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Barry Farber: Radio Man Extraordinaire
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22836 |
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Section : |
CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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1 / 2003 |
1,725 Words |
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Robert R. Selle
Robert R. Selle is an editor in the Current Issues section of
The World & I. |
If conservative radio talk show host Barry Farber, a firm advocate of small government, had his way in Washington, the first thing he'd do would be to launch a big, expensive new government program.
He'd send every high school graduate on a two-week "vacation," at federal expense, to the dictatorship of his choice, just to soak in the atmosphere and feel what it's like to live under the strictures of a tyranny.
"It could be a communist dictatorship, like North Korea or Cuba, or, if you can find any right-wing dictatorships left, it could be one of them," he says in an interview. "It could be a religious dictatorship, like Saudi Arabia. But you don't have to stay long to realize, 'Good Lord, what a treasure we have in America!' "
Farber's fear today is that many Americans, especially younger ones, have become complacent and are taking their country for granted--and then immersing themselves in materialism and hedonism--because of their meager knowledge about the world and America's place in it. Thus, he nominates ignorance as the nation's biggest social problem, the rootstock from which a host of other problems sprout.
His bold government program, he declares, would be a wake-up call to U.S. citizens about global realities and would recenter Americans on what is most important in the country's culture, namely, its values. The 72-year-old broadcaster--born in Baltimore, raised in North Carolina, and host of his own radio talk show since 1960--insists that what makes America valuable to its citizens and the world is not necessarily its racial composition but
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