Pure, blind, arbitrary panic, of the sort that swept the US this week, is probably one of the very few emotions you won't hear sung about on Dublin's Country, the new radio station that switched on this week. In the imagined America of country music, from its tragi-romantic posturing to its social realism, people behave with a bit more dignity - or at least their indignities have a heavy and fateful quality.
But sure, as Ireland knows better than most, no country should have to live up to its imaginings. In real life, chaos rises up and turns a Jim Reeves sentiment into a George Bush syllogism, an American tragedy into an Afghan atrocity. And that perfect denim-clad butt on the new billboards for Dublin's Country belongs, as likely as not, to some Polish supermodel.
Still and all, there's something right just now about a station that plays You Picked a Fine Time to Leave Me, Lucille and Against the Wind and Leavin' on a Jet Plane, bereft, mournful and occasionally defiant. Perhaps, in the circumstances, the respective owners of Dublin's Country and News Talk (still six months off) might wish that their launch dates could have been switched; but perhaps we're getting a more profound connection to middle-American desire and delusion with the music than we could ever get from more of that old journalism.
Coincidentally, the musical connection from our gut to the gut of America was itself the subject of Caroline Bonnyman's amusing drama, Always on my Mind (BBC Radio 4, Tuesday) - in which a Scottish man's lifelong obsession with Elvis reaches its fitting climax when he dies sitting on a service-station loo.
That was funny, but not as funny as Big Big Space, which starts today at 11.02 a.m. on RT╔ Radio 1. Roger Gregg is another Yank, and his six-part radio-drama series is both a throwback to glorious radio days and a love-biting satire on the implied narrative rules that govern both US science-fiction TV shows and (sez me) Pentagon briefings.
Crudely hilarious and sweetly allusive - check out the Little Prince in episode 2 - Big Big Space also offers radio lovers the chance, tonight and next Saturday, to see a couple of episodes being recorded out at the Royal Marine Hotel in D·n Laoghaire. (Do check with producer Tim Lehane before you turn up.) As public outreach goes, RT╔ has rarely done better.
Israeli ambassador Marc Sofer was doing some "public diplomacy" on radio early this week, perhaps to counter the Arafat-in-Ireland effect. (This was hardly necessary - few are the Western hearts and minds that truly warm to the PLO chairman.) And Sofer is a diplomat's diplomat, intelligent, cautious and measured, with only a hint of Blairite righteousness. Listening to his friendly first-name-basis exchange with the Palestinian ambassador, you couldn't help but wish that Sofer was in a more important job back home in Israel.
Sofer's appearances on Monday on The Last Word (Today FM, Monday to Friday) and Tonight with Vincent Browne (RT╔ Radio 1, Monday to Thursday) were also opportunities to contrast the style and abilities of the two presenters. Browne was knowledgable, occasionally aggressive and borderline arrogant, as when he started to sort out Jerusalem. ("Wouldn't a sensible solution be . . .?"); it is useful, there's no doubt, to have a radio host who can tease out the Biblical exegetics about the role of the city with an Orthodox Jew such as Sofer. Browne hardly mentioned the current crisis, except as a starting point.
Everyman Eamon Dunphy, on the other hand, came across as a bit of a latecomer to the Palestinian issue, addressing it with Sofer largely in the context of the aftermath of September 11th. This more populist approach, and Dunphy's only-human gaps in knowledge, actually led to some more revealing replies - even if Dunphy wasn't always able to follow up.
For example, when Dunphy suggested that the Israeli settlements in the occupied territories were "illegal", Sofer came out with a sentence that he surely would have mentally edited better had he been in Browne's studio. It went like this: "The settlements are part and parcel of a deal that will happen in the area if and when we ever reach that deal."
The "Wha'?" response never came. We were left to do our own exegesis on that verse.
The interview also featured a sample of the instant expertise on Osama bin Laden trotted out by folks who had scarcely heard of him six weeks ago. I don't of course count Sofer in that category, but he implicitly exploited the wider ignorance, with a sentence clipped right out of half the British-US punditry of the last month: "Only now is Osama bin Laden using the Palestinian issue as a rallying cry - he had never used it before." Bin Laden's real motivation, we were yet again assured, is hatred of Western values and culture.
Well, maybe. But do you really think bin Laden's previous efforts at rallying Arabs didn't mentioned Israel? Come on, get real - the famous old al-Qaeda "recruitment video" that was all the rage in September (before we got the fresh al-Jazeera footage) "montaged" between images of Israeli troops crushing the intifada and images of gun-toting Osama. Sure, maybe he'd like to call a jihad against American Pie 2, but Palestine is and has long been a great mobiliser of Arab opinion, and bin Laden clearly fancies himself as a populist.
So does Bush, of course. According to Global (BBC Radio 5 Live, Sunday) he scooped an enormous percentage of US Muslim votes last year. Have he and his White House full of oil men really picked a fine time to leave Israel? Sofer would prefer to think not: "What the US government is saying now is not one iota different from what it has been saying for years."
True - but what is the US government thinking?