A week on US radio
Various
Fun-wise, it’s been an unspectacular summer in New York. “We are quietly snoring,” reports the New York Times, briefly enlivened by Beyoncé causing havoc at Coney Island by perfecting her make-up for an impromptu photo shoot on the 90-year-old Ferris wheel, and leaving a lone couple stranded for over half an hour 150 feet at the top, certain they had been forgotten for the night and forced to sit tearfully in their wind-rattled cage, gazing down on the wide and clamouring boardwalk below.
When immigrants approached New York by boat in the 19th century, it wasn’t the Statue of Liberty they saw first, but the one million electric lights of Coney Island – lights promising one thing: here, pleasure is a birthright. But not this summer. A numbing heatwave in June was followed by perpetual drizzle and brown-shadowed thunderstorms along the Jersey shore, knocking out power in the run-up to Labor Day.
“After the news, I wanna bring something up,” sighed Jim Gearhart, the veteran host of New Jersey 101.5, on yet another overcast morning. “Today’s the day that the burger flippers are supposed to go on strike. Has anybody in New Jersey heard about this?”
In New York, fast-food workers’ wages have increased just 25 cents in ten years to a parlous $7.25 (£4.67) an hour. The burger flippers of New Jersey – the most densely populated state in the Union, with tens of thousands working in that industry – earn marginally more, but still short of Barack Obama’s proposed $9 minimum wage. When recently McDonald’s sent out a sheet of contemptuous “suggestions” on how its workers might more sensibly live within a budget, it included an assumed “income from another job”, conceding that nobody can hope to survive by flipping cheeseburgers alone.
“Do you believe in the minimum wage or is it pushing even Karl Marx to the left?” muses Jim. “Let’s go to Joe in Neptune.” “Oh wow,” says a distracted Joe, forgetting what he wanted to say and hanging up. Jim sighs and leisurely goes to the ads for statins. It takes more than dead air (or even murder) to faze a New Jersey DJ.
Later that afternoon, on National Public Radio, it’s not Marx but Einstein up for discussion. Tom and Ray Magliozzi – brothers who nominally dole out advice about fixing cars on the station – affectionately mock a listener who has just emailed in on the subject of geniuses and called Albert Einstein “Norman”. “Hey– Norman Einstein!” shriek Tom and Ray, 76 and 64, respectively, but brimful with the dimply charm of fantastically unsnooty delinquents. “Hey, man!” they bang the table, hooting with a soul-deep satisfaction. “Ah, man . . .” It’s the most fun they’ve had since Memorial Day. “You been collaborating with Yogi Bear on this?”
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