23 December 2002

London Calling

Tomorow is Christmas Eve. I don't know how this happened. Last time I looked up it was still in the teens, still time to get to the Post Office, still time to get the list accomplished and now it is the the penultimate day, either the last gifts are bought or the Holiday comes crashing down, ready or not. I suppose I can put it off another day, and I bet the malls are going to do a brisk business tomorrow. It will be a race against nightfall.

It is the second shortest day of the year. The darkest was Saturday, when the sun diappeared down the gash of Route 50 before five o'clock, the darkness gathering in swiftly. I wonder if the future will ascribe any particular significance to the relationship between Route 50's eight concrete lanes and the winter solstice the way they do at Sontehenge? It is certainly true that many worship out there, morning and night, or at least invoke the Diety. This morning Emilio San Pedro of the melofluous tones is sitting in for the lovely Vicky Barker. He opens up the BBC World Service after three bars of music with the words "It's ten hundred hours. This is the BBC World Service."

There is some interesting stuff flowing through the ether this morning. This is the birthday week of the BBC, seventy years of coverage of wonder and carnage. There is a BBC correspondent roaming around africa, just as the Socotra Bureau would have dispatched a correspondent last week, if the Bureau had a headquarters, that is, and eager young correspondents to send out to take the temperature of the world, and stringers in Zambia and Bhutan the way the BBC does.

When they cut away to National Publioc Radio International Carl Castle can only talk about the expected elevation of Doctor-Sentor Bill Frith to the Majorioty Leader job in teh Senate. He describes a brooding Trent Lott on his plantation down in Mississippi, a wounded man, who believes that his liberal enemies have laid him low. I prefer the news from the wide world, and when Emlio returns we get the view from London. It is ominious and strangely comforting at the same time.

There is a report about the steady drumbeat of war that now looks inexorable to the observers at Bush House, the headquarters of the British Brioadcasting. An essay on the opening of the Kingdom of Bhutan, high in the Himalayas. And a retrospsective on the punk band The Clash, one of whose members passed away yesterday at the ripe age of 50 from a heart attack.

Their most famous song was "London Calling," a pulsing, driving paean of praise in support of world youth revolution and the overthrow of the old order. They appropriated the phrase from the lexicon of the BBC, which had used the phrase through the early days of short-wave radio tramission across the globe. "This is London calling, come in Rangoon....."

The words still mean something in the imagination to all the aging boomers who listened to the radio in the middle of the last century. I remember the introduction of the first transitor radios, a miracle of modernity. The radio then still had static, the solar wind bouncing of the ionosphere, and a little tinny from a small speaker, words from the short-meter bands "This is London Calling...." to the world.

Emilio calls from London to tell me that the BBC is still there at Bush House and The Clash is fading away. They thought it was only fair to note it in passing.