[Kzyxtalk] The board's, the management's and Tim Gregory's magic bubble.

[Marco McClean]

>
> Tim Gregory <tgregory at saber.net> wrote under the subject: Re: [Kzyxtalk] on dictators, goons, sycophants, stuffed shirts and cheerleaders, and cheering mobs:
>
> "Too bad Norman...you see the tool John [Sakowicz] has has made of your efforts at discussion? Some folks never learn boundaries--the world is their magic bubble..."
>   

    Okay, Tim, think of it the other way around. Imagine reading a 
speech-to-text output of all the pledge-drive talk from a single day of 
a typical unlistenable KZYX pledge drive, about how the station needs 
more and more money in memberships and donations just to keep the great 
programs coming, and about how it's like a great big restaurant where 
all the listeners eat for free and so are bound by honor to pay up, so 
pay up, and so on, and then the fatuous chuckling, and praise of the 
management and staff who do /so much/ under such /difficult conditions/...

    Now try to hold this in the same mind: just the manager and program 
director and ad (underwriting) salesman together suck $140,000 a year 
out of the station --the equivalent of 2,800 yearly fifty-dollar 
memberships --more members than KZYX ever had or will have.

    Mary Aigner's position (program director) is entirely superfluous. 
NPR and other syndicated shows switch in and out automatically. Deejays 
show up and play their CDs and once per hour ID the station, and when 
they don't show up automation covers for them. What do you suppose 
Mary's directing but a sine wave graph of pledge drive activity, so she 
can continue to be paid  to pretend to be needed and to quite viciously 
defend her turf and her undeserved authority over others.

    John Steffen is paid more than whatever he imagines /he's/ winning 
for the station in return for it. Naturally he's a snarling dog for the 
status quo.

    And all John Coate has accomplished in eight years: sucking out of 
the station for himself /half a million dollars/, firing the news 
department right off the bat and 7.6 years later starting a pretend new 
one, occasionally telephoning an engineer to half-assedly patch things 
together for him, faking up the occasional financial report, and adding 
approximately one bell and two whistles to a web page.

    The CPB grant has always paid twice-over all the real-life expenses 
of running and maintaning KZYX. How can you not grasp, Tim, that you'd 
still get to do your show if the disastrous expensive top-down hierarchy 
were deposed, and-- maybe my show would be on KZYX too, and the shows of 
others who over the years have run afoul of the bad humour of the /real/ 
usurpers of the radio frequency, which is a natural resource, not a shoe 
store. Three frequencies, in the case of MCPB. The money is there. 
Airpersons can and should be paid for their work.

    You say, "Too bad, Norman," but really, it's too bad for all of us. 
You see the tool the "dictators, goons, sycophants, stuffed shirts and 
cheerleaders" have made of our good faith and, for many of us, of our 
lifelong efforts to provide a place for educational noncommercial 
radiopeople to do audio art and science. Those dictators, goons, etc. 
running the station have caused all their own troubles from within their 
magic bubble of reactionary privilege --that's a good term, and an 
accurate description, and they blame it all on others when anything 
threatens that bubble. And /they/ get angry enough for their heads to 
explode. We've all seen it.

    This conversation should be taking place regularly on the air, and 
in a forum on the KZYX web page, where boardmembers, and so-called 
management, and airpeople --and the public, who pay for the station with 
their taxes whether they like it or not-- can all participate equally, 
in the light. It's crazy that Norman should have had to start this 
listserv in the first place. KZYX should have been hosting an open 
unmoderated forum on its webpage all along.

    So John Sakowicz talks like an angry man. There are some real things 
and creatures to be angry about at KZYX, and they've dug the hole 
they're in, and they're still digging. I have trouble understanding why 
you won't recognize this, Tim.


Marco McClean
memo at mcn.org
http://MemoOfTheAir.wordpress.com