The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 17

A Mrtion of the San Fmikbco Sumhy Eumwct and Chronicle SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER Sunday, Muck 6, 1994 A-17 STEPHANIE SALTER So long KKHI, 'classical music station with soul' YOU ARE a classical music lover, but free enterprise threatens to take away your Mendelssohn, your Mozart, your Mahler, your Massenet and your Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. A communications giant Group of the Westinghouse Corp. has purchased the primary boudoir in which you and classical music meet each day to make love: A radio station in San Francisco called KKHI (1550 on the AM dial, 95.7 on FM). (It is a densely populated boudoir. An estimated 300,000 people listen to KKHI.) According to all reports, Group paid handsomely for the station.

More than $14 million. Although Group won't say what it plans to signatures of more than 5,000 people who love KKHI. The signatures have been mailed to Group and the FCC on petitions that call KKHI "a classical music station with soul." So far, neither Group nor Westinghouse has replied to Jacob-sen or Baroody. Such is big business. You consider an L.A.

classical KKHI. But you know that the FCC will not cancel a $14-million Bale because listeners don't want programming changes. You don't know but you suspect that, without the efforts of Baroody and Jacobsen, Group would have steamrolled into a new format and left 300,000 classical music fans crying in the dust INSTEAD, the company now is "doing everything we can to work with the interested parties to make sure their concerns are ill-founded." From corporate America, that's better than nothing and about all youll get. (Jacobsen thinks that Group could sew major good karma with corporate chump change by donating a translator that will extend KTID's signal deep into the South Bay. Just a suggestion.) You remember your friends in New York who went to sleep one night with classical music on WNCN and woke up the next day to find hard rock.

At least that will not happen to you. From all indications, KKHI, the classical station will be gone in the next six to eight weeks. But Saul Levine's KTID should be up and running, playing your Mendelssohn, your Mozart, your Mahler, your Massenet and, eventually, your Metropolitan Opera. As a classical music lover, you conclude, things could be a lot worse. chase of KTID as is expected he will upgrade KTID's antennae so that the signal will reach San Jose and Bob Jacobsen.

Levine has "made some offers" to KKHI on-air personnel about working for him, he said. He even plans to continue KKHI's Bay Area traffic reports. "I think it's going to be very well received," said Levine. You consider a conversation with an amiable spokesman at Group W. He said almost nothing on the record but did acknowledge that all the letters and petitions made the company "very mindful of the expressions of concern coming out of your city." IN THE best news yet, the spokesman said that if the FCC approves the sale no matter what format Group slaps on KKHI "We will broadcast the rest of this lave from the Met' season to the Bay Area.

You will have that." As a realistic classical music lover, you assess the situation. Like Baroody and Jacobsen, you ache at the thought of losing Access to free classical music is one of the few remaining lines of defense against a societal slide into cretinism flo with iUUil, everyDoay Knows the plan looks more like all-news than classical music. As a classical music lover, you are hot You believe that access to free classical music is like access to libraries: not elitism but one of the few remaining lines of defense against a societal slide into total cretinism. You are also realistic. You know that if the Federal Communications Commission approves the sale as is expected Group can do whatever it wants with KKHL Stephanie Salter is an Examiner columnist A Ml SI CHRISTOPHER MATTHEWS MLrtll I 'Provocation doesn't excuse violence No free health care for freeloaders quate by KKHI loyalists.

He knows that KKHI fans adore their station and do not want warmed-over, piped-in programming from Los Angeles. Even on his car phone from L.A., Saul Levine sounds like a nice man. He likes Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. He said that if things work out as he envisions them, KTID's programming "will not be exactly like" his station in LA "Well do things specifically for San Francisco," he said. Like more emphasis on opera.

Levine has made an offer to broadcast San Francisco Symphony concerts, too, he said, as KKHI now does. Ditto with "Live from the Met." If the FCC approves his pur BARRIE MAGUIRE whatever means by whatever means and get it to pay something toward its health insurance, do it! Where people are unable to pay enough, subsidize them! Mr. President what scares people "who work hard and play by the rules" most about your current health care plan is its favoritism toward those who do neither. Its most feverish advocates seem to be, not American working families but the new, overbearing, unelected class of social guardians we have met before in different garments, from the days of George III through the latter New Deal beg gummW from blond waif pleading for GI gum. But he wasnt a beggar either.

