A Lonely Broadcast Quotes

His name is Daniel Esperanza. He’s about thirty years old, has a degree in performing arts, and within just a few hours of working at the radio station, he was already lying on the floor in a pool of his own blood.

And in case you’re still wondering, that bird made it through the storm too. He’s still out there, pecking at the window and shrieking at me from the other side of the glass. Daniel has decided to name him Bartholomew. I fucking hate Bartholomew.

Are you going to believe your own eyes or the headlines? This is the dilemma of people who live in totalitarian societies. Trusting one’s own perceptions is a lonely lot; believing one’s own eyes and being vocal about it is dangerous. Believing the propaganda—or, rather, accepting the propaganda as one’s reality—carries the promise of a less anxious existence, in harmony with the majority of one’s fellow citizens. The path to peace of mind lies in giving one’s mind over to the regime. Bizarrely, the experience of living in the United States during the Trump presidency reproduces this dilemma. Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension. One cannot put the president and his lies out of one’s mind, because he is the president. Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality. In effect, it means that the two realities—Trumpian and fact-based—come to exist side by side, on equal ground. The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety. One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality. Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics.

I think I could kick a bird’s ass.

You know, nothing ruins a good mood like trying to dislike someone who is a genuinely decent person.

Sometimes you can’t fight to win,” he said. “You just fight until you can’t anymore.

This was how she did things. This was how we both did things. If we were scared or uncomfortable, we had to laugh about it or else we’d go mad.

Evelyn always looked like she was about ready to die at any moment. I’m not saying she was bad-looking, mind you. She was cute in an unkempt sort of way, with long red hair and freckles all over. But she also had this sickly pallor and big, sunken eyes that reminded me of a fading Victorian child getting ready to meet her ancestors in the next life. Right now, still littered with bruises and scrapes from the prior day’s shenanigans, she looked sorrier than ever.

If you’re driving down a long mountain pass, looking for something to listen to on the radio, give a quick scan for 104.6 FM. If you find it, that’s a very good sign to turn around and go right back the way you came. The forest doesn’t need to grow.

I like all wildlife, so long as it’s not trying to run away with a body part of mine. But the last thing that I wanted to see was this little prick laying eggs and making multiple versions of itself, following me from room to room for the rest of my days.

It’s alright, Evelyn,” Finn said as he lit a cigarette and tossed his head back, letting out a heavy breath. “You don’t have to explain yourself, it’s okay to admit when you feel unsafe up here. You’ve got every right to. Besides, Dan’s a good fella’ and all, but … well, I watched him get startled by a bumblebee the other day.

Sure, fine, I’ll let you have your break. You look about a month overdue for one.” “The hell is that supposed to mean?” “I’m just sayin’, if we put you next to a raccoon in a hoodie, I’m not sure we could tell the difference.” Finn laughed again, tapping his cigarette butt on an empty cup Dan had left on the desk the day before.

A team of Mass-Observation researchers, experienced in chronicling the effects of air raids, had arrived on Friday afternoon. In their subsequent report they wrote of having found “more open signs of hysteria, terror, neurosis” than they had seen over the prior two months of chronicling air-raid effects. “The overwhelmingly dominant feeling on Friday was the feeling of utter helplessness.” (The italics were theirs.) The observers noted a widespread sense of dislocation and depression. “The dislocation is so total in the town that people feel that the town itself is killed.” In order to help stem the surge of rumors arising from the raid, the BBC invited Tom Harrisson, the twenty-nine-year-old director of Mass-Observation, to do a broadcast on Saturday night, at nine o’clock, during its prime Home Service news slot, to talk about what he had seen in the city. “The strangest sight of all,” Harrisson told his vast audience, “was the Cathedral. At each end the bare frames of the great windows still have a kind of beauty without their glass; but in between them is an incredible chaos of bricks, pillars, girders, memorial tablets.” He spoke of the absolute silence in the city on Friday night as he drove around it in his car, threading his way past bomb craters and mounds of broken glass. He slept in the car that night. “I think this is one of the weirdest experiences of my whole life,” he said, “driving in a lonely, silent desolation and drizzling rain in that great industrial town.

