Ok, I'll admit it. I'm a radio junkie. I have been a radio-lover since the 1950s, hooked for life by the first radio I can remember: a 1938 Zenith console which lived in an alcove in the house in which I grew up. To me it was a box of wonders. A flying carpet. In addition to a regular AM band, it also had multiple long-wave bands, each one designated by a faraway and exotic place-name: Moscow, Jakarta, Paris, Havana, London, Lisbon.
From about the time I was 8 years old, I was a sort of latchkey kid. And upon arriving home to the empty house, I would grab a glass of milk and then I'd park myself in front of the Zenith. Fiddling with the dial, I would catch snatches of foreign languages on the long-wave bands until the time would come to tune in to the radio version of The Guiding Light, which came on each day just before my parents arrived home from work. This peek into the adult world in Selby Flats, California was both exhilarating and terrifying. That world, too, was a foreign country.
Even after the first television appeared in our house, I continued to be drawn to the radio. I would have completely agreed with the child who, when asked which she liked better, radio or television, answered, "Radio, because the pictures are better."
But before long, my radio-life would be transformed, because in 1957 I was given my first transistor radio, a Raytheon 8-TR-1. For the first time I could carry my radio-world around with me and, much more importantly, I could listen to the radio in bed, which has been unfailing my habit for nearly 6 decades now.
At every significant historical moment, it has been the radio that has brought me the news: the death of John F. Kennedy, routed from the office radio through the intercom system into my junior high school classroom; the death of Bobby Kennedy while driving from Massachusetts to Detroit; the release of Nelson Mandela from Robben Island prison broadcast by the BBC to my table radio in Cambridge, England; the attack on the World Trade Center, heard through a sleepy haze first thing in the morning on the small Sony radio that lived under my bed-pillow in Fort Worth, Texas. And as I write this, National Public Radio is being streamed through my computer, and I am hearing about run-off elections, roller derby tournaments, newly-published novels, and monks in Tibet. As it always has been for me, the radio is a box of wonders, even when the box has become something else entirely.
Very few of us, I think, have much understanding of how the essential devices in our lives actually work, and it is no different for me with radio. My friend Howard Stone, an ardent collector of old radios and student of radio technology (http://www.stonevintageradio.com), seems to comprehend it all thoroughly, and has tried to explain it to me several times. Howard especially knows all about Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), the inventor and engineer who worked tirelessly on long-distance radio transmission. For this work, Marconi was awarded the Noble Prize in 1909 (with Ferdinand Braun), "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy."
With all of this to his credit, Marconi should be a genuine hero to me, given the impact of his work on the past 60 years of my daily life. But sadly, he presents something of a problem: it seems that the great man was a bit of a villian. He was active in the Italian Fascist movement and a member of its Grand Council (Mussolini was the best man at his wedding), he supported Italy's invasion of Ethiopia (1935-1936) during which the Italians bombed Red Cross field hospitals and used poison gas on civilians. (For more on Marconi the Fascist, see Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy [Cornell, 1997]).
Marconi was also an ardent anti-Semite who blocked Jewish applicants from joining the Royal Academy of Italy, and was involved in a series of fairly shady business ventures. Lest we think that this was just a matter of intellectual 'compartmentalization,' Marconi's radio work and his politics were clearly and inextricably linked: he often argued that the fervor with which one pursued the scientific enterprise should have the same intensity with which one pursued the Fascist enterprise.
So what do we do with our tarnished heroes? Of course this is not only our problem: it was a problem for the Greek tragedians, for those whose stories underlay all the world's Sacred Scriptures, for Shakespeare, for Cervantes, for Dickens, and it continues to be a problem for all the truly great creators of complex characters in literature, on stage, and on film and television. (Doc Martin, House, and Doctor Who all come to mind.) Much as we would like it to be different, the perfect hero is just not a very interesting hero.
But is there a tipping point? Is there a point at which our hero causes so much harm to others that any positive accomplishment is rendered null and void? When is the wounded-healer too wounded to heal? When is the tarnished hero too tarnished to shine?
