Text of story written by Bob Bond
Published February 19, 1996 in the Ozark Gazette

It's Monday night, ten o'clock, and Fayetteville begins to fall asleep. Potato-like, you recline couchward, channel surfing. Images flicker: cops, cars, rock and sports stars - a visual menu of sex and violence.

Suddenly two men appear on the screen dressed as women (as they appeared in one show last year) and you figured it must either be Community Access Television, or a new transvestite channel. The number "eight" reveals it to be the former.

Welcome to "One Whirled View," featuring Dan Vega and Roger Henry as perhaps the two wackiest, funniest, most outlandish talk show co-hosts who ever dared to tell the truth about the global village.

Should you have the temerity to stick with Roger and Dan, for even a few minutes, you might begin to wonder what it all means. What is the purpose behind this weird act?

Dan Vega explains: "We live in a dynamic, tumultuous, crazy world. Our purpose is to make sense of it all, to form connections between seemingly unrelated phenomena. In order to do this you have to deal with some pretty heavy, serious stuff. People aren't always willing or able to make it more palatable for people. We're like the court jester who tells the truth about the kingdom right in front of the king, but is spared because he makes the king laugh."

Roger Henry adds: "The material we discuss is too serious to be taken seriously. Humanity is dying. We have to face that. But there IS hope. Healing can occur. As we explain all this, we want to have fun."

They explain a great deal, just the two of them, an hour each week without guests. Roger and Dan are both healers, nurturers. Roger teaches yoga classes, and Dan is a master organic gardener. The two have known each other twenty years, and are like brothers, even to the point of completing each other's sentences.

Said Vega: "We've been sitting around the kitchen table for years, rappin'. On TV we never have dead air, but we never interrupt each other. For us the show is a form of therapy, spontaneous expression. We do no specific format planning, although I spend several hours each week gathering information." When the program began in early 1992 it was live, with phone calls taken from the viewing audience.

Eventually the calls became a distraction, disrupting the dispensing of pertinent information, so they went to a pre-recorded all-dialogue format. "We could do a one-hour show at least twice a week, and never run out of material" claims Vega. "We have no need for guests, because we want to stick with information."

They present sobering, staggering information, of which the central theme is the toxic effects of human chemical pollution on the fragile planetary ecosystem. Once, while wearing a negligee, Vega gazed into the camera and pointed out that toxic chemicals are ambient, and that recently certain ones have been shown to cause abnormally small genitals in baby boys. To illustrate this he held up two okra; one large and one small.

The wackiness doesn't stop there. It extends to the political arena, both national and local. Henry and Vega have formed a corporation, SOLARGE, which has acquired a monopoly on sunlight much like DeBeers with diamonds. All who benefit from solar radiation, even sunbathers, owe royalty fees to the SOLARGE corporation.

Some time ago the wacky ones introduced the public to their newly formed "Northwest Arkansas Regional Seaport Authority," with plans to dig a canal from the Gulf of Mexico to Dickson Street.

According to Vega, "we go to absurd extremes in order to highlight extremely absurd human behavior."

Vega insists that the show contains no purely speculative material, that all the doom and gloom is widely documented by science, though largely ignored by the mainstream media.

"We want to empower people with information to make wise choices. People who limit their own choices often want to limit those of others," Vega continued, "and this explains some of the negative reactions some people have towards our show. Sheep want other people to be sheep. The information we provide reflects the real world."

That "One Whirled View" has engendered some negative criticism is undeniable. In fact, of all the programs cablecast on Channel 8, probably none has generated as much controversy. At ten o'clock on Monday night there isn't much to choose from on Fayetteville Cable TV, so the show has a fairly large audience. The show's outlandish style, liberal content, and popularity combine to create the perfect recipe to arouse the proponents of censorship.

Nationwide, public access television is threatened by the same forces which threaten to limit free speech on the Internet. Today information is being exchanged in unprecedented abundance, with the inevitable result that, at one time or another, everyone's sensibilities are offended. Those who feel that under no circumstances should a man be seen on television wearing womens clothing, even for the sake of humor, might conceivably also offer no objection whatever to a televised church sermon slandering and demoralizing homosexual people. Such a sermon was recently delivered and widely broadcast, evidently without any substantial protest, in contrast to the sometimes virulent attacks on Henry's and Vega's mildly delivered program.

To limit free speech for one viewpoint in order to please another viewpoint can lead only to the extinction of all viewpoints except one: the officially approved, standardized one.

"One Whirled View," by combining the outlandish with the deadly factual, seeks to push back the forces of censorship by meeting F. Scott Fitzgerald's definition of true intellectual attainŽment: "simultaneously holding opposing ideas, and functioning". Or, in the words of either Dan Vega or Roger Henry "trying to give hope to a hopeless situation."