Public radio is the best thing we have going for us.

For as long as I can remember, the McKnight family vehicle fleet has been composed of old Japanese cars — mainly Subarus and Hondas. Some of this is because these are the vehicles that are available as hand-me-downs from the grandparents, but it is also for the same reason that the only plants I own are potted ivy: they can stand up to stunning abuse and neglect for decades. Fifteen years of sitting outdoors in West Michigan winters with oil changes every 8,000 miles? No problem.

As a result, our car stereo systems have always been many years behind the rest of society. (We got our first car with an aux cord in 2015, and that was only because my mother broke character and bought a used Volkswagen that had a tape deck that could take a special adapter.) Sure they could take CDs, but we lived most of our lives listening to FM radio.

Most very old Japanese cars have six radio preset options. The presets never changed. Option 1 was 104.1: Michigan Radio, the NPR affiliate with a tower in Grand Rapids. Option 6 was 91.7: the same thing, but with a tower in Ann Arbor so that we could listen uninterrupted when we drove across the state to visit the grandparents, switching over when the signal started to go fuzzy around Lansing. (In West Michigan, 91.7 is some sort of right-wing bible radio, which once frightened my parents that I had become radicalized when I listened to a CD and forgot to change the radio back on returning home.)

Between the 1 and 6 settings was a sort of no man’s land. Surely there were other stations, but this was of no concern to us. Someone at some Japanese factory had chosen defaults 2, 3, 4, and 5 and they had never been adjusted.

Even in college when I would drive the school’s fleet cars, I would switch the presets back to WMUK with the spirit of somebody picking up litter on the side of the highway, imagining myself to be in a long, quiet war with the sports team that kept undoing my important work.

The effect of this is that public radio has always been a simple fact of my whole existence. As much as the faucet on the left draws hot water and the sun sets in the west, I listen to public radio.

One the way to school, there was Morning Edition. One the way home, it was Stateside. On the way to Sunday afternoon hikes was The Splendid Table with A Prairie Home Companion on the drive back. My most influential education in this nation’s economic system has simply been years of repeated listening to Stormy Weather or We’re in the Money on Marketplace when they “do the numbers.” All Things Considered accompanied my father’s clandestine trips to pick up fast food for us when my mother worked late on Monday nights, and the theme music still makes me think of chicken nuggets. WRCJ was always on for the grandparents, which means that I associate warm summer nights in Ann Arbor with jazz and frigid winter days in Detroit with classical music.

This existence has been the source of small cultural rifts in my life. In the pre-Spotify era, we would occasionally listen to Christmas music on commercial radio for a few weeks each year,  but always with great skepticism and a sort of anthropological spirit, and that was it. Some people cannot believe this. “What do you mean you’ve never heard the Summit Place Kia ad?” people will ask me with the incredulity of a child interrogating their new classmate who has just entered the public school system after a decade of homeschooling.

Still, to me and millions of Americans, public radio is the sound of American life. Perhaps that is why the 2019 change in Morning Edition theme music was received by the public as if the show’s producers had stolen a treasured possession from listeners' own living rooms, or why the disrupted schedule of pledge drive week seems to have a negative impact on every part of life. We cling to public radio because it is a cornerstone of stability and reason. It is the best thing we have going for us.

This is a horrible time in American life. Things are very, very bad. Simply to exist is exhausting. We are surrounded constantly by unthinkably awful news, and all of it is available to us in unlimited quantities through Twitter, Facebook, cable news, and dozens of other sources of varying integrity. 

Public radio is the answer.

There is terrible news. Public radio covers it candidly and accurately, and it knows when to stop. People need balance.

Time may have ceased to be as I work from home, but WRCJ still plays a Sousa march every morning at 7:15 and switches from classical music to jazz every evening. This American Life, Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me, Snap Judgement, and Radiolab still herald the coming of the weekend.

In a world of podcasts and music on demand and car “infotainment” systems (a term I refuse to legitimize by using it outside of quotation marks), public radio is a remaining vestige of our communal life in media. It is a source of good journalism and local news, and also of unique eccentricity that could only be possible on a platform free from the tentacles of advertisers. In an increasingly compartmentalized world, it is one of the few things where we can say, “Did you hear that on NPR? So did I!”

I bought a Ford with satellite radio, Bluetooth, and an Aux cord in 2019, replacing an ancient Honda Accord. (The Accord still worked fine, but a Honda is a liability for somebody working in Metro Detroit Democratic politics, so the car went to my sister.) Frankly, “infotainment” is not all it’s cracked up to be, and the same faithful radio presets (with the addition of a few Metro Detroit public radio stations) still serve me well.

As for the Accord — our last six-preset car: it lived on until two weeks ago, when an inspection revealed that the brake lines were finally about to give out after nearly a quarter of a century of faithful service. We donated it to Michigan Radio.

Distractions

Things I have been reading, watching, and listening to this week.

“The Broadcast Clock” from 99% Invisible. 

A public radio podcast episode about public radio timing. What more could a person want? While impeccably-timed, round-the-clock public radio programming seems effortless to listeners, it turns out that it is wildly complex and ruled by an unforgiving clock.

Jazz by Ken Burns, streaming on PBS or Prime Video or Thursday nights this winter at 10 on Detroit Public Television.

We have seen America at its worst this week. This is the antidote.

From the trailer: 

“[Jazz] is America’s music, born out of a million American negotiations — between having and not having; between happy and sad; between black and white, and men and women; between the old Africa and the old Europe — that could only happen in an entirely new world. It is an improvisational art, making itself up as it goes along, just like the country that gave it birth. It rewards individual expression, but demands selfless collaboration… It has always reflected Americans — all Americans — at their best. ‘Jazz,’ the drummer Art Blakey liked to say, ‘washes away the dust of everyday life.’”

And there is plenty of the dust of everyday life to wash away right now.