He was the son of a soldier, defeated or victorious. And then, in the west of Ireland, a dark and toothless traveling persona tinker, as she was called showed me a hard-luck story on a diabolically crumpled piece of paper. She asked for a copper. I know she wasn't a beggar either, but I'm not sure if she was a sorceress or a relative. Eventually, I went back to Mexico, deep down to Duranga Coming out of church on Sunday, 1 was You consider the effort of a San Francisco public relations consultant named Samira Baroody.

She used all her contacts to form the Committee to Save Classical Music on KKHI. Heavyweights of the fine arts, like San Francisco Opera's General Director Lotfi Mansouri, joined the committee. A classical music-loving member of the Board of Supervisors, Sue Bierman, introduced a resolution in support of the committee. The resolution passed unanimously. BAROODY wrote angry letters to the chairman of Westinghouse, to the FCC, to just about anyone who would open mail.

In some of those letters, she referred to Group Wa other Bay Area property, KPIX-TV (Channel 5), and used words like "boycott" and "picket." You consider the efforts of a Peninsula man, a microwave communications designer named Bob Jacobsen. For two months sitting for hours sometimes outside Davies Hall or the Opera House Jacobsen and friends collected the in massive, impersonal cooperatives. If a citizen fails to do so, he is not simply denied health care; he is declared a criminal of the state! Mr. President, this is not what this country is about Cooperatives might fly in Germany or the Netherlands or some other more docile society. Canadians, too, might freely accept such regimentation.

After all they tend to trust, even like, gov-' eminent It's by choice, after all, that they still have Queen Elizabeth's picture on their dollar bills, 6till honor a hereditary monarch as their country's head of state. Not here. We Americans dealt with that matter 218 years ago. There's a second element of the American character that you've overlooked, Mr. President self-reliance.

Why are Social Security and Medicare popular? Because by the time people retire, they figure they've paid enough payroll taxes to justify the benefits. They gei what they get because they worked for it This does not mean Americana are selfish. If someone is sick or down and out most people accept the need to lend a helping hand through public assistance and Medicaid. What enrages Americans are the cheats, freeloaders, dcadbeats, alternative lifestyle" types, who avoid paying their bills, much less their taxes. rra talking about the chiselera who pry up what's not nailed down, the crocks who cheat on their taxes and laugh at those who don't who sell drugs to the children of the Tb the stage of reason, I remember being all dressed up for a special Sunday drive in our brand new blue Ford.

Pop stopped in the middle of a bridge in El Paso. He let my brother and me throw a nickel's worth of pennies into the murky bowl of the Rio Grande River. Bare and burnished, the wet Mexican boys rapidly dog-paddled to retrieve the shiny coins, then laughed and begged for more. But they weren't really beggars. They were entertainers.

Athletes. Weren't they? A couple years later on the v- radio station owner named Saul Levine. He recently purchased a San Rafael radio station, KTID (100.7 on FM only) for a lot less than $14 million. He wants KTID to play classical music. Saul Levine knows that the only other Bay Area classical outlet, KDFC (1220 on AM, 102.1 on FM), is an automated music station in Palo Alto that is considered inade- ghetto and mock those who work for minimum wages, the fathers who split from their responsibilities.

Under the proposed Clinton health plan, all of these wonderful folks would get the same health care as the hardworking family carrying the load. Does this mean that every system of health care is un-American? No, it does not In 1992, you promised to champion those "who work hard and play by the rules." Do it! Guarantee the health insurance of working families. If you can sign up a family of J. PATRICK HIS beg, or not to Canadian Line in Montana, I had a similar experience with an old-time Indian wearing long braids and a big black Bad Hat In return for all the pennies I had, he showed me how to get flattened Lincoln heads off the railroad track. But he wasnt a beggar cither.

He was a teacher. Wasn't NEARLY a couple decades later, after graduating from a university into the U.S. military overseas, the first two words I actually learned in German were 'Kaugummil Kau- XstfL 2 woeful tales with a sense of entitlement based on their own victimization real, imagined or exaggerated. Court TV brings the abuse excuse from the courtroom into the living room. Lorena Bobbitt: was provoked to sever my husbands penis by his past violence toward me.

Menendez Brothers: We were provoked to kill our parents by our father's sexual abuse of us. Michael Griffin; was provoked to kill an abortion doctor by those awful anti-abortion pictures. The "provocations" are open to debate. Despite the jury's insanity acquittal, it certainly seems plausible that Lorena Bobbitt's act was motivated as much by rage over her husband's decision to leave her, as over her fear that he would stay and continue to assault her. Despite the hung jury, it seems plausible that the Menendez brothers were motivated by cold cash rather than hot passion.

