Michael Weiner (who calls himself "Michael Savage) is distilled hate and nonsense
Kickin' Ass and Takin' Names
By Rory O'Connor and Aaron Cutler, AlterNet Books
Posted on May 23, 2008, Printed on May 23, 2008
http://www.alternet.org/story/86237/
Who is Michael Savage? On its surface the question seems obvious: he's
a 66-year-old nationally syndicated conservative talk radio host whose
program, The Savage Nation, airs five days a week from its home base
of KNEW in San Francisco. He's the founder of the Paul Revere Society,
which, according to its mission statement, aims to "take back our
borders, our language, and our traditional culture from the liberal
left corroding our great nation." He's a former MSNBC cable television
talk host who was red after four months on the job after he told a
phone caller, "You should only get AIDS and die, you pig." He's also
the third most popular radio talk show host in America, whose weekly
audience of more than eight million listeners is surpassed only by
Limbaugh and Hannity.
Dig deeper, however, and the question of who Savage is, and how truly
savage he is, becomes far more complicated. "Savage" isn't his real
name; it seems to speak to his heightened sense of masculinity, his
aggression, and his antipathy toward minorities. Born Michael Alan
Weiner, "Savage" is the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He earned
two master's degrees and a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from
that liberal bastion the University of California, Berkeley. He's
written two dozen books, five as Michael Savage and an additional 19
under his given name, on medicine, the subjects of which range from
maintaining a healthy diet to breaking a cocaine habit. But by any
name, he professes to know what's good for you.
Before the vitriolic monologist emerged, there was another, kinder and
gentler Michael. This one roamed Greenwich Village and the Bay Area in
the early 1970s, kept a weathered copy of On the Road in his back
pocket, and lay on the beach with the renowned beat poets Allen
Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti whenever he wasn't working on stand-
up comedy routines. He guarded Timothy Leary's LSD supply, and he even
once posed naked in a photograph with Ginsberg, a well-known and very
public homosexual, which he distributed among friends in an attempt to
prove himself part of the counterculture. At some point, however, more
than 25 years ago, something took a sinister turn and, like Prince Hal
rejecting Falstaff, Savage suddenly disavowed his former friends. In a
2006 interview for SF Weekly, Savage explained, "I was once a child; I
am now a man." In the same interview, he said of Ginsberg, "I looked
at him almost like a rabbinic figure. Little did I know that he was
the fucking devil." For Savage, rejecting his old friends was simply a
part of growing up.
The moralist, the healer, and the hedonist -- there's a tension
between his three identities, which interact like a trio of siblings
elbowing each other for seconds at the dinner table. As one listens to
his conservative radio talk personality, one is moved to question
whether it's his true self, not because Savage isn't consistent in his
views, but because the views are so grotesque it's difficult to
believe that anyone-let alone a former beatnik-could espouse them with
a straight face. While it's more than passing strange for a
homophobic, conservative radio host to work out of San Francisco,
Savage continues to broadcast nationally from his base in the city he
likes to call "San Fran Sicko."
Savage is so extreme that even many of his fellow right-wing talk
radio personalities don't like him. Bill O'Reilly calls him a "smear
merchant," while Neal Boortz refers to Savage as "the Antichrist."
Although Talkers Magazine recently bestowed its annual Freedom of
Speech award upon Savage, publisher Michael Harrison says he thinks
the man is "an asshole." Liberal advocacy organizations such as GLAAD
and ACLU have censured him. Liberal media watchdog groups have
compiled long lists of the especially inflammatory remarks Savage has
made-many of which must be heard or seen in print to be believed.
Collectively they justify the cautionary statement that is read by an
announcer before each edition of The Savage Nation.
Why do so many different people dislike Savage and his Nation? Perhaps
it's because Savage dislikes so many different people. In his book The
Savage Nation: Saving America from the Liberal Assault on Our Borders,
Language and Culture, he writes, "I was raised on neglect, anger, and
hate. I was raised the old-fashioned way." Despite claiming to have
originated the term "compassionate conservative" (and threatening to
sue George W. Bush for appropriating it), Savage is usually far more
passionate than compassionate. On the issue of illegal immigration, he
said:
"We, the people, are being displaced by the people of Mexico. This is
an invasion by any other name. Everybody with a brain understands
that. Everybody who understands reality understands we are being
pushed out of our own country."
On CNN news anchors:
"Wolf Blitzer, a Jew who was born in Israel, [is] probably the most
despicable man in the media next to Larry King, who takes a close
runner-up by the hair of a nose. The two of them together look like
the type that would have pushed Jewish children into the oven to stay
alive one more day to entertain the Nazis."
On homosexuality:
"The radical homosexual agenda will not stop until religion is
outlawed in this country. Make no mistake about it. They're all not
nice decorators
They threaten your very survival
Gay marriage is just the tip of the iceberg. They want full and total
subjugation of this society to their agenda."
And in conclusion:
"Why should we have constant sympathy for people who are freaks in
every society? I'm sick and tired of the whole country begging,
bending over backwards for the junkie, the freak, the pervert, the
illegal immigrant. All of them are better than everybody else. Sick."
Listening to a host for whom even George W. Bush is too liberal
(Savage particularly lambastes the president on immigration issues)
can be an intense experience. Yet millions of people do it. As New
Yorker editor Ben Greenman says, "People who listen to Savage say that
he's a little extreme but that some of the things he says are also
true. I think his show does encourage you to think for yourself,
because he's so weirdly contradictory."
