Obama, the speech, and the static

I don’t know if tonight’s health care speech was historic, except in the pathetic low to which a South Carolina congressman sank in heckling the president of the United States like it was dollar beer night at Uncle Chuckle’s. But the way my wife and I heard the speech sure had the whisper of history about it.

We’re on the road as I write this, headed from Los Angeles out to Albuquerque, and we were climbing into the high country near Seligman, AZ when the underpowered NPR station on which we were about to listen to the speech dropped out and faded away. So we switched over to the AM band. The conditions for listening were lousy, and AM is notoriously unforgiving; as my wife drove and our dogs snoozed in the back seat I wrangled the dial, coaxing the signal past spikes and dips, down for bursts of static, up again when the volume flagged. It was a pretty primitive listening experience for a digital age. But there was something about it, something intimate and enveloping. It’s raining in the Southwest this week, and the late-summer air is charged with electricity. Every once in a while the speech would be obliterated by a burst of noise, and we’d find ourselves actually leaning in closer to the dash to pick the words from the noise. When the guy from South Carolina yelled “YOU LIE” like a a frat boy, we couldn’t be sure at first that’s what we’d heard. When the GOP offered a tepid round of golf claps for its own malpractice-reform idea, we asked ourselves whether it was applause at all or a passing disturbance in the atmosphere. That’s how we drove east, climbing toward 7,000 feet, listening, focusing. Near Ash Fork it occurred to me that this must have been how Americans listened to Roosevelt when radio was the only game in town and AM was the only kind of radio — actively, with purpose and effort.

Just outside of Williams the skies cleared and darkened, and we spent the rest of the ride into Flagstaff talking about what we’d heard. If we’d been home and watched on TV, would we have listened so intently? Maybe. But maybe not.