This starts off sounding rather like an educational filmstrip you have to sit through in school because it’s supposed to be good for you. It even has the old educational film music, which I guess is supposed to be ironic, but I’m not totally sure. But what happens is you get sucked in by the surprisingly fast pacedness of the thing and how well it is crafted. This is not exactly radio to cook by... or perhaps even to eat a sandwich to. It is radio for which you will have to sit in a chair and listen, or else you risk getting lost. But this is not a bad thing. It is sort of like being in college and having a US history teacher who gets so excited by the material that he gets up on the desk and starts to yell… in a charming way, not in a scary way. This story has gunplay, power politics and chases. It’s like The Dukes of Hazard without the cars, cross bows, yeehaws or Daisy Duke. Just Boss Hogg. Perhaps it is not like The Dukes of Hazard. But there are great stories here… straight out of a comic opera… like how, for instance, the poll watchers, who were on high alert looking for foul play, were given coffee with laxatives so they would have to leave their posts for the bathroom. In its day, the seat war made the cover of the New York Times, and now it so lost to us. “One town in Western Kansas contains all the folly of humanity” says the narrator. It was a war that should never have resulted in so many deaths, deaths that brought great sadness to the families involved, and we can still feel the weight and immediacy of this sadness. This is what makes the piece such good journalism.