Every now and again I think that it's all a delusion -- that something important and alive is happening out there in radio land and that I just don't know where to look. Maybe they do it when I'm asleep. Even when I tune in to the much-vaunted "All Things Considered," I hear an extended review of rock records (rock!), another (another!) peek at the stock market and a one-minute review of books. The promises made to us long ago are long forgotten.

Ten years ago I got a C-band satellite receiver and started listening to the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. network. Now that's radio. Great classical and ethnic music. A wonderful jazz program in which the producer actually does some serious homework on the masters, mixing interviews and biography and music: Bix Beiderbecke, Miles Davis, Fats Waller, Artie Shaw, Duke Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie. Talks -- serious talks -- on politics and science and art and literature: Shakespeare, Chaucer, Keats, Yeats, T.S. Eliot. Instead of one-minute book reviews, a full half-hour of serious interviews with an author. And, oh yes, radio dramas, commissioned by the CBC, performed as high art.

One of those dramas came into my bedroom on a Saturday afternoon, back in 1991 or 1992. It was called "Grasshopper Hill." I was lying in bed reading while listening idly to the radio. Then I stopped reading. The protagonist had been caught by the Nazis and put in a concentration camp. At the end of the war, he emigrated to Vancouver and ended up teaching in a college there. He was describing to another teacher, his lover, what it was like.

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He didn't want to tell her everything, but she insisted, so he told her about being in the camp, working during the day in the storehouse for eyeglasses and hair and jewels they called "Canada." Canada was paradise for working prisoners, the one place where you could have everything, especially food, taken from the new victims -- food that, sometimes, you had to kill for.

As he talked his anger, bitter and mocking, became very clear. He had seen too much. No matter how hard she tried, there would always be that between them. He had seen too much there, in that other Canada. Love, any love, could never reach him.

In slightly more than an hour, I learned more than I could ever want to about what it was like to be in Auschwitz -- what it did to the soul, to one's humanity, to the ability to be touched. It was a radio drama that could and did change one's view of the world, of what we laughingly call "Western civilization."

I subsequently contacted the CBC and finally found someone who had helped make the program. I talked her into making a copy for me (which was highly illegal). I then made several copies and sent two to NPR -- one to its president, another to Susan Stamberg (whom I had met a couple of times). I also sent a copy to my local PBS station. I asked all of them to listen to the tapes and try to figure out a way to get them broadcast. I thought "Grasshopper Hill" was that important.

I don't have to tell you what came of it all. I was an innocent. I was still thinking of the NPR we had back in the beginning -- the radio network that had been set up to give voices to those who had been voiceless for so long. At least, I thought, they would respond to my request and thank me for trying.

It's very simple, really. All you have to remember is that early on, public radio was just that -- for the public. But then, somehow, while we weren't looking, they privatized it -- gave it to those who have far more say-so than you or I, turned it over to people who have a distaste for controversy and challenge and complicated issues.

Public radio has become very, very private -- a National Private Radio owned lock, stock and barrel by those who have all the chips.

Until those times, twice a year, when they crank up the money-begging machine and tell us that we're listening to public radio. National Public Radio. Yours and mine. To support. Until the goal is met.

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