Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out

KC hipsters shake their groove thangs to the swingin’ sounds
of KCXL and Radio Sputnik.

I don’t remember what was playing on the radio when I was hitchhiking through Kansas City back in 1972. Number one on my personal hit parade was getting the hell out of Missouri.

Forty-eight years later, guess who wants in?

Radio Sputnik, that’s who. Actually, the Russian propaganda outlet has already landed, at three KC-area radio stations.

According to Neil MacFarquhar at The New York Times, Radio Sputnik — formerly Radio Moscow — is one cog in a state-run Russian “news” machine that focuses on “sowing doubt about Western governments and institutions rather than the old Soviet model of selling Russia as paradise lost.”

“(T)he constant backbeat,” says MacFarquhar, “is that America is damaged goods.”

Well. I guess it must be. It’s a hell of a note when we have to offshore our bitching and moaning to the Russians.

Can’t Alpine Broadcasting Corporation find some red-blooded, home-grown, U-nited States of America Americans to talk shit? I mean, I do it for free, which is about as cheap as it comes. Alpine honcho Peter Schartel has the Russkies and their stooges do it for him and he gets $27.50 an hour. What’s that work out to in rubles, or pieces of silver?

I don’t expect that KCXL plays many cuts from the early Merle Haggard catalog between swigs of milk and honey and preachin’ ’bout some other way of living. But if you slip Schartel a few dead presidents, why, I expect he might just accommodate you.

It’s a free country, but everything in it costs money.

16 thoughts on “Let me hear your balalaikas ringing out

  1. Only now after 51 years I get it…Procul Harum’s song The Devil Came From Kansas. How did those limeys know this way back then? “The Devil came from Kansas, where he went to I can’t say. (White House) Though I teach I’m not a preacher, and I aim to stay that way There’s a monkey (tRump) riding on my back, been there for some time (yeah since Nov 2016) He says he knows me very well, but he’s no friend of mine (tRump)

      1. Foot the highland fancy, pitch the quick fantastic, trip as you go on the light fantastic toe, beating the round in a light fantastic round.

        Then say “toy boat” ten times while the woodchuck chucks wood.

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