One reason we have regulation: Dr. Brinkley and goat testicles

I listened to a history of music on American radio, covering the last century, on OPB. It's all very interesting, but nothing much can top this. It hurts just to think about it.

Shows like the Opry and the WLS Barn Dance were usually squirreled away to just a couple of hours on the weekend, but there was one powerhouse station keeping old-time music alive all week long. How it got there is one of the most unlikely stories in the history of radio.

Dr. Brinkley: And ladies and gentlemen, you're again listening to the voice of Dr. J.R. Brinkley of the Brinkley Hospitals. And I trust that I may have your attention for the next few minutes regarding some matters of vital importance to you as a healthy man and healthy woman.

New regulations gave Washington the ability to shut broadcasters down. Bill Crawford is co-author of "Border Radio."

Bill Crawford: One of the first people is a guy named Dr. John R. Brinkley and he had a station called KFKB, Kansas First Kansas Best, which was one of the most popular stations in the Midwest.

Dr. Brinkley: And you know you're sick. You know your prostate's infected and diseased. And you know that unless some relief comes to you, that you're going to be in the undertaker's parlor on the old, cold slab being embalmed for a funeral.

Crawford: Dr. Brinkley had made a fortune doing something he called the goat gland proposition. An early form of Viagra in which he would take a sliver of a goat gonad and insert it, transplant it, into a man's personal equipment. He claimed it would "Make any man the ram what am with every lamb."

Brinkley did thousands of these quack operations. They were shockingly popular. He built the station at first to entertain recovering patients waiting to get back on their feet and give their new virility a test drive. He also found it was a great way to advertise all sorts of novel procedures and patent medicines. Federal regulators were falling all over themselves to shut him down.

Sometimes it's interesting to reflect on why regulations came about in the first place. I knew the story of Brinkley, but I had kind of forgotten about it. Not that it means anything, but country music would not have turned out the same without Dr. Brinkley and his radio station. And thank goodness, because you just don't get too many opportunities to write the words "goat testicles."

Conservatives like to moan about "excessive regulation," but there was someone implanting goat gonads in men and using his powerful radio station, heard in all states, to promote it. We tend to forget what things were like before the FDA.

We have people on the radio today who do the intellectual equivalent of transplanting goat gonads into the public discourse. Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lars Larson and the dozens of other national and local noise machine talkers are political quacks, nothing more.

The companies that distribute and benefit from their shows need to clean up their act. Dr. Brinkley, the Kansas goat testicle guy, fled with his "practice" and radio station to Mexico. That option probably isn't open today.

As Democrats prepare to take power, we need to think about Constitutional ways to ensure our public discourse is elevated rather than diminished. The public airwaves have been hijacked largely by one ideology promoting its own profit and views over the best interests of the people.

Anyhow, I don't mean to sell the program short, there's plenty of other interesting stuff. You can find a link to listen to it here.