Losers: The Road to Everyplace but the White House by Lewis Michael

Author:Lewis, Michael [Lewis, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History
ISBN: 9780679768098
Goodreads: 10655
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 2007-11-13T00:00:00+00:00

“Who are you?” I ask. He’s all alone, a stray alien life-form who landed on earth by mistake. And he’s put his finger on the problem. It’s the corporate risk aversion that’s so bothersome, the mirror image of the political risk aversion at the top of politics. Democratic politics depends on direct confrontation and commitment to ideas. It is admirable only when it requires nerve. How can the immediate presence of a corporation using the political system to promote its own interests, nonpartisan in the most market-savvy way, do anything but contribute to the prevailing fashion in political attitude—the detached, ironic, and “independent” mode? (The critic Dwight Macdonald had a phrase for this. “The herd of independent minds,” he called it.)

“You want my real name or my radio name?” asks this lone voice of dissent.

“Radio name,” I say, out of curiosity.

“Clutch,” he says, “from Naked Radio.”

Naked Radio, it turns out, is a pirate station that broadcasts alternative music intermixed with long programs about local political issues. Within minutes Clutch is explaining in highly technical language—using words like “binary” and “switches”—how his station moves by stealth into an area of town, sets up its equipment, and, by sheer force of watts, poaches the frequency of legitimate stations. “If there is an area of town where the station’s frequency is weak we can come in and dominate their frequency,” he says. “Like, yesterday the station we took over was playing this demo tape, and you could just see it.” Clutch places his hands on an imaginary steering wheel. “This guy is driving down the highway listening to his corporate music and then bam! All of a sudden he’s hearing the Mamas and the Papas and then me saying: This is Naked Radio and we’re coming for your children!”

I ask Clutch when I can hear his show.

“I dunno,” he says. “We have to, like, switch our frequency, or we’re going to get busted. Maybe tomorrow night you might want to check 89.9 FM.” Then he adds, thoughtfully, “I don’t mind infringing on someone else’s frequency. It’s a felony I don’t mind committing.” And with that we are interrupted, for good as it turns out. Rock musicians with stringy unwashed hair and tattered clothes—from bands called Sky Cries Mary and Goodness—emerge from the Choose or Lose bus, take the stage, and in weak, camp-counselor voices implore the assembled students to get out and vote. The students drift in and out of the crowd, with the perfected indifference of people who stopped listening long ago.

A few hours later the bus rolls back to the hotel to find waiting a redheaded, freckled-faced nine-year-old boy. “Is this the Choose or Lose bus?” he asks excitedly. It is, I say. “Cool. Can I look?” He hops on board, takes a quick peek. Then he races out into the back of a waiting slate-green stretch Mercedes-Benz with a personalized license plate that reads: QUORUM.

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