NOTE: Jim Cavener, of Asheville NC and the world, has been a friend, reader & correspondent for — yikes! — almost 50 years. And he’s been an NPR instigator/fan for even longer. So when he saw my post about the network’s prospects after the fed money cuts, he soon weighed in with his usual panache.

The response felt too interesting to leave on the comment page, and the mood is Dog Days kick-back. So with his agreement, I have turned it into a conversation post, with my parts in bold red.

So Jim, you go first:

I was already addicted to Saturday night’s Prairie Home Companion (Garrison Keillor) and “All Things Considered”. “Morning Edition” didn’t come along until the late 1970s… The first NPR news director — who hired Susan Stamberg and Bob Edwards — was Clive Mathews, later retired in Asheville where his son and family lived.

CHUCK: One of my few regrets (if regret it is) post-NPR is that I never got around to trying Mama Stamberg’s famous cranberry relish. Seemed like every time Susan Stamberg described it, I’d think, “l like cranberry sauce, so I should really whip up a small test batch of that concoction. Sure.” And then that resolve, like so much else, would quickly drift away in the crosscurrents of the holiday season. . . .

JIM: Our local (regional!) “Mountain Air Network” has become “Blue Ridge Public Radio” and our original ‘call letters’ of WUNF (belonging to UNCA — UNC-Asheville) was changed to WCQS (88.1; now BPR Classic; frequency has remained the same) when we broke from UNCA and moved to 73 & 75 Broadway in Asheville.
I appreciate the hour of BBC each week-day morn (9:00 a.m.) and a bit of it late at night for global perspective.

Fellow Quaker and long-time friend/Friend Chuck Fager has a point in his charge of NPR being ‘D.C. – Centric” and that charge was proven moments ago (on August 2) on Scott Simon’s ‘Weekend Edition” with a long feature of Trump’s attacks on The Smithsonian Institution.

Okay. That’s very serious and worthy issue to report. Scott Simon of NPR was a long-time Quaker both in Chicago and in Washington.

AND, DC is a pretty important part of our nation (and the world). Both Chuck and I have lived in and been engaged in DC over the decades. He was a staffer for Congressman Pete McCloskey a moderate and effective California Republican from San Mateo Country.

Pete had defeated Mrs. Charles Black (onetime child movie star Shirley Temple) in a 1967 special election, and as a Marine Veteran, he was the first Republican — even before George Romney — who said we shouldn’t be in Vietnam and must get out… and he was listened to (but we didn’t leave!).
I’m old enough to remember when you could be both honorable and Republican….

CHUCK: A “moderate and effective Republican.” And “honorable.” Few of the younger “progressive” whippersnappers now believe that such a political species ever existed, and I don’t blame them. But while always rare, they did — thee and me can bear witness.

And if someday in the rubble of D.C., a statue is erected in their memory, Pete’s visage will be among at least the semi-finalists (along with Mark Hatfield, Clifford Case and a few others) to be portrayed on it.

JIM: Yeah, when I say I love DC, the Washington Post (until Jeff Bezos’ recent refusal to endorse Harris and his demand that the WashPost make a profit!) and I could live there again, I get the charge that DC is a single issue city, or a company town, but THAT SINGLE ISSUE IS NOT ONLY NATIONALLY, BUT GLOBALLY IMPORTANT.

CHUCK: Yeah, some of what happens in DC matters. But there’s not enough sleazy bitcoin rattling through the oval office, or gold-tinted sneakers padding thru the West Wing hallways to persuade me to return to D.C. 

After I started work for Pete in 1979, (it was sort of by accident, but that’s another story), one of the first things I learned was that it took the nonstop efforts of several hundred media folks (now several thousand, along with a couple million more in-home online pundits) to keep afloat the idea that what Congress does is nonstop exciting and dramatic.

It ain’t. To paraphrase the great baseball philosopher Yogi Berra, what goes on in Congress is 90% boring, and the other half is performative piffle (or expletives to that effect.)

And that’s when it was (relatively speaking) honest, which is to say members were more often sent to jail. (My boss Pete, by the way, was clean as a whistle.) Now, I can hardly mention the Hill without resorting to unspeakable banned profanities such as “diversity” (lack of), [rampant in]equity,” or the new religion of masked “[ex]clusion.” Or worse: [totally ignored] “due process.”

But don’t let me get started; back to you J. C. . . .

