Waiting for Speedway Fowler

I remember the days then 'NEB had a studio in the Galleria and Paul Larson used to hold forth with that great voice of his. That was before the radio business turned into a dark and troubled thing and hundreds of stations were left as wreckage on the broadcast landscape. I had assumed that WNEB was one of those stations. But while spinning through the dial last week while I was in the car running errands, I discovered that 'NEB is apparently still on the air. I can't say that that is a good thing, though. The station now calls itself "Patriot Radio" and serves up a steady stream of extremist far-right radio that is almost cartoonish. WNEB's mornings are filled with evangelical shows, and this transitions into the political stuff in the afternoons with the perfect segue show: "Wallbuilders Radio Live", a program dedicated to establishing a Christian theocracy in America. Apparently there are enough people out there who take this sort of thing seriously that they are able to sell enough ad time to stay on th air. Then we get the usual mix of Hannity, O'Reilly, hugh Hewitt, and that most egregeous of Limbaugh clones, Mike "That's-Not-His-Real-Name" Gallagher. They DO air Dave Ramsey, who's a holy roller, but a sane one, and who dispenses common-sense, yet VERY good money advice. So they have that going for them, but there is NO local programming, and, with the exception of Ramsey, the rest of the mix is so terrible it's almost enought to make one wish WNEB had gone dark.