“BAWLING BEDLAM”

Wairarapa Times-Age, 23 November 1943, Page 6

“BAWLING BEDLAM”

I ■ I ■■■ ■!■■■ ALL THE WORLD ON THE AIR. BACK TO NATURE ASPIRATIONS. I “After listening on the radio to items you wanted particularly to hear, have you ever started shifting the needle along the line of wave-lengths? If so, you may have got the impression that the whole world is one bawling bedlam. I’ve sat sometimes for an hour or so reduced to a sort of hypnotised stupor doing this, listening to voices shouting and joking, and preaching, mixed with fragments of jazz, sonatas, songs, stories, plays; voices speaking in languages I don’t even recognise or only partially understand. All of them urgent, as though there was only one thing of consequence—the matter the speaker had in hand. At such moments one may be tempted to conclude that ‘wireless’ may be reckoned among inventions which (like the internal combustion engine) have come too soon- — before mankind was fit to make proper use of it. Ah, there’s the tragedy of progress! Technology goes rolling} on —developing quite independently of the welfare of mankind. And hence those periodic ‘back to nature’ movements, whose prophets attract many 1 and appeal to something in most. Hence too, the influence of such writers as Rousseau. Ruskin, Tolstoy, such poets as Wordsworth." —Desmond MacCarlhy speaking on “Books and People.” a 8.8. C. short, wave series.