Hoover fed the story to sympathetic reporters—so-called friends of the bureau. One article about the case, which was syndicated by William Randolph Hearst’s company, blared, NEVER TOLD BEFORE! —How the Government with the Most Gigantic Fingerprint System on Earth Fights Crime with Unheard-of Science Refinements; Revealing How Clever Sleuths Ended a Reign of Murder and Terror in the Lonely Hills of the Osage Indian Country, and Then Rounded Up the Nation’s Most Desperate Gang In 1932, the bureau began working with the radio program The Lucky Strike Hour to dramatize its cases. One of the first episodes was based on the murders of the Osage. At Hoover’s request, Agent Burger had even written up fictional scenes, which were shared with the program’s producers. In one of these scenes, Ramsey shows Ernest Burkhart the gun he plans to use to kill Roan, saying, “Look at her, ain’t she a dandy?” The broadcasted radio program concluded, “So another story ends and the moral is identical with that set forth in all the others of this series….[ The criminal] was no match for the Federal Agent of Washington in a battle of wits.” Though Hoover privately commended White and his men for capturing Hale and his gang and gave the agents a slight pay increase—“ a small way at least to recognize their efficiency and application to duty”—he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case. They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology. Plus, Hoover never wanted his men to overshadow him.

The second stage of insurgency, which the CIA calls the incipient conflict stage, is marked by discrete acts of violence. Timothy McVeigh’s attack in Oklahoma City could be viewed as the very earliest attack, in some ways years before its time. The insurgents’ goal is to broadcast their mission to the world, build support, and provoke a government overreaction to their violence, so that more moderate citizens become radicalized and join the movement. The second stage is when the government becomes aware of the groups behind these attacks, but according to the CIA, the violence is often dismissed “as the work of bandits, criminals, or terrorists.” Timothy McVeigh seemed to many Americans a lone wolf actor. But McVeigh and his accomplice, Terry Nichols, were suspected members of the Michigan Militia. In 2012, the number of right-wing terrorist attacks and plots was fourteen; by August 2020, it was sixty-one, a historic high. The open insurgency stage, the final phase, according to the CIA’s report, is characterized by sustained violence as increasingly active extremists launch attacks that involve terrorism and guerrilla warfare, including assassinations and ambushes, as well as hit-and-run raids on police and military units. These groups also tend to use more sophisticated weapons, such as improvised explosive devices, and begin to attack vital infrastructure (such as hospitals, bridges, and schools), rather than just individuals. These attacks also involve a larger number of fighters, some of whom have combat experience. There is often evidence “of insurgent penetration and subversion of the military, police, and intelligence services.” If there is foreign support for the insurgents, this is where it becomes more apparent. In this stage, the extremists are trying to force the population to choose sides, in part by demonstrating to citizens that the government cannot keep them safe or provide basic necessities. The insurgents are trying to prove that they are the ones who should have political power; they are the ones who should rule. The goal is to incite a broader civil war, by denigrating the state and growing support for extreme measures. Where is the United States today? We are a factionalized country on the edge of anocracy that is quickly approaching the open insurgency stage, which means we are closer to civil war than any of us would like to believe.

Catawamteak,” meaning “the great landing,” is what the Abenaki Indians called the early settlement that became Rockland, Maine. Thomaston and Rockland can be bypassed by Route 90, an eight-mile shortcut which I frequently used as a midshipman, but our bus stayed on the main road and stopped to let passengers on and off in both places. At one time Rockland was part of Thomaston, called East Thomaston, but the two towns have long since separated, having very little in common. In the beginning, Rockland developed quickly because of shipbuilding and limestone production. It was, and still is, an important fishing port. Lobsters are the main export and the five-day Maine Lobster Festival is celebrated here annually. The red, three-story brick buildings lining the main street of Rockland, give it the image of an old working town. I have always been impressed by the appearance of these small towns, because to me this is what I had expected Maine to look like. When I first went through the center of Rockland on the bus, I was impressed by the obvious ties the community had with the sea. The fishing and lobster industry was evident by the number of commercial fishing and lobster boats. Rockland was, and still is, the commercial hub of the mid-coastal region of the state. The local radio station WRKD was an important source of local news and weather reports. This was also the radio station that opened each day’s broadcasting with Hal Lone Pine’s song, recorded on Toronto's Arc Records label: “There’s a winding lane on the Coast of Maine that is wound around my heart....” The United States Coast Guard still maintains a base in Rockland, which is reassuring to the families of those who go fishing out on the open waters of Penobscot Bay and the Gulf of Maine. Rockland remains the home of the Farnsworth Art Museum, which has an art gallery displaying paintings by Andrew Wyeth, as well as other New England artists. The Bay Point Hotel that was founded in 1889 had a compelling view of the breakwater and Penobscot Bay. The Victorian style hotel, later known as the Samoset Hotel, had seen better days by 1952 and was closed in 1969. On October 13, 1972, the four-story hotel caught fire in the dining area due to an undetermined cause. Fanned by 20-mile-an-hour north winds, the structure burned to the ground within an hour. However, five years later a new Samoset Resort was founded.

