Henrietta Hay's Column

Normally I sleep the sleep of the righteous, or the just, or the just plain tired. But now and then I find myself wide eyed in the middle of the night, and then I go station surfing. I'm not quite up on modern language but if channel surfing is correct for TV, surely station surfing is P. C. Anyway, talk radio in the night is amusing to listen to and is almost guaranteed to put me back to sleep if it doesn't scare me into permanent wakefulness.

It's really quite amazing to listen to what goes out at night over the airwaves. Mostly I doze through the commercials and the station breaks, but now and then words like Dallas, or San Francisco, or Omaha or Window Rock, Arizona filter through, along with our one local station that talks all night.

Although there occasional flashes of country music or rock, the nighttime sounds are almost all talk. Constant talk. Talk in all accents. Intelligent talk. Stupid talk. Scary talk. Shouting and mumbling. Talk. Talk about politics, money, sports and sex. And it is almost exclusively male. Apparently the women go to bed at night to rest up.

Some of the night talk show hosts are well known and professional, but most of them are strange voices talking to and arguing with strange people.

As a long time civil libertarian, I believe in democracy and I believe that "the peepul" should have every right to express themselves. But the kind of political stuff I hear in the middle of the night truly scares me. The hosts deliberately incite verbal riot and the callers work up a major hate at just about everything. They rail at all government, at all politicians, at all taxes, at all authority. The world is going to hell in a handbasket, and they seem to revel in helping it along with pure emotional bombast. The talkers do not worry much about facts or solutions. This is the kind of wild talk that leads to anarchy.

Fortunately, all the night sounds are not political. Several stations have nothing but sports talk. The host can tell a listener who stole second in the game between the Red Sox and the Giants in 1982. I am completely floored at the number of people who seem to get emotional about stuff like that, but they are out there.

Then there is the financial advice you can get in the night. The choice between buying a mutual fund or common stock in the American Widget Company may be important, but at 3 a.m.? If you are concerned with the type of mortgage you should get and whether you need a lawyer, or whether your neighbor can build that ugly fence, you can probably find out.

And then there is sex. Every now and then a radio hostess (this group is usually female, for reasons which I do not entirely understand) dispenses advice to the lovelorn. This can get interesting sometimes, but I have noticed that the people who call don't really want to know any answers. They just want to talk and talk, and they completely ignore any comment from the expert. Finally the said expert decides she has had it, politely tells the caller to shut up and go on doing whatever it is he/she is going to do anyway, and hangs up.

Unless you have had a really horrible day, ten or fifteen minutes of any of these should put you back to sleep, and in the morning you will have only a vague memory of what you heard. But now the worst has happened. Some station somewhere has put Rush Limbaugh on at night. Rush is obnoxious enough in the daytime, although I must admit that any guy who can make $4 million a year from bashing everybody to the left of Barry Goldwater and laughing while he does it, has earned some grudging respect. But in the middle of the night, when I hear his voice I leap to my feet and dash to the kitchen for a glass of warm milk or something stronger.

Ah radio; it has come a long way since my first little crystal set. Or has it?