Eavesdropping An American Pastime

Like killer bees stinging everything that moves, congressional Republicans demand the prosecution of everyone involved in reporting a Republican strategy session overheard by Florida grandparents on a police scanner.

I sure hope the Republicans don’t succeed in throwing John and Alice Martin into prison for what syndicated columnist Cal Thomas called “a sophisticated and coordinated operation, part of a larger game plan aimed at removing Speaker Gingrich from office.”

While Thomas and other Newt Gingrich defenders may believe that a 50-year-old school maintenance worker and his wife, an elementary school teacher’s aide, are part of a sophisticated and coordinated anti-Gingrich conspiracy, it’s more likely this incident is another example of how out of touch inside-the-beltway types are with real America.

The Martins are far from unusual in their 20-year hobby of listening to police scanners, which often pick up cellular phone conversations. In parts of the country, it seems half the people talk on cellular phones as the other half listens.

You see, I’ve listened to telephone conversations across most of the United States. Like the Martins and hundreds of thousands before me, I’ve learned that it’s adults, not children, who say the darnedest things.

Two years ago before leaving on a car trip through every state west of Texas, I stopped at Best Buy and bought a Uniden BearTracker 800 “Highway Communications System and Preprogrammed Warning Scanner.”

The unit advertised that it would work in the car as well as in hotel or motel rooms. The box said the BearTracker 800 would pick up frequencies for NOAA weather, CB radio, news, aircraft, fire, highway patrol alert, highway patrol scan, police, ham radio, military, mobile and more.

The “more” was the most interesting. I soon learned that the scanner picked up cellular phone conversations. I next learned that there’s more cheatin’ going on than I ever imagined.

If it wasn’t about the cheatin’ they’ve done, it was about the cheatin’ they were getting ready to do. That’s cheatin’ as in Hank Williams’ “Your Cheatin’ Heart.” Running around. Being unfaithful.

As a general rule, women have more interesting conversations than men. Women talk expansively about things men would have to be tortured to admit.

Unless you happen to pick up Newt Gingrich and his buddies planning to manipulate the press and stick it to the Democrats, most telephone conversations between men are boring. Men try to figure out how to do something, make some comment or two about the upcoming football game and that’s it.

Conversations between men and women with romance on their minds are easy to recognize. Men on the make talk low and as smooth as butter. The women giggle and make naughty innuendos.

Near Los Angeles I listened as a pair of wealthy women planned a party for a few hundred of their celebrity friends.

In Colorado I heard a homosexual man sob and threaten suicide when his lover ditched him.

I’ve stopped at garages, cafes and service stations where police scanners were turned up to broadcast telephone conversations for the entertainment of customers and workers.

Except for high-ranking Republicans, most people know their conversations over cordless phones in homes and analog cellular telephones are broadcast over public airways where they can be heard.

The solution to cellular telephone privacy should come from technology, such as digital cellular phones, not more criminal laws.

In the meantime, people shouldn’t say anything over a cellular phone that they don’t want the world to know.

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