Jack Reacher made his first appearance in print on March 17, 1997—St. Patrick’s Day—when Putnam published Killing Floor in the United States, which was Reacher’s—and my—debut. But I can trace his, and the book’s, genesis backward at least to New Year’s Eve 1988. Back then I worked for a commercial television station in Manchester, England. I was eleven years into a career as a presentation director, which was a little like an air traffic controller for the network airwaves. In February 1988, the UK commercial network had started twenty-four-hour broadcasting. For a year before that, management had been talking about how to man the new expanded commitment. None of us really wanted to work nights. Management didn’t really want to hire extra people. End of story. Stalemate. Impasse. What broke it was the offer of a huge raise. We took it, and by New Year’s Eve we were ten fat and happy months into the new contract. I went to a party, but didn’t feel much like celebrating. Not that I wasn’t content in the short term—I sleep better by day than night, and I like being up and about when the world is quiet and lonely, and for sure I was having a ball with the new salary. But I knew in my bones that management resented the raise, and I knew that the new contract was in fact the beginning of the end. Sooner or later, we would all be fired in revenge. I felt it was only a matter of time. Nobody agreed with me, except one woman. At the party, in a quiet moment, she asked me, “What are you going to do when this is all over?

Fundamentals of Esperanto The grammatical rules of this language can be learned in one sitting. Nouns have no gender & end in -o; the plural terminates in -oj & the accusative, -on Amiko, friend; amikoj, friends; amikon & amikojn, accusative friend & friends. Ma amiko is my friend. A new book appears in Esperanto every week. Radio stations in Europe, the United States, China, Russia & Brazil broadcast in Esperanto, as does Vatican Radio. In 1959, UNESCO declared the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers to be in accord with its mission & granted this body consultative status. The youth branch of the International Federation of Esperanto Speakers, UTA, has offices in 80 different countries & organizes social events where young people curious about the movement may dance to recordings by Esperanto artists, enjoy complimentary soft drinks & take home Esperanto versions of major literary works including the Old Testament & A Midsummer Night’s Dream. William Shatner’s first feature-length vehicle was a horror film shot entirely in Esperanto. Esperanto is among the languages currently sailing into deep space on board the Voyager spacecraft. - Esperanto is an artificial language constructed in 1887 by L. L. Zamenhof, a polish oculist. following a somewhat difficult period in my life. It was twilight & snowing on the railway platform just outside Warsaw where I had missed my connection. A man in a crumpled track suit & dark glasses pushed a cart piled high with ripped & weathered volumes— sex manuals, detective stories, yellowing musical scores & outdated physics textbooks, old copies of Life, new smut, an atlas translated, a grammar, The Mirror, Soviet-bloc comics, a guide to the rivers & mountains, thesauri, inscrutable musical scores & mimeographed physics books, defective stories, obsolete sex manuals— one of which caught my notice (Dr. Esperanto since I had time, I traded my used Leaves of Grass for a copy. I’m afraid I will never be lonely enough. There’s a man from Quebec in my head, a friend to the purple martins. Purple martins are the Cadillac of swallows. All purple martins are dying or dead. Brainscans of grown purple martins suggest these creatures feel the same levels of doubt & bliss as an eight-year-old girl in captivity. While driving home from the brewery one night this man from Quebec heard a radio program about purple martins & the next day he set out to build them a house in his own back yard. I’ve never built anything, let alone a house, not to mention a home for somebody else. Never put in aluminum floors to smooth over the waiting. Never piped sugar water through colored tubes to each empty nest lined with newspaper shredded with strong, tired hands. Never dismantled the entire affair & put it back together again. Still no swallows. I never installed the big light that stays on through the night to keep owls away. Never installed lesser lights, never rested on Sunday with a beer on the deck surveying what I had done & what yet remained to be done, listening to Styx while the neighbor kids ran through my sprinklers. I have never collapsed in abandon. Never prayed. But enough about the purple martins. Every line of the work is a first & a last line & this is the spring of its action. Of course, there’s a journey & inside that journey, an implicit voyage through the underworld. There’s a bridge made of boats; a carp stuffed with flowers; a comic dispute among sweetmeat vendors; a digression on shadows; That’s how we finally learn who the hero was all along. Weary & old, he sits on a rock & watches his friends fly by one by one out of the song, then turns back to the journey they all began long ago, keeping the river to his right.

