Jack Socha INFO!

Still under construction, bear with me!

This is not going to be a heavy political thing, it is not going to be exceptionally partisan. Basically, it's going to be a kind of overview analysis, isn't that a great term? Not making new news, taking a step back and looking at something that was already going on.


One of my radio heroes, and there's not too many of them, is Gene Sheperd, a guy who would broadcast from probably the late 50s to the early 70s. I listened to him at a very tender age, I was like a sophomore or junior in high school. And he really did shape my idea of what talking type radio should be about.

He had the ability to be in the middle of something that was tumultuous. And while the thing was actually happening, he could just step back a few feet and get kind of a fly on the wall perspective as to what was going on and talk about it. And I have not really run across anybody who has done that quite as well.

It's one thing to go back historically and go back 25 years ago, but to do it in the midst of what's going on and to say, let me show you what is kind of happening here. And of course, Gene Sheperd's big thing was he liked to point out absurdities. So we'll talk about that.

An example of absurdity I can give you right now from where I'm living, Minnesota, was that several years ago, there was a candidate for governor who was so completely boring that the populace of Minnesota, and which, as you know, from the recent things with the ice raids in Minneapolis, they can be pretty tense type people. But this guy was so boring that instead they elected a former professional wrestler to be governor. Yeah.

He had no qualifications to be governor, but he had been a professional wrestler. These are the guys who fake wrestle, and when I say fake wrestle, it's still incredibly physical. Now do not try this stuff at home that you see them do.

These guys are kind of like the stunt guys in movies. They are highly trained because if not, they can get seriously hurt. But this guy was a wrestler.

And here he's campaigning, and he's making statements. "I think people who join organized religions are weak minded." Now whether you agree with that or disagree with that is not the point.

The point is, if you're running for office, you don't make statements like that because sooner or later you're going to really insult somebody who probably isn't going to vote for you. But despite all that, he still became governor. Well, I guess the world didn't fall apart in Minnesota that I recall.

And in all fairness to Jesse Ventura, who was, by the way, a former Navy SEAL, he also understood that when it came to government, if he didn't really understand all the things that were going on, he better darn well get the absolute best people around him to help him make decisions. This is not always what happens when some people get into high places in government. So this is the kind of overview I want to talk to you a little bit about.

These are totally fact free times. Don't expect analysis and don't expect careful discussion in the last commercial type ads that are out there.

And of course, beware also if they call it a public service announcement, as we have seen. However, they are going to go for the throat. They are going to leave blanks where your fears will fill in.

Did you see the graphic that I found to put up for this show? It is classic. Early 1950s, the Red Scare was going on. And this ad, this thing, wherever it appeared, plays on fears perfectly because it's very, very nonspecific.

It shows this evil looking red guy with a hammer and sickle on his helmet. And you can see the point of a bayonet behind him. And he's injecting red something into the schoolhouse.

What is he going to taint our American children with? You know what he's going to do. You know. You know exactly the kind of stuff he's going to do.

They, of course, leave this blank for your fears and your prejudices and your misinformation to figure out what it is that you know. It is a perfect ad. Today, everything is much cooler with AI than with put together images.

But it's the same darn thing. You know, it's going to be, you know what's going to happen when they win. And then leave that, you know, to be your own personal prejudices, your fears, and all kinds of things like that.

It's really quite amazing. So that's why I put it on the cover. Frank Zappa was more than a weird looking guy who recorded albums of music that were seldom played on mainstream commercial radio.

He also composed classical music. And he was not the drug-using hippie that most expected him to be based on his experience and his antics. He actually once said, I don't like drugs, I don't use drugs, and I don't like being around people who are on drugs.

I suspect he felt that spending a lot of time around people who were high or being high yourself dampens your creativity. But like Jane Shepard and others, he also wanted people to question what they saw and also what they were told and what they believed. He said provocatively, everything you know is wrong.

And let me go back again to this week's graphic so you see a little bit how historically this all fits in. World War II was over. The Russians rebuilding their country were certainly not above trying to steal product designs from other countries, copies of German cameras, even copies of electric razors, and famously plans for our atomic weapons.

And they did their best to show an alleged fast-improving social situation that was actually more hype than it was reality. Look up the word Potemkin Village if you want to understand what I'm talking about. In the USA, some factions used the idea of the communist threat to advance their agendas.

There were still plenty who were still not happy with the FDR's New Deal and the idea of Social Security and other benefits for workers. So they tried real hard also to mix in the words communism with the words socialism. That problem confuses people today.

Movies, and especially television shows, were required to exhibit American values. And some dramas created far-fetched plots about commie spies living among us. When I was a little kid, I saw an episode of some absurd TV show where these communist infiltrators, supposedly your neighbors, were each given a vacuum cleaner that could be quickly adapted to launch a small ground-to-air missile to shoot down aircraft.

