Tryin to anesthetize the way that you feel

About a month ago, in the midst of one of my periodic fits of theoretical self-improvement via consumption, I bought a clock radio.
I took it home, plugged it in, set the time and began to search for a radio station that I could wake up to without reflexively smashing the device against the wall upon being roused from slumber.
I'm still looking.
Since you, dear reader, are most likely an NYU student, it's highly unlikely that you have ever attempted to navigate the barren wasteland of the New York City radio dial.
You haven't had occasion to. After all, in the technologically bloated body that constitutes today's college lifestyle, the radio is the appendix: purposeless, vestigial and prone to septic infection.
In dorms full of stereos, iPods and computers with high-speed internet connections - in a world where piracy of music remains ubiquitous and commercial-free, listener-funded, eclectically programmed radio stations like Seattle's KEXP and Ohio's WOXY stream live through every iTunes account - I'm convinced that the only times NYU students find themselves listening to the radio are when they are in delis and cabs, and when their sadistic roommates wake up.
On my more paranoid days, this conviction lends itself to the belief that the very strong correlation between radio listenership and the earning of subsistence-level wages is indicative of a causal relationship - that radio in NYC, in all its mindless, soul-numbingly repetitive ingloriousness, operates as an especially insidious form of class warfare.
Does it seem altogether inconceivable that the fine folks at Clear Channel might be in league with their good buddies and campaign beneficiaries in the White House and on Capitol Hill to gradually endumben the minimum wage masses by bludgeoning their brains with Ricky Martin and Maroon 5 on an hourly basis?
Yes, I just said "endumben." New York's only white music station is stupidizing me.
Economists and political scientists use the term "the tragedy of the commons" to describe the abuse and neglect of common resources, notably environmental ones, due to the insufficient energy and attention devoted to their maintenance by the collected public.
Since broadcast entities are increasingly owned by huge, lumbering media conglomerates, the airwaves cannot be thought of as entirely public, and the stench rising from radio's steady march toward a nationalized, homogenized, 10-track-playlist lowest-common-denominator has gotten so heavy that normal radio can hardly be thought of as a resource.
But just as pollution of aquifers and fears about the safety of tap water created a market for Evian, the degradation of our airwaves has pushed many members of our society into luxury brackets of popular music consumption; the iPod and satellite radio are just the most prominent examples.
Something about our culture's failure to sustain publicly-available institutions for the promulgation of the kind of pop music that hints at the richness of its heritage, coupled with the fact that the closest thing that America has to John Peel is Carson Daly, makes me queasy.
It's another example of the fact that the media market, as sustained by current advertising models, is incapable of sustaining innovative or challenging programming.
In the future, it seems, all the best television and radio will be available only on a subscription basis, and the plebes who lack the coin for HBO and Sirius will have to settle for equal doses of idiocy and monotony. Since the country seems anxious to slip back into a feudal state of peasantry and aristocracy (Hi Paris!) this is perhaps only appropriate.
When social justice on the level of the dinner table is a far-off wish, it seems frivolous to carp about social justice on the level of access to culture, but the two seem critically interrelated.
Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to pick up the pieces of my radio.