have no money to pay your bills. 

This is perhaps the most shocking discovery to many Liberals who think that commercial radio operates like government-subsidized NPR, and who assume that everyone in the country thinks exactly like they do.  I was in Manhattan the day after the 1972 presidential election and actually heard a woman say to her friend, “I can’t believe McGovern lost!  I don’t know a single person who voted for Nixon!”

The timely demise of Air America has re-confirmed for me a couple of beliefs about American politics and the state of the nation that I’ve garnered from listening to people talk, instead of taking my political direction from the editors of the New York Times and CBS News.  It explains why despite predictions that the Republicans were going to lose 30 seats in 1994, there was a 54-seat swing in their favor.  It explains why after one mid-term and one presidential election since Bush “stole” Florida in 2000, supposedly earning the ire of the entire country, Bush was re-elected and the Republicans remain in power.  And it makes me less uneasy about the prospect this November that Republicans will retain control of the House and Senate.

Regardless of what we’re told by Dan (now Katie), Little Pinch Sulzberger, and whomever else I no longer listen to, things simply aren’t as bad as the press and Liberal pundits would have you believe.  This makes change less of a driving force in the personal decisions of a voter.  When you couple this with the lack of any coherent thought, strategy, plan or solution to deal with the crisis-de-jour broadcast daily by our friends on the Left, then I think political change is even less likely.

I could still be very wrong about November, particularly if the Republican base sits on its hands due to Bush’s incoherent immigration policy.  But without an alternative philosophy (other than “it’s not the way we’d do it”) ready to take its place, Congressional and Senatorial elections will be decided on local issues like they always are — with one big exception.  The threat of terror by Islamo-fascists still looms over everyone’s head, and unless and until the Democratic Party actually offers a plan to deal with this threat, I think the tie will go to Bush.

History is littered with political predictions that bear no resemblance to reality once an election is held, and mine may be one of those as well.  I haven’t tracked individual races, or applied any sophisticated polling techniques to ferret out a position plus or minus five percent.  All I’m going on is my gut, which tells me that the Democrats don’t have a clue what they would do if they regained power, other than “payback” Bush for the Republicans impeaching Clinton. 

In peace time this may be enough to get you elected, but not today.  My wife and I were at odds over whether to buy new furniture & carpet or a new car on December 15, 1997.  The next day, when she was diagnosed with cancer, neither of us could have cared less about these issues.  Our world changed that day, just as it did for this country on September 11, 2001.  And even though the cancer was successfully excised and she’s had no recurrence since, the threat of it still remains firmly in the back of our minds.  Even eight years later we still do things differently, just as we continue to assign different values to our actions and possessions than we did before.  Once you’ve experienced real horror, the threat of harm doesn’t simply go away just because you dealt successfully with that one incident.  It forever shapes your life.

Until the Democrats get their act together and realize that complaining about a problem isn’t the same thing as solving it, I don’t see a sweeping change running through this country.  The anticipated demise of Error America at the precise moment the country is supposed to be turning to the Left reinforces my belief that, just like in the movies, if we look carefully enough we all can easily pick out the bad guy and know exactly where the story is going. 

All we need to do is apply a little common sense to a situation, and look for the “clue” that’s there right in front of our face.