Patrick’s Rants

On the $5.00 rack at WalMart sat a movie that I hadn’t seen since it was originally out, Pump Up the Volume starring Christian Slater. The copyright date on the back of the box is 1990 - 15 years ago. Time sure flies. Christian is a shy student in a new town by day, pirate radio DJ “Hard Harry Hardon” by night. He rails against the institution represented by his school commissioner father, the uptight principal who expels students whose test scores are low to keep her school at the top of the ranks. His following grows from a few listeners to nearly the whole school even to a few teachers as fans. He is at once an amateur - albeit poorly prepared - psychiatrist, a representative of the angst of his peers, a sexually repressed youth attempting to erupt literally and figuratively onto his listeners in the dark.
Of course he manages to raise the ire of the principal and her henchmen who call in the FCC to shut him down. Tracking him in bright yellow trucks reminded me of the stories I read growing up in South Florida. Back then, the FCC had their hands full with pirate radio stations run out of panel vans. Back then, Cubans tried to send signals back to Cuba to their fellow citizens still stuck on the island. They used anything they could get their hands on to create radio stations - antennas made out of aluminum ladders. I don’t know if those stations still exist, but they drove the FCC crazy just like Hard Harry.
Interestingly this movie reflects on the current state of bloggers. Those sometimes small voices spouting wisdom, opinion and conjecture in the darkness. So to Hard Harry, and to bloggers everywhere, “talk hard”.