The fat man called my house at precisely 7:10 a.m,. from WKLL-FM in Syracuse, New York, just as the schedule said he would - and he was ticked off. "So you're writing a book about how the people in government are trying to tell us how to be moral when we should be making up our own minds, right?"
This was the kick-off for my Drive-Time radio tour, a media convergence that makes even the Web look tame and static. It was one of the oddest media experiences I've ever had, an only-in-America fusion of technology, information, culture, hype, and opinion.
Sandwiched between appearances in New England and Chicago, the Drive-Time tour for Virtuous Reality took place in my living room (the basement was too cold; but don't worry, I'm getting out - I hit the road again in just a few minutes).
But its reach was vast, as big as the US of A. It was morning in America, and as the sun rose across the land, I traveled with it, a guest on one morning radio show after another, spreading the gospel of mediaphobia across the land. The idea is to pop up in almost all major media markets - particularly those you're not visiting in person - as people stumble out of bed and head for work.
The fantasy is that millions of Americans get up, dress, have breakfast, drive to the office, and when they get there, ask one another if they heard what that guy was saying on Ken Calvert's show on WJR in Detroit a few minutes ago, or Jerry Anderson's show in Toledo on WSPD. Then they rush out at lunch hour to scare up Virtuous Reality. It is clearly a rare occurrence, since there are few blockbuster books in America. But it's a tantalizing notion, especially if you're the author of five novels, the publishing of which has not felled many trees.
All told, I appeared on 21 radio stations between 7 a.m. and noon. After the fat man in Syracuse, the Drive-Time tour hit Memphis, Minneapolis, Toledo, Grand Rapids, St. Louis, Dubuque, Lansing, Wilmington, Houston, Richmond, Philadelphia, Detroit, and Salt Lake City, among others.
The Drive-Time organizers prepped me on how to handle five straight hours of argument and advocacy: Have lots of tea and throat lozenges ready. If a joke works early on, don't be shy about repeating it. Mention the book. Get ready to get off when you hear the single beep, it means another station is waiting. Get off immediately when you hear two beeps, it means another station is there. Mention the book.
A producer somewhere in Alabama cued me when it was time to move along and advised on the quirks of the shows and the hosts (some are raucous, Stern wannabes; others are Gen X-targeted; others conservative, Heartland programs where you need to keep it clean).
Get cozy, said the producer. Wear your slippers. Have one point you want to make, and make it, no matter what. I wish I'd known all this last week, when I found myself battling attack panelists all over Washington.
The Drive-Time tour was hypnotically interactive. I got so into it I turned on the computer and started writing this rant while moving from show to show, checking online to see whether any HotWired readers were picking up any of the programs and emailing me.
A couple of readers had. "What a shock! I wake up and just heard you on WSPD in Toledo!" emailed Alien, clearly unnerved. "Are you here?" The radio tour was also fluid. As breaking news erupts in different parts of the country (we had an emergency landing, a massive car crash, and a political scandal), interviews get shortened, expanded, moved around.
Different regional voices, flavors, and politics filter into 10-minute (usually) segments. David Holt finished playing the Oak Ridge Boys on WXGI in Richmond and, in his velvety Virginia drawl, wondered why parents didn't just teach their kids what they wanted and shut up about it. Many shows have callers, some don't. Some of the hosts have read the book, some haven't. Few appeared to have been online much, all talked a lot on their shows about Net pornography and other dangers.
One came on seconds before we aired saying there'd been a screw-up and he'd never heard of me. "Quick!" he hissed. "The premise. The premise!" "Okay," I whispered back hurriedly. "Culture and media don't cause social problems. Kids aren't dumb. The Internet has more than pornography on it." "Great," he answered, "when we get on just keep talking." Then we're on the air. "Folks, welcome author Jon Katz, who's going to tell us exactly why the Internet isn't a dangerous place. Jon?"
In Ohio (and Texas, Virginia, Michigan, and Iowa, too), a school board wants to disconnect schools from the Net to keep kids away from pornography and bombmakers. In Minneapolis and Philadelphia, callers were angry about violence in high schools and were convinced new media, especially TV, movies, and the Internet, are to blame.
"You're full of it," said one Minnesota teenager on KT, Nick and Andy's on KEGE-FM in Minneapolis. "There's gangs all over my school." Yes, I said, but media probably isn't to blame. "Yeah, well what is?" she asked. Another teen called in. "My best friend listens to rap and goes online. She's the most moral person I know!" In those exchanges lay the boundaries of the discussion.
Morality, media, and politics are familiar ground for the talk-show hosts. They hear about those issues all day.
Most of them said they had been catching hell for years - long before people knew what the Internet was - from those who blame media for violence, civic degeneracy, and the general decline of civilization. Most were happy to entertain the notion that things are more complicated than that, even though their callers were often shocked to learn that crime among the young was dropping, not rising. Some flatly refused to believe it.
The notion that the young are weak-minded and uncivilized was pervasive. "Are you seriously saying that kids have the right to determine their own values and cultures? That we shouldn't make them learn ours?" asked one incredulous schoolteacher.
"I get this all the time," said Louise Collins of WHWH in Philadelphia, a thoughtful and careful interviewer. "People are obsessed with issues of morality, especially as we approach the millennium. Do you sense that what's really going on here is confusion about what morality is?"
Yup, I did sense that. The theme was a familiar one for readers of The Netizen, since we've been thrashing it out all year: who is responsible for moral values? Wal-Mart? William Bennett? The government? Or individual families? Is the damage caused by children having children they can't care for greater than the damage caused by violent movies or Internet porn?
Although the Virtuous Reality tour sometimes results in my being reflexively pitted against Bennett's many conservative followers, (the full title of my book is "Virtuous Reality: How America surrendered discussion of moral values to opportunists, nitwits and blockheads like William Bennett"), it has never seemed to me that the primary ethic of the online world - one I share - is a liberal notion. It seems a bedrock conservative one: We are responsible for our own moral lives, and for those of our children and families. We make our own decisions about what is or isn't moral for us. We teach our children how to make moral judgments for themselves, rather than ram our own conventions down their throats.
Surprisingly, this was not a particularly controversial notion on the Drive-Time tour, which was in many ways my deepest foray into smaller cities and rural areas far from the smarty-pants who inhabit coastal media enclaves. This was a broadly accepted idea in a world populated by hosts who talk to people on the air every day. In fact, many of the talk-show hosts were surprised to hear it was an online value as well.
May it spread and prosper.
