June 2005
Dear Readers,
Sitting down to write my column this afternoon, I am surrounded by the “notes” I keep all month long (some months more vigilantly than others) in preparation for this moment. Mostly, I am thinking about the Real ID measure tacked on to a relief spending bill which was passed unanimously by the Senate after passing by a wide margin in the House, and how scary it is that I could be facing the choice of whether to offer up a retinal scan or make good on my threat to go live off the grid once and for all. I’ve found lots of scary information on the subject, and really did spend part of last night laying awake and worrying about it. My premonition that we are sitting here like a herd of dumber than average deer shined by headlights on a back country road in the middle of the night grows with every passing day. The other night I watched My Dinner with Andre. The whole story takes place at the table of a fine dining restaurant, and is a conversation between a struggling playwright and a disenchanted director who’ve lost touch. Andre, the director, has left the New York theater scene to explore the deeper meaning of life, civilization and the essence of the soul. At one point, he mourns the invasion of technology into people’s personal lives and asserts that we’ve already lost our privacy and, by extension, our freedom, but we just don’t know it yet. This was in 1981. Then again, George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 were written in the middle of the twentieth century, over thirty years earlier. This line of thinking can spin into myriad directions. Does civilization move cyclically, or is it more complex than that? With every cycle, do we actually end up with a slightly different epicenter of certain knowledge and social priorities? When the epicenter shifts, is it random, based on whatever recent events caused it, or is it actually moving along an irrevocable trajectory toward a pre-destined future?
All this makes my head spin, when all I really want is to be outside playing at the park or hiking in the woods. Warm weather is finally here, and the soft breeze blowing in my office window is making it awfully hard to concentrate. I want to spread the word about weighty matters, I really do. But today, my convictions are almost equally split between the need for universal justice and the need for the ice cream man to come by and bring me a Choco-Taco.
And speaking of food, anyone who likes it will want to clip and save our 2nd annual Definitive Farmers Market Guide. It’s everything you need to know about all the fruits that matter. Vital’s cover story this month is on satellite radio. For a monthly fee of $12.95, subscribers get dozens of commercial-free music stations, plus channels dedicated to news, talk, sports and more. I wrote the story, and wish I could have made it 5,000 words instead of the paltry 2,000 to which we’re limited. I would have loved to include more about the typically gloating and complacent attitude I encountered in researching terrestrial radio’s reaction to satellite, and in the course of my interviews with national and local radio people. I was equally amused by the marketing prowess of the two U.S. satellite radio providers, XM and Sirius. Their spokespeople were so smooth! They had their talk polished to a blinding sheen – I was impressed. Both side are SO sure of themselves; it cracked me up! As I mentioned in the story, it doesn’t take psychic ability to recognize the pattern: satellite radio is to terrestrial radio what cable was to network TV; what TV was to AM radio; what radio was to live theater, and what the Internet might end up being to print media – and so on. It’s evolution, baby. Neanderthal man coexisted with homo sapiens for 100,000 years. Just like cable TV coexists with network TV. So the chances of one wiping out the other are slim. But the fight will be fun to watch.
Peace,
Jon Anne
Jon Anne Willow is Editor and Co-Publisher of Vital Source. She has been a freelance writer and editor for over 20 years, first published in Highlights magazine at the age of ten. So far, this is her only national writing credit.
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