Even though Thom Hartmann has been on the air nearly 20 years, to me, he seems an anomaly when it comes to a prototypical radio show host. Unquestionably a man of letters, an intellectual, Hartmann just doesn’t seem to fit the mold of a radio talk show host. When you can do so much, possess so much brainpower, why radio?
“I’ve always loved radio, ever since I was seven-years-old,” Hartmann explained. “My father got me an old crystal radio kit, and I listened all the time. I wanted to be a DJ and at 15, I got the chance at a small country and western station. I did that for a couple of years, then I did news for seven years.”
The early Hartmann years were full of curiosity, but all of those brain molecules needed somewhere to take root. After the Russians launched Sputnik in October in 1957, the Eisenhower administration figured they’d better invest in bright kids in America, just to remain competitive with our collective intelligence, to stand toe-to-toe on essentially any concern. Eisenhower dumped all sorts of money at gifted student programs. Progressive radio talker, entrepreneur, and prolific author Thom Hartmann was one of those students.
“As a young student, I was immersed into studies and was never bored,” Hartmann explained. “By the time I graduated sixth grade at 12 years of age, I’d had two years of Spanish, one year of Latin. I was taking trigonometry and reading at a college level.”
Then came middle school. By that point, the challenges seemed to fade and Hartmann, insanely bored, began to get into trouble. Looking for things to capture his interests. In high school, he found something.
“I started an underground newspaper in the 11th grade,” Hartmann said. He was expelled from high school for writing an article about the principal. “I was kept away from school with a court order. Then I got my GED, got arrested in an anti-war demonstration, and dropped out of Michigan State University.”
Hartmann had been interested in consciousness and spirituality since childhood, and has been a vegetarian since he was a teenager. Hartmann’s son was diagnosed with ADHD. Dissatisfied with the prevailing understanding of ADHD, he immersed himself in study on the topic and Hartmann became an authority on ADHD, writing several books on the subject; Thom Hartmann’s Complete Guide to ADHD and The Edison Gene: ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child, among several others.
Hartmann cites ADHD as part of the difficulty some sufferers experience in adapting to essentially everything. Being easily bored is one of several telltale signs of ADHD. Hartmann’s Hunter versus Farmer hypothesis is a proposed explanation of the nature of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD.)
After his relatively brief early foray into radio news, Hartmann began a string of successful ventures in business. He and his wife Louise founded an Atlanta-based advertising agency. They sold the agency in 1997. The Hartmann’s started three other successful business ventures. Hartmann and his wife had paid their dues in the work-world. With plans of retiring in Vermont, Hartmann said he figured that would be the end of his working career. He’d already reaped rewards from hard work and four successful companies he started and sold.
During this “retirement”, he and his wife were on a long drive from Vermont to Michigan for Thanksgiving. Hartmann experienced an enlightening moment that essentially catapulted him to a career in radio. In bridge, it’s called a “demand bid”, essentially an obligation to respond to something. That was when Hartmann heard President George W. Bush “talking” the country into a war with Iraq.
“I flipped out about it,” Hartmann said. “We were driving from Vermont to Michigan and I had the radio turned on, and all I could find anywhere were right-wing talk shows. There was nothing else.
“What I couldn’t understand was half the country was full of Democrats, and the other half was Republican,” Hartmann said. “It didn’t make sense that only Republicans were represented on the radio. The prevailing wisdom at the time was only conservatives listened to talk radio. That’s what Rush Limbaugh was telling everybody.”
He found this disconcerting and wrote an article for Common Dreams titled, “Talking Back to Talk Radio“. In the article Hartman said he had been in the radio business and acknowledged how it made sense to program something that would sell.
A couple of venture capitalists in Chicago read his article with great interest, and essentially used it as a business plan for Air America Radio. Hartmann was brought to Chicago to discuss possibilities.
“My main goal in returning to radio was to be able to have a conversation and not kiss George W. Bush’s butt about invading Iraq. I helped start Air America,” Hartmann said. “But it was taking them seven months to put together and I was impatient.”
