Jerry Agar is a rising star. You may not know him yet, but he's a guy to watch. He follows the popular
Don Wade and Roma on
WLS-AM 890 here in Chicago (from 9 to 11 a.m.), but that blow torch gets his voice out over most of the Midwest.
Agar also does fill-in duty for national talk show hosts, too, such as a recent stint filling in for the nationally syndicated
Mark Levin Show.
This morning, Agar talked about the ongoing battle to keep the
Children's Museum from moving into protected
Grant Park. On his own blog, Agar writes that he and his production staff
"attempted to get the Chicago Aldermen to state their position on whether or not the Children's Museum should be allowed to relocate to Grant Park." They called each Chicago alderman more than once, and you can
see the results at Agar's blog. He urges his listeners and readers to
"Call the aldermen yourself, especially those who didn't call us back and give your opinion."
IT'S "BURMA," NOT "MYANMAR"
Prior to Agar this morning, Don Wade talked about Burma, and why those in the American media insist on calling it "Myanmar." We shouldn't, said Wade, because the name was changed by executive fiat nearly 20 years ago by the military junta, without it being voted on. That's the same group that's denying international aid from coming into Burma to help millions of people suffering from the effects of the recent cyclone that killed over 100,000 people.
According to the CIA World Fact Book, "Despite multiparty legislative elections in 1990 that resulted in the main opposition party - the National League for Democracy (NLD) - winning a landslide victory, the ruling junta refused to hand over power." The opposition parties in Burma still call the country "Burma," not "Myanmar," and "Burma" is the accepted colloquial name used by most Burmese people. The name "Myanmar" has been recognized mainly by a few neighboring countries, but mostly by Communist countries such as China and Russia. "Burma" is still the name officially recognized by most Western democracies, because they know that "Myanmar" is a name imposed on the country by a vicious, tyrannical military junta.
To call it "Burma" is to symbolically oppose those tyrants.
So why do the American media call it "Burma?" My own theory: To sound hip and worldly. Think National Public Radio, for example. How many times have you heard an announcer on NPR pronounce "Mexico" as "May-
hee-
koh," or "Chile" as "
Chee-lay?" Now, how often have you heard an announcer on NPR refer to Germany as "
Bundesrepublik Deutschland," or pronounce "France" as "
Frahnce?" (And by the way, I'll start pronouncing "Mexico" like a Mexican as soon as everyone in Mexico starts calling us "The United States" and not "Los Estados Unidos.") They try so hard to sound worldly, but media do it selectively.
The communist nations call it "Myanmar," so NPR and other media trendyites think it's cool to do so as well.
But what these media idiots do not understand is that calling the country "Myanmar" is to give a little bit of legitimacy to the military dictators there - the ones the same media are reporting about now, about the injustices and horrors being inflicted on the Burmese people.
So quick to be trendy, so slow to be correct, that's the mainstream media for you.
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