Saying goodbye to office colleagues yesterday evening, I climbed into my car and turned the key. The radio, left on from my drive to and from lunch, started to play. Roger Hedgecock on.

Hedgecock? I looked at the dashboard clock - it was what it should have been, a little bit before 5 o’clock. We’d all left a little early on account of it being Friday. So - why Hedgecock?

Roger Hedgecock is the former mayor of San Diego and host of a West Coast radio show. He’s Rush Limbaugh’s understudy, the most frequent fill-in for when Limbaugh is on vacation or at a doctor’s appointment - in fact, Hedgecock had taken the helm just a couple of days ago. But not today. The local AM station, WTAM, plays Rush from noon to three. It’s also the carrier of Cleveland Indians game coverage. Sometimes - too often, I say - the Indians play afternoon games and WTAM bumps Rush for baseball. They replay his show later - at night. Not during another show, certainly not that of local screed-jay Mike Trivisonno, who airs right after Rush.

I’ve never been much of a fan of old Triv: his repertoire usually leaves me with a vacant stare. You see, living your entire life in a suburb on the far edge of Greater Cleveland insulates a man from most of the city’s culture and events. Old neighborhoods, the club scene in the flats, the Rich East Side and the Far East Side; they usually don’t ring a bell. Cleveland’s politics, owned by Democrats for decades, are as familiar to me as Timbuktu’s. (Our Congressional district reelected Dennis Kucinich by a margin of four to one last year, can you blame me?)

Then there’s sporting. Browns? They almost went to the Super Bowl in, oh, 1987 but John Elway’s Broncos managed to ensure that Denver could be destroyed in post-AFC Championship celebration riots instead. Indians? They put together a dream team in 1994, made it to the World Series in 1997 and lost to the Marlins. I watched the limp final game - I’m certain the numb anticlimax affected the team as fatally as the fans. It’s like reading The Natural after watching the movie and discovering that Robert Redford’s literary counterpart strikes out; yes, dear, it ruins your day. In 2001, Mephistopheles returned and the Tribe went back to living on the standings’ ground floor. Now, I’m always pleased by either team’s occasional success - but you won’t catch me following them. It usually takes me a few seconds to recognize a mascot idol sitting on someone’s front porch. Ah, yes. The sports teams.

And that’s all Triv’s domain - Cleveland sports, living, politics, miscellany. The man himself has got a face only a mother could love; but then his paycheck is from radio broadcasting, not half-naked catwalk modeling. Even if he weren’t a hopeless chain-smoker, the guy has a voice that was microphone-ready by age twelve. He’s full of vinegar and the other famous, acidic liquid; but don’t call him “obnoxious.” Call him...“bombastic.” Triv’s humor is self-deprecative and usually only mildly offensive; his co-host and regular guests round out an entertaining cult show for Clevelanders.

The operative word above is “usually.” I’d never heard of Mike Trivisonno before I came back home from college - remember what I said about unfamiliarity. One day, I’d left him on after Rush’s show had ended, and it was only a few minutes before I overheard some of Triv’s choice remarks: the topic was guns, the specifics of which I’ll never know. But when the phrase “gun nuts” came out of the kitchen counter radio’s speaker, it took only a stomp from across the room for me to shut old Triv off and resolve to give the fellow a pretty wide berth.

As with yesterday, I’ll occasionally catch a second or two of Trivisonno’s show, revving up the car to drive home, before I stick in a CD. Not long after September 11th, I had the misfortune of listening to and continuing to listen to one of the least-made-for-professional-radio-broadcasting ramblings in all of amplitude modulation’s history. It was the picture of a man who should have taken a day or two off - a bona fide meltdown for thousands of open-mouthed listeners. Triv swerved like a drunk on a slalom course, with a “Senator’s Son” here and a “They attacked civilians for what our government did” there. He didn’t sound like he meant what he was saying but true enough, there he was, hosting a mass-media event and bloody well saying it all. I kept the radio on long enough to hear a couple of callers so irate they must have singed Triv’s earphones - before slamming it off.

A minor brouhaha bubbled up from the episode. People called for Trivisonno’s release from the station. Apologies were made, Triv and the station, implicit and explicit. Triv tucked his tail and bit his lip, and for a few months afterward dealt with tense listeners easily put over the edge by his occasional goof-off antic.

I still don’t listen to the man regularly, but it’s to be sure that Triv hasn’t run his mouth off a cliff since.

As I pulled out of the office parking lot, destination apartment, Roger Hedgecock pressed on. He was reading something - a news report? No, it was too lively and illustrative. An opinion column? It was about Iraq. And it was glowing in idealism - it couldn’t have been a news report, then.