Hartmann wanted proof of concept. To show he wasn’t nuts and how something in a more liberal voice could work on the radio.
“A local radio station in Vermont put me on Saturday morning to try it out,” he explained. “It worked and the show was picked up by I.E. American Radio Network and sent to 27 radio stations. Ultimately I went on Air America and that died, but I kept on going.”
Hartmann’s son was diagnosed with ADHD when the boy was young. It wasn’t a mainstream topic although it had been identified in the early 1900s. British pediatrician Sir George Still, described the condition as “an abnormal defect of moral control in children”. He found that some affected children could not control their behavior in the same way a typical child would.
Children with ADHD notoriously have trouble paying attention, controlling impulsive behaviors, being overly active, and may act without thinking what the result of an action may be.
The doctor informed Hartmann his son would not live a life rich in intellectual pursuits, and would do well to investigate a hands-on career.
“When my son was diagnosed with ADHD, we were told that he was unteachable,” Hartmann said. “When he was 12, we were told he was an educational failure. He’s now working on his master’s degree at a major university.”
The somewhat irresponsible, but what Hartmann called “well intentioned diagnosis”, prompted Hartmann to do extensive research into the topic and write several books, including Attention Deficit Disorder: A Different Perception. Hartmann also developed a hypothesis which proposes that ADHD represents a lack of adaptation of members of hunter-gatherer societies to their transformation into farming societies.
“It’s not hard science, and was never intended to be,” Hartmann said. That doesn’t mean Hartmann’s hypothesis and other methods haven’t been extremely effective in understanding ADHD.
Years ago in a speech he delivered to doctors in Norway, Hartmann told the group ‘We live our lives based on the stories we tell ourselves.’ That’s not only a revelatory thought, it reminded me of something mythologist Joseph Campbell would have written. It turns out my instincts weren’t off a smidge.
“Joseph Campbell was a meaningful inspiration to me at one point in my life,” Hartmann said. “His protegee, Stephen Larsen, wrote an authorized biography on Campbell, A Fire in the Mind.”
Hartmann said we transmit our identity, where we came from, principally through stories in our culture. Stories that reflect behavioral studies.
“Aesop’s ‘Boy Who Cried Wolf’ teaches us not to lie,” Hartmann said. “‘The Emperor Wears No Clothes’ teaches us not to hold back with truth. Some people have stories about themselves where they are unloveable, bad, a broken person.”
Studies suggest those stories, to a certain extent, are defined by our temperament.
“Temperament is a fascinating conversation, vastly underrated as part of our personality,” Hartmann said. “Part of this is from parents and how they raised us. Parents also tend to project. It’s also about the kids you grew up with, the movies we watch, all the way back to the Bible. Adam and Eve were told they were given dominion over the earth and felt they could destroy it because God gave it to them. They could do whatever they wanted.”
While immersed in the study of ADHD, Hartmann said he was in Taiwan in the late 90s when he experienced something fascinating to him.
“I’d learned they were doing remarkable and innovative stuff in their public school systems,” Hartmann said. “I don’t speak Mandarin so I didn’t understand the concept of what was being taught in the class. The teacher stood in front of the class for five or ten minutes explaining a concept. It was only five or ten minutes to lay down the concept. Then she asked by a show of hands, how many students understood what she’d just said. Five or six kids raised their hands. This was something the kids understood as they did this frequently. She said, ‘great.’”
The teacher had those six kids stand up, and the kids who hadn’t raised their hands formed circles around the kids that had. The students in the middle of the circle started teaching the others. This was going on with six different groups. Soon, the kids that hadn’t raised their hands in the first place were helping others in the circle learn. The teacher made the rounds to make sure what was being taught was correct.
“The kids were teaching their peers,” Hartmann said. “That’s always more effective than a teacher teaching kids. Every kid was physically engaged. After class I asked her if they had any ADHD problems. She told me they didn’t even understand the concept. It wasn’t a problem in their classrooms.”
We have just scratched the surface in understanding depression, ADHD, and the positives both of those conditions add to our existence. ADHD is perhaps critical to our survival as a species. Hartmann explained why.
