Talk of the Town
I'm in my hometown of Holland, Michigan, for a few days, enjoying a snowy Easter vacation with my parents. While out driving today, I tuned in to "Talk of the Town," a talk radio show on WHTC, the local AM station. People call in and talk about whatever's on their minds, from politics to the weather. They ask Van Oss for favorite recipes from his file, which he reads over the air. The show has been hosted by Juke Van Oss for 56 years, so long that I can remember getting steamed at snide comments about hippies and Vietnam War protestors when I was a youth.
Holland is fortunate to have a local radio station that is chock full of local content like Talk of the Town. Too many stations these days run canned programming sent in from somewhere in Texas. Nearly everything on WHTC is local except the network news breaks--another welcome retro-touch--and the Laura Ingraham Show. Holland is predominantly movement conservative and Republican, an island of the religious right in a state that votes Democratic overall.
I come from an odd town. It once was nearly entirely of Dutch descent, to the point that the arrival of a General Electric plant in 1963 was a traumatic experience for some of the old Dutch, especially the very insular Christian Reformed Church members. "Now the Americans are coming," a docent at the Holland Museum remembered an old relative saying. Today Holland City is barely a third Dutch, he told me, although the surrounding region is still predominantly populated by people who trace their ancestry back to the Netherlands.
This morning, Mayor Al McGeehan of Holland, my ninth grade American History teacher, was talking calls with Juke. McGeehan has been mayor forever, by my mother's reckoning. Callers were mainly concerned about the upcoming vote on raising the millage to fund a local airport authority, and an announcement by the Board of Public Works that electric rates are going up 15 percent. Holland has municipal power and its own power plant, but the rising price of bituminous coal and other things have forced this increase.
McGeehan plans to hold a public hearing tonight to have the BPW explain all the factors behind the increase. One thing in the favor of ratepayers of any municipal electric operation is that profit for stockholders doesn't factor into the rates. But they do have to cover their costs, and the price of coal has gone up steadily because of increasing demand from, you guessed it, China. McGeehan talked about having BPW explore alternative energy options, including wind turbines. The energy seas will be turbulent for the next several years, if not decades, and elected officials will ignore the public's desire for stable and fair rates at their peril.
But this being Holland, the most provacative comments came after the mayor's segment ended. Diehard Bush zealots called in to argue that 4,000 U.S. soldiers killed in Iraq was no big deal compared to other wars, and we only thought it was because the "main stream media" had conspired to make us think otherwise. These are people who are still in denial about the massive public rejection of Bush and the Republican Party, and the reasons this has happened. Zealots in a lost cause can be dangerous, and that is worth remembering.
My daughter and I drove up to the Grand Rapids Art Museum to see an exhibit of Andy Warhol's serial images. Among them was his Death and Disaster series, which included the Kennedy assassination. A guide was explaining the iconic images to a group of high school students, and she veered off into something that obviously worried her greatly. She asked them to think about the national trauma that would result if Sen. Barack Obama was assassinated. That was what the Kennedy assassination was like, she said.
Many of us worry about that horrific possibility. Obama seems too good to be true, and those of us from the 1960s know how quickly a Bobby Kennedy or Martin Luther King can be snatched away.