By Roy L Hales
Doug Hamel made his first broadcast almost two months ago. His two-hour-long tribute to Gord Downey was the beginning. Doug had underwent some introductory DJ training at Cortes Radio months before, but found the time commitment intimidating. He works as a building contractor six days a week! Everything changed that first day he spoke into the microphone. That was the birth of Free Range Radio.
Shut Off Mainstream
“I don’t hear my point of view anywhere in Mainstream – anywhere. There are some small alternative sites where what I am trying bring out comes out – and this was brought forward to me by a gentleman who used to work for the CBC who lives in the community. My sister worked for the CBC. And I shut off Mainstream eight years ago because I couldn’t handle the inability to show any kind of balanced reporting,” says Doug.
“So I’m trying to bring that other viewpoint forward and if people don’t want to listen – they don’t have to. There is other stuff to do. But if you are not going to argue history and you are not going to try to bring these things forward. Mainstream media is full of it.”
Doug was in tears the day Obama was elected. He and co-worker watched the election unfold at the Banff Centre. “I made the mistake of thinking he was Jackie Robinson [the first African American to play Major League Baseball]. Robinson was a man of immense character who would not quit despite being verbally abused, cleated and even having bottles thrown at him. Doug though of Obama in the same light.
The ‘Seers’ Of Western Culture
“Then Obama turned around and gave the banks sixteen trillion dollars … That really bothered me and what bothered me even more was the inability for people to hear me. {Obama] just gave sixteen trillion to a bunch of white bankers. So this whole game of cool … They are all on the same team guys. I think maybe that’s been made clear now. I think that could be possible,” says Doug.
“Right now what troubles me is the ‘seers of the tribes’ are just a bunch of corporations. They aren’t really the seers, but they are the ones that are controlling the media. They are creating these visual images and… they are creating a divide and destroy culture … Its a real “us” and “them.”
Unify the Opposites Within Yourself
He added, “What Jung said was that if you do not want to become a mass man and fall prey to one of the ‘wretched isms’ you need to unify the opposites within yourself. It is a lifelong task, obviously. But you can get to a point where you have training wheels and you don’t shadow all over yourself – shadow being the negative side … that you project on other people so that you don’t have to see it in yourself. Once you understand the whole thing, you can just watch the news and and go ‘that’s a lot… because of the whole shadow projection involved.”
One of Hamel’s heroes is Monty Python.
“Nothing was sacred with them. That’s why they were so brilliant, because they didn’t let that crap get in the way. And in doing that, they eased the pain. They brought humour to something. You look at a lot of their stuff now and there is no way in God’s green earth it would get on T.V. … We’ve all become so infantile, protecting our little egos. You’ve just heard something you don’t want to hear, so deal with it.”
Free Range Radio
Hamel describes himself as a political atheist and believes Western Civilization has lost meaning.
“We are trying to replace it with egotistical desires and gratifications and that will not work.”
He added, “Free Range Radio is a place where your mind has the possibility of roaming free and perhaps gathering in some images, some facts, some words and inspiration or even antagonistic dialogue. It is free range, it’s going to roam.”
The theme question is “Who and what is going on?”
“I started doing it because Gord Downey died and it upset me that no one seemed to know his lyrics – really understood his lyrics. I read his stuff like poetry and it was the most soul sustaining work I’ve come across in a long time – especially mainstream, that was amazing. But I think it was very successful mainstream, not because of the lyrics – because of the blend and the spirits came through the music. This whole ecstatic poetry came through the music.”
“So I started with that. Then [CKTZ’s station manager ]Howie got a couple of emails … and he said do you want to have a show?”
More
There is much more in the podcast above, including the mythology of language, Jung, the meaning of myths, Ann Rand, conspiracy theories, and the international monetary system.
Listen to Free Range Radio Sundays on Cortes Community Radio, CKTZ 89.5 FM, from &:30-9:30 PM.
Top photo credit: The Tragically Hip / CBC’s The Hour / Toronto, Ontario / 15 October 2006 by amber dawn pullin via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)