Trusting one’s own perceptions is a lonely lot; believing one’s own eyes and being vocal about it is dangerous. Believing the propaganda—or, rather, accepting the propaganda as one’s reality—carries the promise of a less anxious existence, in harmony with the majority of one’s fellow citizens. The path to peace of mind lies in giving one’s mind over to the regime. Bizarrely, the experience of living in the United States during the Trump presidency reproduces this dilemma. Being an engaged citizen of Trump’s America means living in a constant state of cognitive tension. One cannot put the president and his lies out of one’s mind, because he is the president. Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality. In effect, it means that the two realities—Trumpian and fact-based—come to exist side by side, on equal ground. The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety.

Last night, I had a dream that the forest split in two.

My name is Evelyn McKinnon, and I’m the newest host of 104.6 FM. There are plenty of things around here that shouldn’t exist, and this radio station is one of them.

There was that familiar aroma in the air of an incoming September storm – the kind that chills you deep down to your bones.

The forest that surrounds Pinehaven is a border between our own world and one that is vicious and feral.

They all die on that mountain. Every single one.

Although it was summer, I felt a chill in the air like a tickling wind, just cold enough to raise goosebumps on my skin. That breeze made the leaves rustle and the grass blow in a new direction. My ears itched as I heard the creak of the heavy wooden stakes that held up our tower—it sounded like a weak old animal, groaning in pain as it settled.

When I got to the edge of the clearing, the kid ran. He was laughing like it was some sort of game. He couldn’t have been more than six or seven years old, but I never saw his face up close. That’s when he got down on all fours and started to sprint like an animal. I froze. My blood ran cold as he slipped into the darkness, running like a beast while giggling and clicking his tongue. Jesus Christ, the way he moved was so unnatural, too quick for a human child but too awkward to be an animal. The sound of his laughter turned strange. It was like something trying to mimic the giggle of a child, but only barely getting it right.

I wish I could explain why things were like this, why they had always been like this. Unfortunately, solving mysteries of the unknown was a bit above my pay grade. The most I could do was keep people out of the woods, keep a gun pointed at the tree line, and occasionally join the rangers on ‘forest duty’.

The hair on the back of my neck stood on end. I felt a chill run up my arms as a wheeze echoed through the tunnels. Slowly, the wet slap of bare feet began to stagger toward us, the sound bouncing off the walls. I recognized that voice …

Where he would have a naked human form, the forest had sought to replace his flesh with vines, thorns, and a gaping hole full of pale, thin, tiny hands. Dear God. They were crying. They were flailing as if trying to escape.

I promise you, every insurgent, freedom fighter, and stray gunman in Iraq who we arrested knew the ropes, knew that the way out was to announce he had been tortured by the Americans, ill treated, or prevented from reading the Koran or eating his breakfast or watching the television. They all knew al-Jazeera, the Arab broadcasters, would pick it up, and it would be relayed to the U.S.A., where the liberal media would joyfully accuse all of us of being murderers or barbarians or something. Those terrorist organizations laugh at the U.S. media, and they know exactly how to use the system against us.

On his opener, he won over the studio audience almost to the point of receiving an ovation at the broadcast’s close. Cast members rooted for him wholeheartedly, Frank Pittman gave deftness to direction, and Waterman’s own intrinsic thespian integrity contributed to an initial performance that was greeted with enthusiasm.” The same review panned Honest Harold as derivative, unexciting, and, in the end, “just another show.” It would fail in its lone season to develop any appreciative audience, while Gildersleeve under Waterman did a slow, inevitable fade and expired in 1957, at the advanced age of 16. Though

It was during the summer of 1952 when I first came through the center of Rockland on the bus, “I was impressed by the obvious ties the community had with the sea. The fishing and lobster industry was evident by the number of commercial fishing and lobster boats. Rockland was, and still is, the commercial hub of the mid-coastal region of the state.” The local radio station WRKD was an important source of local news and weather reports. This was also the radio station that opened each day’s broadcasting with Hal Lone Pine’s song, recorded on Toronto's Arc Records label: “There’s a winding lane on the Coast of Maine that is wound around my heart....” The United States Coast Guard still maintains a base in Rockland, which is reassuring to the families of those who go fishing out on the open waters of Penobscot Bay and the Gulf of Maine. Rockland remains the home of the Farnsworth Art Museum, which has an art gallery displaying paintings by Andrew Wyeth, as well as other New England artists.

When I stood out there, I felt a sense of … immense insignificance. The world around me felt so big and I felt small, suffocating somewhere in the middle of all that vast and limitless space. It all just went on forever: the mountains, the trees, the clouds. It was the first time in a week that I had felt the wind on my face, but it didn’t feel like freedom to me. It felt like a violation. I felt seen, like a newborn exposed to the world, caught in the eyes of something much bigger than me. This air tasted hopeless.