Daily Blague

The Times reported yesterday that radio station WNYC is about to vacate the premises in the Municipal Building that it has occupied since 1924, thus finalizing its separation from city government. In his story about the move, Glenn Collins quotes our own local Rambo, Curtis Sliwa, the populist host of a program at WABC.

"If you have a blue collar or no collar, and you listen to WNYC, you're going to turn the dial because you know they aren't talking to you; they speak the language of the suites, not the language of the streets."

Mr Sliwa's wordplay may be clever, but it's deeply wrong. The idea that all educated people share a certain political outlook is sheer nonsense, and I would venture that most of WNYC's listeners regard "the suites" with hostility even greater than Mr Sliwa's contempt. I don't know where else one might find local discussions in support of raising the minimum wage and in general improving the lot of Mr Sliwa's colored collars.

There ought to be a name for this maneuver - this dismissal of all educated conversation as "elitist," in the sense of being unconcerned about "the real world." It's the worst sort of demagoguery, not so much because it misidentifies college grads as the enemy of "ordinary" people but because it suggests that education itself is a sort of toxic transformative process. Get an education, it implies, and you'll be ruined for regular life. In fact, it is the lack of education that is toxic. To be an adult in our society without the resources that a college education opens up is to be hobbled by mental malnutrition. Trying to navigate the modern world without the intellectual training provided by higher education, intelligent people nonetheless fall for this or that conspiracy theory, this or that simplisticism. Such as Curtis Sliwa's notion that WNYC speaks "the language of the suites." What rubbish. WNYC speaks the language of "get an education!" Which, failing all else, the station's listeners can work on just by paying attention.

According to Glenn Collins' report, WNYC has not only the largest public-radio audience in the nation but also the largest share of Manhattan's radio listeners.