Who By Fire, Who By War

Desert Oracle Radio

Ken Layne

Society & Culture, Places & Travel, Philosophy

4.8 • 804 Ratings

🗓️ 15 April 2023

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's a beautiful spring in the desert, which naturally makes one dream of heading off to war. Maybe a secret war, a guerrilla war, an unknown soldier, wounded deep in psychic battle, like Leonard Cohen in the Sinai, like Che in Bolivia, like good old Ambrose Bierce headed to the deserts down in Mexico for one last campaign, one final outrage. With moody new soundscapes by RedBlueBlackSilver and a travelogue from ancient Damascus, where Saul/Paul stumbled into town after being blinded by the impossible lights over the backroads.

Thanks much to those of you who support this program on our Patreon, and for listening over these many years.

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/desertoracle

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Transmitting from the Mojave Wilderness in Joshua Tree, California, now is the time for Desert Oracle Radio, the voice of the desert.
0:14.0	Night has fallen on the desert.
0:31.6	And there's an uneasy feeling here at the station.
0:42.2	An overwhelming urge to go off to war.
0:55.2	To broadcast from my portable transmitter and a solar battery.
1:04.1	On the dusty road with Shea with the IRA,
1:11.3	riding alongside Ambrose beers through the deserts down in Mexico.
1:25.5	Decades ago, working the police and politics and military beats at a newspaper down an Oceanside, I had an old worn copy of Ambrose Beers' Devil's Dictionary.
1:39.4	Right there next to the Associated Press style book and the White Pages and the Thomas Brothers maps,
1:51.2	I would flip through that dictionary looking for something that caught my eyes,
1:57.6	something relevant to whatever current circumstance.
2:01.1	Because
2:01.7	Because Ambrose
2:10.4	Beers is a good editor, he
2:12.3	teaches you to avoid
2:14.4	false language.
2:22.2	Okay. to avoid false language. It was not long after the old gringo by Carlos Fuentes was published.
2:31.8	That's a sort of fictionalized account of beers during his last crusade.
2:42.4	Then somebody told me it was much better in Spanish, so I got the original Mexican edition
2:51.1	one night in Tijuana
2:52.9	at a bookstore.
2:57.7	It was
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Ken Layne, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Ken Layne and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.