When Roger was done, Mike Trivisonno came on. I had been listening to Roger Hedgecock on the Rush Limbaugh show from two days prior, reading a letter bursting with pride and optimism from Navy Seabee Senior Chief Art Messer, stationed with the 22nd Naval Construction Regiment in southern Iraq. Why was Triv playing it? Word of mouth about the press painting every report from the country shroud-black had found its way to Cleveland’s favorite blue-collar, cynic jock. And the idea stuck in his head. “You should have listened to this the other day,” Triv beamed, “it was some classic radio.” Letters like these, he went on, even if slight exaggerations, balance persistently negative coverage from traditional news sources.

There ought to be a saying: When Cleveland knows about something, the secret’s out. Thousands of listeners - the same people who called and wrote in droves responding to Triv’s unhinged performance two years ago - must have heard the good news spread by a radio jock they know. They undoubtedly joined millions more across the country. Even the elites are catching on. Dan Rather finally found the frequency (Kenneth) - so how long can it be until Jennings and Brokaw offer stately explanations for their networks’ FIRE/MURDER news-gathering techniques, and promise to include in future broadcasts the hundreds of substantive metro stories straight from Iraq?

The Trivisonno show went to commercial and as I rounded a corner, I ran headlong into one of those moments where you know the momentum has shifted to your champion. Eight o’clock at night on an election night, hearing about the first returns that scream nothing but “landslide” - that’s what one of these moments feels like. I slipped a CD in - U2's The Unforgettable Fire. Track two, “Pride.”

It’s one of my favorite songs - written by Bono and the gang twenty years ago as a eulogy for Martin Luther King, Jr., but it aged well into a timeless celebration of vision and courage. "Auld Lang Syne" for stadiums. Here’s the king: it simply doesn’t stop rocking until fadeout. Same chord pattern save for the bridge, over and over; just a few rhythm and arrangement change-ups to keep things fresh. But it’s exactly that insistent, faithful cadence that begs volume be wrenched to eleven, every play.

I shuttled down a side street, music blaring, knowing that in a few years Iraqis themselves would be hanging clothes lines, mowing lawns and playing in the street as cars blaring classic radio rock passed. Only they'd enjoy themselves without the subtle dread they'd all feared would stay with them throughout their lives. The letter came back, line by line:

The railroad is running again! The railroad has not run since 1991. In the city of Hillah, the power stays on 24 hours a day and it has more power than prior to the war. Some Iraqis are worried about getting too much food from the coalition because they don't have enough room in their homes to store it...

...The markets are open...

...Most of the Iraqi men want to buy Chevy pickups...

...In the Universities, the girls have tossed their deshakas (long black dresses with head and face coverings) and are now wearing western style clothes and even some are wearing short sleeves. The favorite drink is Pepsi, followed by Coke. They want us to bring them any and everything American. Any item made in America or that is from America is worth money over here...

Soon enough, the American market will brace for an Iraqi invasion - a fleet of imports unique to Iraqi culture and abilities. The same know-it-alls who pronounced a struggling, late 1940s Japan as DOA never heard of transforming robots, computer chips or animé. Their journals are sitting on the same ash heap of non-prescience as the think tank predicting one human being for every three square feet of earth by the mid-1980s.

...The Iraqis have a saying about the situation over here "Every day is better than the day before". Life is flowing back in to this country and it is fun to watch and I am so glad I got to watch it happen...

...They are starting businesses everywhere. They want to build shopping malls and factories, they want McDonalds and Jack in the Box and Pizza Hut. Of course anything American Fast Food, because of the stories the troops are telling them...

One of the many tragic mischaracterizations of American culture - a culture derived from the freedoms protected by the Constitution - is that it is only about ethnicity or geography. I’m as white as snow, but neither Anglo-Saxon nor noble-born; that guy over there is as dark as night. We’re both Americans, contributing to and receiving from a common society. The Iraqis, from Messer’s letter, want to be more like us. Let them - freedom from natural rights doesn’t carry a patent. America didn’t invent it - we were simply the first country to understand how to establish and fortify it. Liberties draw the best from any man or woman, anywhere in the world. When people want to be more like Americans, what they’re really pining for is the freedom through which they will become more like themselves.

Freedom unfetters human potential and it dooms authoritarianism and extremism to wither and rot. That’s the real story, here. Go home, Eeyore. Take the black cloud with you, Joe Btfsplk. The soldiers know better; the American people know better; old Triv can count himself in. Most of all, the Iraqi people know better. In a short time, peaceful and inspirations to their fellow Arab, they’ll have to give the journalism noir, trying to count them out at the start, at least a good grin.