Daily Blague

A classical-music radio station in Kilgore, Texas, will be converted to a Christian Lite format when Kilgore College, a community college, sells the station to a California-based chain, according to a Times story by Daniel J Wakin, "In Texas, Fighting to Keep Brahms on Air." This is terrible news for the 15,000 or so local people who listen to KTPB, but as business-as-usual in radioland it is bad for all of us. The concentration of media outlets ought to be illegal. It ought to be against the law to have access to more than one frequency on each band. (The New York Times has always seemed to be happy with its single AM and FM stations.) Absolutely no one benefits from media concentration.

What's that? You say that "stockholders" benefit? Not to be Marxian, but your contention is highly alienated. Where do these stockholders live? Insofar as they, too, reside in the United States, they live in a degraded environment. They are hooked, perhaps, on the delusion of the gated community, which holds that wealthy people can create walled-off Utopias, and that it therefore that doesn't matter what kind of a world their less affluent countrymen have to be content with.

As for the loss of a classical music outlet in particular, I'm reminded of one of the few passages in Plato's dialogues that has struck me as appealing.

And harmony, which has motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given by them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself, and rhythm too was given by them for the same reason, on account of the irregular and graceless ways which prevail among mankind generally, and to help us against them.

That's from the Timaeus, 47d (translated by Benjamin Jowett).