Leftovers

Every radio market of any size has one AM station that is the Local Institution. It's usually a clear channel station, meaning that it's AM frequency is protected so that it can reach far out through the night to rural areas that didn't (in the old days) have radio stations of their own. The radio business has changed, of course, but the clear channel stations enjoy a sheen of respectability in the same way that the big three television networks do.

So last night I'm sitting in my car for a few minutes and I'm listening to WHAS, which is Louisville's gold-standard station, and WHAS has given it's precious airtime over to Michael Savage. WHAS is basically a right wing propaganda outlet. It runs Rush Limbaugh seven days a week. And I know about Michael Savage, though I've never really listened to him.

I listened for about ten minutes and here's what struck me: Michael Savage is insane. No, seriously: he's nuts. He's a lunatic in exactly the same way that an old man living alone in a shack filled floor-to-ceiling with old copies of the Saturday Evening Post, waving a shotgun on his front porch and screaming at the kids to get off his lawn is a lunatic. He's tinfoil-hat detached from reality.

The show was a rerun, I assume, because much of his invective was aimed at Presidential candidates long eliminated from the race. I don't know; maybe he's still concerned that Rudy Giuliani is going to get elected. Anyway, his stance seemed to be that he hated everyone, the country is doomed, the Mexicans and Muslims are taking over and there's no politician in the country who hasn't been co-opted by liberalism. Not one. And then, at the orgasmic height of his outrage, he stopped to spend a few minutes giving his recipe for Spanish rice. Seriously. You use leftover rice and you put it in a skillet and he doesn't like to pre-cook the onion and don't use too much tomato sauce and you form a little crater in the middle of the rice and put in diced chicken and cover it up with rice and it's kind of like a little oven there, made of rice, cooking the chicken and the rice all at the same time. It's the most obsessive, anal retentive recipe for leftovers I've ever heard, evidence on its own of severe mental hardship, and he managed to sandwich it seamlessly in between calling George W. Bush treasonous and the "President of Mexico" and claiming that when Hillary Clinton is elected she's going to install Sharia Law.

I cut people a pretty wide berth in on-air behavior, but the racism and hatred and anger of Savage made me long for the days of Thorazine and straight jackets.

So this morning I wake up and I'm cruising the web and I come across this article on a right-wing, pro-business site, which is giving a couple of Iwo Jima vets space to rant and rave about Time magazine's use of the iconic Iwo Jima imagery on it's magazine cover. And I read this:

Donald Mates, an Iwo Jima veteran, told the Business & Media Institute on April 17 that using that photograph for that cause was a “disgrace.”

“It’s an absolute disgrace,” Mates said. “Whoever did it is going to hell. That’s a mortal sin. God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor.”

(...)

Lt. John Keith Wells, the leader of the platoon that raised the flags on Mt. Suribachi and co-author of Give Me Fifty Marines Not Afraid to Die: Iwo Jima wasn’t impressed with Time’s efforts.

“That global warming is the biggest joke I’ve ever known,” Wells told the Business & Media Institute. “We’ll stick a dadgum tree up somebody’s rear if they want that and think that’s going to cure something.”

OK, so Donald Mates and John Kieth Wells don't like the art direction of Time magazine. Fine. They've got that right, and as veterans of Iwo Jima they should be able to say or do whatever they want without being ridiculed by the layabout likes of me. But read what they're saying again and tell me that these aren't just two old cranks blowing gas about young people today.

These kids got no respect! Their music is nothing but noise!

I get a special kick out of Wells' use of "dadgum" and Mates' threat of bodily harm to the artist: "God forbid he runs into a Marine that was an Iwo Jima survivor." Yes, well, I'm sure the thirtysomething Photoshop artist who put that cover together is terrified at the thought of a run-in with a pissed-off octogenarian.

You get back here you whippersnapper and take your medicine!

The right wing media are morphing before our very eyes into crotchety-crackpot-on-the-front-porch media. Maybe it's the inevitable result of the right's dependency on generating outrage, an emotion sane people build up a certain resistance to. But I think it's also because the things that most people are outraged about these days are more traceable to the actions and ideology of the right than the left, and the only people left sputtering rage from the right are crazy people. And that's all the right wing media have to work with, and they're doing their very best.

But really: it's not working.

Comments

[fish]

If you listen long enough (and this should tell you something about my formative years) eventually he'll return to the story about his swimming nude with Allen Ginsburg! As god is my witness this is true! This is the font from whence his madness flows!

Apparently Ginsburg touched his pee pee...and sent him over the edge! Kinda of like what happened to Nicholson in the first Batman movie.

Two Batman references in two days! Not bad.

[Frank]

I don't know about lumping Savage in with the rest of us. I listened to his show a couple times on 15 hour plus road trips, and I came to the same conclusion; the man is off his rocker. However, I would happily stack up the success of right-wing radio hosts against the likes of Air America and most any other left-wing host any day. You see, while some of them may be off the rocker, the right-wing message, despite what you may think of it, still wins in the marketplace of ideas. Or at least in winning over millions of more listeners every day.

[Wally]

In the marketplace of ideas the right-leaning consumers buy Limbaugh's and Savage's invective in wholesale quantities. The left-leaning consumer seems to look at the similarly packaged attempts to rouse the rabble from the left and say, "Give me a break. I can actually see what's going on. I'm informed and angry but I don't need your jaundiced screed to shape my opinions."
I'm just sayin'...

[Scott]

Ah, the Reality-Based Community. Only the gun-toting Jesus-humping hicks are listening to the wireless, probably because they're too poor to have a satellite dish or an internet connection, right, Wally? Certainly too stupid to do much else.

The thing that jumps out at me is that the Local Institution is a right-wing propaganda machine, ramming their packaged screeds down Tom's throat daily. Or nightly, out in his car, for a few minutes...even, or especially, the re-runs.

NB: We've been yelling at kids to get off the lawn since FDR. Yall always seem surprised and non-plussed and vaguely superiour about it -- yet, you're winning, so I guess it's a good plan.

[Lee]

Listened to Savage only a couple of times. I'm not cool with him at all. That said, after catching Randi Rhodes little stand up incident, and more importantly the cheers she was getting while going off that cliff into cuckoo land, do we really want to draw conclusions on what the left is becoming?

[Wally]

Scott,
Those are not my assumptions. I was commenting on the failure of left-wing radio to catch afire not the, to me inexplicable, popularity if Rush Limbaugh. Do you fall into the category who believe he sells because he speaks truth to power?

[Scott]

"[S]peaks truth to power"? You're joking, right? That's such a vapid banality, I can't even type it without smirking.

[Steve]

Savage nuts??

On this we agree completely.

[Wally]

Trust me, I was smirking.

[Pursuit]

I love this. Michael Savage is quite literally the best thing on radio today. Of course, he's completely intolerable if you take him seriously, but when you realize the man is the best, most successful performance artist in the world today, you then glimpse his genius. Believe what he is saying? Not a chance in hell he believes half of it. Nope he is playing a role and eliciting a response in a way that Annie Sprinkle and others of the genre can only dream about. The fact that he is doing it from the conservative side of the fence only serves to highlight his brilliance.

[Scott]

I can't believe not one of you have (besides me) have remarked on the screeching left turn from Tom & Michael in the car together late at night to the Iwo Jima vets pissed off at Time's "art" director.

Personally, I'd kind of like to see this Wacom-wielding punk square up to two of the Marines who took the hardest piece of rock in the Pacific.

[Tom]

Scott, the nice thing about your last comment is this: I have no idea what you're talking about. I'm going to guess, however, that it's insulting.

[Scott]

A Wacom tablet is often used by graphic artists to push pixels around.