JIM: The Cultural richness of DC makes it rank with NYC, Paris, Vienna and Los Angeles (all of which I have lived in) what with the many Smithsonian sites, the Corcoran, Dumbarton Oaks, Marjorie Merriweather Post’s home/museum, the Dupont Circle museums (Anderson House and The Phillips), and all the national Embassies with fine programs for the public.

CHUCK: Yeah, if you can find parking, have no more than one very even-tempered kid, a pretty generous budget, or contacts with the stars. As another great sage, the late lamented Sly Stone put it, “Different strokes . . .”

But hey, Jim — remember the time — early ‘80s — you offered me & the missus a pair of tickets to see John Denver in the coliseum? (Folksy John was hardly thy cup of tea, and only partly mine; but he was then flying high and the tickets, which somebody gifted you, were way beyond my reach. But we went, and by golly and thank-god-he-was-a-country-boy because he put on a mighty fine toe-tapping show. Thanks again!)

JIM: THUS, I appreciate the many “Inside the Beltway” features. But also welcome the reports for Nowhere Nebraska or New Mexico. Not one or the other but BOTH and more…

CHUCK: This, friend, is but one specimen of a continuing pandemic called “Potomac Fever.” It’s a real malady that can consume its victims like TB. I saw it from the inside: the unending shuffle of goggle-eyed, once-functional persons, shuffling through members’ offices, begging to land a job in that magical realm, “The Hill.” They even came from Pete’s district, 3000 miles away.

But it was worst for the Members from the six states within a couple hours’ drive: in these late pre-internet days, some beleaguered interns toiled for hours clipping paragraph excerpts from magically-renewing stacks of resumes. Then, pasted onto new stacks, they were copied, stapled at the corner and circulated endlessly among all the Hill offices, where they were carefully ignored, and only a few recycled. Our tax dollars at work.

Somehow I had mutated a gene and had antibodies to this virus; as to my two year stint, most of it is a study in boredom. Pete was getting bored with it too, and soon he signed up for the only real “vaccine,” namely getting the hell outta Dodge. He headed back home to raise organic almonds and local political hell, which he did til the ripe age of 96. Gives me at 82 something to aspire to.

JIM: Yes, NPR and much of ‘the media’ are liberal and the enemy of the current administration — because well educated and informed journalists know fascism when we see it, and we have too much of it these days. And more to come, alas…

CHUCK: Amen to this last, alas. La lutta continua.

JIM: My informants on the staffs of WCQS and PBS-NC tell me that the loss of the small percent of the funds they get from the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (formerly Sharon Percy Rockefellers’s domain) will not put them out of business as the response from the general listening/watching public will replace those funds in part, and they will have a leaner staff and programming budget, but WILL survive. Whew….

CHUCK: Like I said in the OP, with that and more commercials, they’ll get through.

JIM: Chuck makes many good points, but we disagree in that I DO CARE IF THE CORPORATION [for Public Broadcasting] SHOULD BE SMOTHERED WITH RESTRICTIONS OR LACK OF FUNDS.

CHUCK: Actually, I didn’t even mention the CPB, but any debate over that seems to have been rendered moot by CPB’s weekend announcement of a winding down with no further ado. If CPB is replaced by an ad sales operation with hustle, it shouldn’t be a big loss.

And besides, there ought to be a long-term upside to losing the feds’ money: much more freedom from Big Brother’s executive orders. Now you can flip off his diktats the way he sneers at federal court orders — but your defiance will even be constitutional (well, as long as the First Amendment lasts. . . .)

JIM: I’d certainly not oppose moving NPR headquarters to Asheville Ior any part of North Carolina. The current NPR broadcasting ‘palace’ at 1111 North Capitol, NE in DC is pretty palatial, thanx to Joan Kroc (McDonald’s builder’s fortune from in La Jolla, California, formerly Chicago, ‘burbs). McDonald’s was started by the McDonald brothers on “E” street in San Bernardino, California, the county I was born and raised in). Ray Kroc bought it from the McDonald brothers and built it into the massive fortune. His widow rewarded KPBS in San Diego and NPR in DC with mega-millions of dollars some years ago. Good for Joan Kroc.

CHUCK: Pass me some fresh hot fries, and your new bumpersticker for the MOVE NPR TO ASHEVILLE campaign — Bro, I am all in for that.