“In the 1970s, there was a study involving chimpanzees. Since humans suffer episodic depression, and it’s measurable, they found the same holds true with chimpanzees. A good number of the group was what they deemed depressed. They wondered where it could come from. How a chimpanzee could be depressed in the first place.”
The study was conducted in a natural habitat. Hartmann said those in charge of the study removed the ‘depressed’ chimpanzees from the community. The chimps were tranquilized and physically taken to another location.
“Those in charge of the study assumed the ‘normal’ chimpanzees would celebrate when all the depressed ‘bummer’ chimps were gone,” Hartmann explained. “When they pulled the plug on the experiment a few months later, half of the remaining chimpanzee group were dead. The ‘depressed’ chimps actually kept the others alive,” Hartmann said.
“The ‘depressed’ chimps weren’t sleeping at night. They weren’t socially engaged. They were hyper vigilant. They’d move to the periphery of the group. All classic symptoms of depressed individuals. They were constantly on the alert for danger. They were the community’s early warning system.”
Hartmann said it was these chimps with ‘depression’ and ADHD who spotted the leopard, cheetah, boa constrictor coming towards the group and alarmed them. The depressed chimps were critical to the survival of the group.
Talk radio is top-heavy with political discourse and argument. Hartmann said politics is the essence of everything. Politics reflect the stories we pay attention to today. He said in practice, politics create, employ and swat down all our stories.
“I grew up in a world that was predominantly white,” Hartmann explained. “Not just the neighborhood around me. I only saw whites on television and in the movies. When I did see non-whites, they were portrayed as villains, buffoons or minstrels. That shapes your worldview. You can’t avoid that.”
In 1965, Hartmann said we started to see a lot of people of color immigrating to the United States. Immigration had been banned since 1924, and in 1965 immigration was subject to the proportion of the majority of the population. If the country was 85% white, then 85% of the new immigration must be white.
“Today there’s a backlash against immigrants by white people who realize they are no longer the absolute majority,” Hartmann said. “When President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act in the mid 60s, he told his press secretary Bill Moyers, he believed he may have given the south away from the Democratic party for a generation. He didn’t know the half of it. LBJ underestimated how much race drives politics.”
Then Nixon came along. In 1968, with his run for the White House, he saw the opportunity to snare a bunch of voters and suggested he should pick up the white racist vote.
“They didn’t know how many were out there,” Hartmann said. “They didn’t really recognize what percentage of the white population was being driven primarily by animus. If there were enough of them, Nixon figured they might be able to help his cause.” Hartmann said that was Nixon’s Southern strategy which he said has metastasized over the years.
“Now it’s one of the principal drivers in our politics,” he explained. “Racism at one time belonged to the left, the Dixiecrats. Then it became a right issue. Seems crazy to me. I don’t know why conservatism would become racially conscious, but that’s what happened.” Prior to the 1960s, Hartmann said Republicans weren’t racist.
“My father was an Eisenhower supporter, and he was most definitely not a racist,” he said. “Over the last decade or two, since the Willie Horton ad in 1988, we’ve seen the party shout out to white racists. They’re screaming, ‘dance to the tune of big corporations and billionaires. Come over and vote for me.’”
Hartmann is approaching his 20th year in talk radio in March. Joseph Campbell said when you’re involved in your daily life, things can be muddled, confusing. You wonder why you made a certain decision. As you age, when you reflect on that same life, your actions make a lot more sense.
“Here I am 20 years later and I’m having a good time,” Hartmann said. “I guess ADHD would be kind of a curse if I’d decided to become a professor. As designed by life, ADHD has been a blessing. Talking on the radio is the perfect job for someone with ADHD. There’s always something new. Always constant change.”
Jim Cryns writes features for Barrett News Media. He has spent time in radio as a reporter for WTMJ, and has served as an author and former writer for the Milwaukee Brewers. To touch base or pick up a copy of his new book: Talk To Me – Profiles on News Talkers and Media Leaders From Top 50 Markets, log on to Amazon or shoot Jim an email at jimcryns3_zhd@indeedemail.com.
