Hello everybody. I'm a little under the weather as I write this postcard, so forgive any undue moments of clarity or good writing. For those of you new to my Postcards, they're correspondence from my travels through life. For some masochistic reason, I have been listening to AM radio lately. These days in the Bay Area, only about 12% of the AM stations are broadcasting in English. No, none of them is putting out stuff in Latin or French, so to listen to AM is to listen to talk radio. There are times when the Invisible Hand of the Free Market makes competition work wonders for quality and quantity of products. This is not one of those times. Talk radio has essentially turned into the intellectual equivalent of the World Wrestling Federation. It's now a political brawl among the moderates (right wing), the far-right wing, and the nutball lunatic fringe. For the moment, the nut-cases are winning. You'd expect this kind of thing if the audience was a bunch of moneyed Alzheimer's victims trying to turn back the clock to when their memories worked. But that's not where the AM demographic is. AM is about the disenfranchised sectors of the middle class and the trailer trash. There are VERY big numbers here -- Rush Limbaugh claims 30,000,000 in his audience. Nothing that FM, internet, print journalists, or even Dan Rather can touch. Rush is on the radio for 3 hours solid, teaching his minions how to be ignorant. How long can this continue? It looks like we haven't even hit the bottom yet. If you look at other industries, competition can go awry -- in a demented "can you bottom this" contest -- for a very long time: * In the 50s, 60s, and early 70s, the US auto industry fought really hard over who could produce the crappiest car for $2500 or so. Manufacturers whined loudly when the Unfair Foreign Competition delivered decent product. * In the 90's, the airline industry were in a race to make service levels go down, driving any semblance of comfort or courtesy out of coach flying. * In the 70s, 80s, and 90s, the US audio industry worked really hard to make sure that loudspeakers would get increasingly ordinary without letting the price fall. In trying to explain why the quality of political debate and general civility on the radio is inexorably declining, I really can't do any better than P. T. Barnum: You can never go broke underestimating the good taste of the American public.