ONE OF those arrested along with Rashad Baz told police that Baz had been robbed by a black man and that this experience had provoked him into carrying guns and ranting about killing blacks. He also told police that Baz had become enraged by Goldstein's actions in Hebron the previous Friday. And friends of Goldstein have said that he had been talking about killing Arabs for a long time. But even if all or some of these horrible acts were, in fact "provoked" by the earlier acts of others, that might only explain the resulting barbarities. It would not necessarily excuse them.

There are other factors unique to the individuals that explain why they, as distinguished from the many others who were at least equally provoked, resorted to violence. These other factors are wliat distinguishes criminals from the rest of us. Yet by focusing on the "provocations," we diminish the moral importance of the other factors that differentiate criminals from law-abiding citizens who are also provoked but do not respond with lawlessness. If the "abuse excuse" were ever to become widely accepted, the greatest beneficiaries would be men who abuse women and children and who claim that they, in turn, were abused. Victimization must not be allow ed to become a moral or legal license to engage vigikntism.

The law must make it crystal clear that we expect our citizens to respond to provocation by invoking the law, not Cambridge, Mass, AFTER RASHAD Baz was arrested on 15 counts of attempted murder for shooting four Jewish Cha-sidim in a van, he told police that his rampage had been "provoked" by its driver who, according to Baz, tried to cut him off near an approach to the Brooklyn Bridge. It demonstrates how far we have gone in accepting, and indeed encouraging, "provocation" as an excuse for even the worst acts of mayhem. In Israel, friends and supporters of Dr. Baruch Goldstein who murdered dozens of Palestinians at prayer claim that he, too, was "provoked," not by anything as trivial as a traffic incident, but rather by the repeated terrorist acts directed by Palestinian extremists against his fellow Jews. From the former Yugoslavia, we hear a constant refrain of provocation, counterprovocation and retaliation for the violence allegedly provoked by earlier violence.

The shootings in New York, Israel and Bosnia may seem to have little direct relationship to what went on in the trials of Lorena Bobbin, the Mcnendez brothers and Michael Griffin in the courtrooms of Virginia, California and Florida. But there is an insidious and dangerous relationship. Excuses have become the staple of daytime TV talk shows. Viewers come away from this steady diet of Alan M. Dershowitz, attorney and author, is a professor at Harvard University.

transfixed by a person sitting on the cathedral steps and holding a tin can. This person was uniquely dignified. A professional beggar. An integrated member of the community, a poor person whose quiet eyes bespoke a compliance with the values of Christian charity. THIS PERSON had made a contract to uphold a national tradition.

A tradition that may be changing. Now, in the modern foot traffic of San Francisco, I am endlessly confronted by the mad but logical question of how to respond to naked confrontation with lost souls who demand immediate retribution for the cumulative sins of our society. I have dedded not to be a beggar because I believe the good beggars are not those who choose to be, tut rather those who have to be. Washington DEAR Mr. President: Americans are turning against your health plan.

A new ABC poll shows more people "disapprove" than "approve." A CNN survey shows just 4 percent of the country believes Congress should pass your plan in its current form. Your pollsters are telling you, Mr. President, that it's all because of those nasty TV commercials being run by the insurance companies. Your health care wonks are chiming in that the more the regular folk truly understand the proud product, the more they will want to have it Weasel words! Since I don't work for you, I can tell you what people really feel. It's not the TV ads that are killing your health care push, it's the attitude of the viewer watching them.

Deal with that attitude honestly and you may yet bring health care security to those "who work hard and play by the yes, those same millions of voters you championed as a candidate. Start with one easy, undeniable reality: you are dealing with Americana here. Americans don't trust government, don't trust the elite and don't trust anyone, be they kings, bureaucrats or social engineers who try subjugating us to their desired order. This is the first place your plan went wrong. It demands, by force of federal law, that every citizen enlist himself from cradle to grave, Christopher Matthews is The Examiner's Washington bureau chief.

Mill Valley FTER 32 years of working at the same A job, I quit People say to me, "What are you going to do now My answer, "Be an open spirit for awhile." So, in my freedom to receive inspiration, I found myself contemplating neither work nor holiday. I have been thinking about being a beggar. Weren't there many saints who took a voluntary vow of poverty so they might avail themselves of the power that comes from providing others with the opportunity to give alms? Alms. What a word! It rhymes with psalms and comes from the tame creation. In IoCkiallyhit J.

Patrick Goggins, recently retired. is chair of the Irish Forum..