The only reason this stuck with me for years and years and years is that the same model vacuum was one my mother owned, and I really don't think she was a spy. It really is absolutely amazing how much opinion, as opposed to fact, we get from TV and movies. I did a radio interview with a retiring rabbi, and he lamented that a lot of his Jewish flock's understanding of their own beliefs came from watching the movie The Ten Commandments, and not much else.

And now don't go laughing, you Christians out there. How many of you think, honestly, that the three wise men got over to the manger within a matter of a day or two after Christ was born? Like they took some kind of really, really fast Uber, check your fax, and in a totally different area? I seriously never believed in the fantastically silly James Bond movies. I did think that after I went to army intelligence school, and no jokes please, being assigned to a top-secret operation in the Pentagon would be a bit more exciting, with things like maps of the world with little lights that lit up, things like that.

But it was actually a bunch of mostly guys at typewriters, and even someone duplicating documents on a printing press. Now granted, the material we handled was some pretty exciting stuff, but our job was simply to get it from point A to point B and do it really quick. Everything you know is wrong.

And at the time of this recording, just to make sure we all know where we are now, opposing factions are embroiled in a deadly serious idea of how this country should be run. Vast amounts of money is being spent on both sides, because sooner or later, vast amounts of people on one of those sides are going to lose power and, of course, fortunes. All depends on the outcome.

Currently, about 10 billionaires own much of American media. I'm talking about all kinds of audio, video, streaming, social media, movies, TV networks. This is relatively new and not healthy.

It's not healthy because some say the exchange of ideas, the discourse that has marked the American experiment is endangered, stifling open news coverage, which is no longer an abstraction that you read in some futuristic book. Some Americans have no problem with this. Others do.

Some people say the great span of those opinions has to do with answering the question, what's the difference between ignorance and indifference? I don't know and I don't care. Quite a few people simply don't notice or don't care. I guess it's a question of everything everybody else knows is wrong.

But it gets more complicated. In recent years, fully staged reality TV shows such as The Apprentice gave millions of people the false impression that Donald Trump was a very savvy business person, which he clearly is not. Decades before that, Bill Clinton impressed a whole bunch of people on The Tonight Show because he could play a jazz saxophone, clearly a presidential caliber skill.

Americans also don't like to admit it, but there have always been powerful people with their own interests calling the shots, while many of the rest of us seldom have much say. But the funny thing is, we do have a say. And it is the kind of power that causes the rich and powerful to lose sleep.

We can vote. We are given a sheet of paper and a pen and we make little marks that create or destroy ambitions and careers. We can celebrate them by voting for them.

Or we can throw the bums out. That is why one side or another may try every trick in the book to sway your vote or even try to prevent you from voting. The so-called Department of Dirty Tricks is alive and well.

Don't give up your power. Get genuine information about the people you can vote in or out and you go ahead and do it. Do that even if it is not convenient and perhaps especially so if it is inconvenient.

Vote and the choice is yours. Stay home and the choice is theirs. This is something that has been important even since the times of the end of World War II.

During Memorial Day, I play portions of an audio broadcast that was the most listened to in America. It was called On a Note of Triumph and it was about how finally the Nazis had surrendered. And you can go back to the previous podcast until you find it and it's really an amazing piece of work.

But at the very end, they have the character of the soldier, the common guy, the enlisted guy. He's lying in his bunk and he's waiting to go home. And then he says, are we going to have to do this again? Is it really over? And then the announcer comes on and this is what you hear.

Soldier, when the sweet morning comes and you're mustered out, when you get paid off and there's a ticket in your wallet that guarantees delivery to street and number and the faces that you've dreamed about in foxholes, you must not forget to take along your homework in the barracks bag. There's no discharge in the war. You're on probation only.

You and the faces you've dreamed about and all the rest of us. Henceforward, we must do a little civil thinking every day and not pass up the front page for the sports page as we did before. Vigilance pays interest and compounds into peace.

A little civil thinking every day. That is the homework. Yes, shooting your mouth off against a bad appointment and the shoddy referendum, storming the redoubts of the local shickle groover, voting in season and demanding of your representative that he be representative.

You can win a war today and lose a piece tomorrow, win in the field and lose in the forum. Peace has a mind of its own and doesn't follow victory around. You can make war quickly, but you make peace slowly.

Listen, to win is great, to learn from winning greater, but to put the lessons learned from winning hard to work, that is the neatest trick of all. The neatest trick of all, not passing over the front page for the sports page. Lessons from as far back as 1945 as we head into a midterm election that will have historic proportions today.

 

September 27, 2026