Of course these are the questions that shape our lives, and sorting them out is our life's work. Conflict, ambiguity, uncertainty are necessary to that grown-up world that I glimpsed as a child in The Guiding Light. Our grown-up world is a world where the good characters are good (most but not all of the time) and the bad characters are bad (most but not all of the time), and the task of the whole and sane person is to negotiate all of this intelligently and fairly. Because to fail in this task puts so much at risk: our personal relationships, our politics, our interfaith and international relations, the future well-being of our planet.
So perhaps we must look upon Marconi as the "patron saint" of the Modern World: so many good things for which we must be ever-grateful, and so many dreadful things which we justly condemn. In himself, Marconi represents the modern predicament. And to find a way of allowing complexity and ambiguity to be what it is, without either simplifying it out of existence on the one hand, or collapsing it into a one-dimensional cartoon on the other, is the main challenge of being alive in the 21st century.
So: Salute, Marconi! (And shame on you.)
But before long, my radio-life would be transformed, because in 1957 I was given my first transistor radio, a Raytheon 8-TR-1. For the first time I could carry my radio-world around with me and, much more importantly, I could listen to the radio in bed, which has been unfailing my habit for nearly 6 decades now.
At every significant historical moment, it has been the radio that has brought me the news: the death of John F. Kennedy, routed from the office radio through the intercom system into my junior high school classroom; the death of Bobby Kennedy while driving from Massachusetts to Detroit; the release of Nelson Mandela from Robben Island prison broadcast by the BBC to my table radio in Cambridge, England; the attack on the World Trade Center, heard through a sleepy haze first thing in the morning on the small Sony radio that lived under my bed-pillow in Fort Worth, Texas. And as I write this, National Public Radio is being streamed through my computer, and I am hearing about run-off elections, roller derby tournaments, newly-published novels, and monks in Tibet. As it always has been for me, the radio is a box of wonders, even when the box has become something else entirely.Very few of us, I think, have much understanding of how the essential devices in our lives actually work, and it is no different for me with radio. My friend Howard Stone, an ardent collector of old radios and student of radio technology (http://www.stonevintageradio.com), seems to comprehend it all thoroughly, and has tried to explain it to me several times. Howard especially knows all about Guglielmo Marconi (1874-1937), the inventor and engineer who worked tirelessly on long-distance radio transmission. For this work, Marconi was awarded the Noble Prize in 1909 (with Ferdinand Braun), "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy."
It was Marconi who developed the system of antennas and receivers that were the underpinnings of wireless radio transmissions, who sent the first ever wireless message across the Atlantic Ocean, who developed radio systems for ships at sea, making travel by ship a much safer prospect that it had ever been, and it was Marconi who broadcast the first radio entertainment program.
Marconi was also an ardent anti-Semite who blocked Jewish applicants from joining the Royal Academy of Italy, and was involved in a series of fairly shady business ventures. Lest we think that this was just a matter of intellectual 'compartmentalization,' Marconi's radio work and his politics were clearly and inextricably linked: he often argued that the fervor with which one pursued the scientific enterprise should have the same intensity with which one pursued the Fascist enterprise.
But is there a tipping point? Is there a point at which our hero causes so much harm to others that any positive accomplishment is rendered null and void? When is the wounded-healer too wounded to heal? When is the tarnished hero too tarnished to shine?
Of course these are the questions that shape our lives, and sorting them out is our life's work. Conflict, ambiguity, uncertainty are necessary to that grown-up world that I glimpsed as a child in The Guiding Light. Our grown-up world is a world where the good characters are good (most but not all of the time) and the bad characters are bad (most but not all of the time), and the task of the whole and sane person is to negotiate all of this intelligently and fairly. Because to fail in this task puts so much at risk: our personal relationships, our politics, our interfaith and international relations, the future well-being of our planet.
So perhaps we must look upon Marconi as the "patron saint" of the Modern World: so many good things for which we must be ever-grateful, and so many dreadful things which we justly condemn. In himself, Marconi represents the modern predicament. And to find a way of allowing complexity and ambiguity to be what it is, without either simplifying it out of existence on the one hand, or collapsing it into a one-dimensional cartoon on the other, is the main challenge of being alive in the 21st century.
So: Salute, Marconi! (And shame on you.)
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