Lubbock Radio Sucks

So the other day I made a run to Lubbock and back to pick up a new toy. I went solo because the lady of the house had some urgent statistics homework to attend to, so I thought it would be a great time to rock out.

About 40 minutes outside of Canyon, I had already run through the CD I  brought for the trip, and decided to hit NPR for some sweet, sweet All Things Considered.

Much to my dismay, the signal was beginning to fade. Few things are more irksome to my ears than an in-and-out FM signal.

So I hit scan.
And I hit it again.
And again.
For miles and miles and miles looking for something worth listening to.

I decided that, as much as Amarillo radio sucks a bag of dicks, it is solid gold compared to Lubbock Radio.

Seven.
SEVEN.

That's how many "Christian Rock" stations I came across. And they weren't spread out across the spectrum, they were all one right after another.

I put quotes around Christian Rock because I don't really know what to call these stations. I hesitate to merely call them "Christian" because that doesn't seem descriptive enough. I wouldn't blaspheme the Rock and Roll genre with this tripe if it weren't for the fact that it is under this subcategory heading one would likely find what I was hearing.

The above image is taken from David Hayward's nakedpastor blog. It's an irreverent webcomic, and I suggest any internet archaeologists from the future who happen to have stumbled across this article in a cache somewhere check it out.

I decided to give "Christian Rock" a try. I think "Christian Ecclectica" would be a better format title for these stations, because it's hard to tell what the target market it. The station IDs only say that the music is "uplifting" and "positive."

The songs themselves seem to switch targets between soccer moms and preteens. At least that's what I was getting from the music itself. I sampled several different stations and I couldn't determine what made them any different from each other. Listening to them was pretty much like listening to Delilah but all of the songs were loaded with guilt, references to the cleaning power of blood, ritualistic cannibalism and telepathy. The music and commentary were, somehow, worse.

I felt like my patience had been rewarded when one of the stations started broadcasting a piped-in talk show called, of all things, "Wall Builders." This was not a reward. It was a punishment.



I was immediately stricken by the irony of the show's title and reminded of this post.

I was sure that the show title had to do with some obscure Biblical reference, because nobody would name such an openly and obviously divisive show "Wall Builders" without having some kind of nonsense to hide behind. When I got home, I Googled it.

This is what their website has to say about their name:
"In the Old Testament book of Nehemiah, the nation of Israel rallied together in a grassroots movement to help rebuild the walls of Jerusalem and thus restore stability, safety, and a promising future to that great city. “Rebuilding the walls” represents allegorically the call for citizen involvement in rebuilding our nation’s foundations. "

Their objective is to get Christians more involved in the civic arena and to help return the United States to its "godly roots."

I'm all for a return to 'Merika's godly roots, but I do have a few requests.
I will support this cause so long as we get to re-institute slavery, end womens' suffrage, destroy all labor safety laws and, for crying out loud, bring spousal and child abuse back! All of these social conventions are clearly supported in the Bible.

While we're rolling the clock back to the fucking dark ages, lets go ahead and dissolve medicine and just go back to praying to fix everything. Gotta keep the military, though... never know when Yahweh is going to need to "give us some more land" that we'll have to go take away from the people already living there.

Pictured above: Samson, a man of the LORD, using a donkey's jawbone to clear the way for Yahweh's chosen ones. Yahweh prefers to have people do his killing for him, except for when he doesn't.

The issue of last Wednesday's episode of "Wall Builders" was the fact that there exists a group of folks who were having a "Godless Constitution Day" on the day following the National Day of Prayer.

The Godless Constitution folks are just protesting the notion that any federal time or energy be devoted to prayer to any gods anywhere. The Wall Builder folks take it personally and feel persecuted. Their retaliation was to enumerate a list of things which proved, to them at least, that the Constitution of the United States of America is a Christian document.

If you're curious, you can go listen to their archived podcast on their website. The episode in question is on May 4, 2011, titled The Godless Constitution. Bring hip waders.

My position on the matter is this:
The Constitution doesn't mention Jesus or Yahweh. It does employ the then contemporary convention of dating material "In the Year of Our Lord ----." They hadn't come up with CE yet to date material, so they used what they had. Aside from that, the Constitution is pretty much void of any religious connection. And that's fine. The authors understood the consequences associated with the establishment of a religious government and wanted to avoid it.

But lets save the argument and grant, for no good reason, the contention that the Constitution of the United States is a Christian document (which it doesn't seem to be), and that the writers were all evangelical Christians (some of which were most certainly not).

What difference does it make?

It was written exclusively by men. Does that make this a male country?
It was written exclusively by white people. Does that make this an exclusively white nation?
It was written by bigots and sexists. Does that make this a bigoted, sexist nation?

Of course not.

The proclivities and leanings of the individuals writing the document have nothing to do with the fact that the Constitution and its subsequent Amendments are the law of the land in the USA. The first amendment goes out of its way to make it clear that there is and should not be any law supporting any particular religion.

The best way to do that is to keep government out of the business of religion. All religion.

These guys don't get that.

And they won't.

Because they're too busy building walls.