Savage's three-hour program often consists of apoplectic rants-usually
against a particular group or groups of people allegedly doing damage
to America-that end with an animalistic, Network-like cry of "I can't
take this anymore!" During calmer times, Savage ends his monologues
with a huffy "That's just the way I see it." Sometimes Savage exhibits
a rare and startling tenderness, for instance in his fond
recollections of the lm director Elia Kazan (famous not only for On
the Waterfront but also for naming names to the House Un-American
Activities Committee).
And every so often Savage changes the subject, mentioning a great
barber he's been to recently or a good movie he's just seen. There is
something almost hypnotic about the up-and-down anger on the program;
even though Savage's views are not always internally coherent, he is
supremely confident and comfortable in expressing them. His ability to
steer the course without having to resort to logic to support his
points is a trait more often seen in politicians than commentators.
Indeed, Savage briefly (if laughably) mulled a run for the 2008
presidency on the grounds that since neither the Democrats nor the
Republicans were to be trusted, a nonpolitician like him might be
exactly what the country needed.
Savage's main sources of anger these days are illegal immigrants,
Islamic terrorists (a near-redundancy for him), and homosexuals.
Unlike his parents, who legally emigrated to the United States,
arriving in Ellis Island, illegal immigrants assault fundamental
American values-or so Savage claims. They not only compromise the
security of the border and bring drugs, crime, and disease with them,
but they threaten the American way of life-or at least the white male
way of life. In reference to Arabs, Savage has said that the "racist,
fascist bigots" should be converted to Christianity because
"Christianity has been one of the great salvations on planet Earth.
It's the only thing that can probably turn them into human beings."
The shift in Savage's attitudes toward homosexuality may be the most
revealing of his complex persona. When he was younger, his father
mocked Savage's sexuality. "Michael would have on tight black jeans
and a boat-necked sweater, and his dad would say, 'I don't like the
way you're dressed. You look like a fag,'" childhood friend Alan Zaitz
has said. In his first and only novel, Vital Signs, the protagonist (a
fortyish Jew named Samuel Trueblood who shares many of Savage's
biographical details) says, "I choose to override my desires for men
when they swell in me, waiting out the passions like a storm, below
decks." There are Savage's years with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti,
including a note to Ginsberg that read, "Watched a tourist from New
Zealand taking pictures of Fijian people in the marketplace [and]
thought of inserting my camera's lens in your A-hole to photograph the
walls of your rectum." These days, his attitude is outright hostility,
with, for instance, his continual assertion of a "homosexual mafia"
trying to control the state of world affairs. Savage has also said
that gay parenting is "child abuse" and that the sight of a gay couple
"makes me want to puke."
In an interview with the right-wing Web site NewsMax.com, Savage said,
"I guess people love my show because of my hard edge combined with
humor and education. Those who listen to me say they hear a bit of
Plato, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Moses, Jesus, and Frankenstein."
Frankenstein aside, that's not bad company, and hyperbole
notwithstanding, there are still many members of the conservative
faith who swear by him. He has been married to the same woman for 40
years and has two children, a daughter, who is a teacher, and a son,
who is the creator of the RockStar Energy Drink. His wild popularity
allows him to make increasingly outrageous statements:
"Victims of the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami deserved the devastation
because they were harboring terrorists; Democratic presidential
candidate Senator Barack Obama was trained in a madrassa."
One consistent quality of Savage's vitriol is that he spares no one he
feels is contributing to the problem. The Republican Party and the
Catholic Church, both of which wanted to help illegal aliens, were
equally subject to his wrath.
Over and over again, one wonders where Savage's interest lies, why he
is so angry and why he seems to take it all so personally. "It really
is a mystery. I have no idea what happened to Michael Weiner," says
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, whom Savage has gleefully denounced after his
Bay Area days as the owner of "that once-famous communist bookstore,"
City Lights. "We were his friends, and as far as I know, we never did
anything to him."
Order your copy of Shock Jocks right now!
https://www.alternet.org/books/9/Shock+Jocks%3A+Hate+Speech+and+Talk+Radio+/
Filmmaker and journalist Rory O'Connor is now completing AlterNet’s
first-ever book, which is on the subject of right-wing radio talkers
like O’Reilly, and will be available early in 2008. O'Connor also
writes the Media Is A Plural blog.
© 2008 AlterNet Books All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/86237/
lora...@cs.com
<PopUlist...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> The Most Savage Shock Jock of Them All
> By Rory O'Connor and Aaron Cutler, AlterNet Books
> Posted on May 23, 2008, Printed on May 23, 2008http://www.alternet.org/story/86237/
As I posted here a few months ago... his monker should be 'The Savage
Weener'.
testingt...@aol.com
Scotius
@m73g2000hsh.googlegroups.com>, PopUl...@hotmail.com says...
> first-ever book, which is on the subject of right-wing radio talkers
> writes the Media Is A Plural blog.
>
> © 2008 AlterNet Books All rights reserved.
> View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/86237/
>
I heard him rambling one night while I was in Indiana last summer
sitting in the car and listening to what was available.
He was talking about how Dads shouldn't go bowling with their
kids, or be their kids' friend... no, no. Rather, "be an example...
teach them something... they have no discipline of their own, and if
left to their own devices will make the worst choices for themselves"
etc kind of thing.
Sure, be an example, and don't let them eat two tonnes of popcorn,
but this asshole has something against FUN. That's unamerican.
He sat there spouting it too as if it was something he thought was
extremely smart... that's what surprised me. It was like he thought he
was the advice giver from the holy mount, and everyone ought to listen.
He even disses other conservative talk show hosts because he can't stand
to be compared to anyone, since that would mean being a "peer" rather
than somehow above even them. He's a friggin' loony.
I just saw footage on YouTube the other day of him arguing with
some NBA player. He's a dork.