Tuesday, April 07, 2015

MICHAEL SAVAGE: JUST A MISUNDERSTOOD HIPSTER WHO'S ROOTING FOR A RACE WAR

No one who's paid attention to Michael Savage's political pronouncements over the years, on radio and in several bestselling books, will be surprised at this:
On the Friday edition of “Savage Nation,” right-wing talk show host Michael Savage said that President Obama is trying to destroy America by bringing “Third World haters” into the country and provoking white people to revolt against the government.

“The white man is a quiet man and a peaceful man,” Savage said, “and right now the white man is very, very quiet, and very, very peaceful, and like many dictators before him, Barack Obama thinks the white man will remain quiet and subdued forever. Hitler made that mistake; Hitler boasted that his supermen, his Hitler Youth, would easily wipe the floor with the GI Joes that were being sent over.... But it was the white man who defeated Superman in World War II. Let me tell you something else, you push the white man only so far, you’re going to have a reaction like you’ve never seen.”
But whenever I'm reminded of the ugliness of Savage's soul, I think back to the appalling profile of Savage that appeared in The New Yorker in 2009. That profile, by Kelefa Sanneh, portrayed Savage as an existential hipster and wildly inventive word-jazz artist cruelly deprived of the bien-piensant cult audience he richly deserves:
Even in this world of born-again refuseniks, Michael Savage is an anomaly: a heretic among heretics....

What he gives those listeners is one of the most addictive programs on radio, and one of the least predictable.... he delivers his analysis and his anecdotes in a vinegary New York accent, occasionally seasoned with Yiddish, and this voice alone conveys something of the nostalgia he feels for his boyhood in the Bronx and Queens, in the forties and fifties.

... Savage’s regular listeners ... know him to be, more days than not, a marvellous storyteller, a quirky thinker, and an incorrigible free-associater. He sometimes sounds less like a political commentator than like the star of a riveting and unusually vivid one-man play (he frequently dumps callers, even sympathetic ones, after about a sentence and a half), or a fugitive character out of a Philip Roth novel. Savage seems resigned to the fact that the majority of Americans, including many of his own listeners, just don’t get it -- just don’t get him -- and never will. He is a permanent resident of the political wilderness, sending daily dispatches back to the diseased civilization that the rest of us call home....

On his radio show that afternoon, Savage had played tracks by Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane, and he sought to draw a line connecting the music he loved as a boy, the herbal medicine he practiced as a young man, and the political philosophy he advocates now: in each case, he said, he was after a kind of freedom....
The only people for Savage are the mad ones! Savage saw the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness! ... Or, um, Obamacare. I forget which.

This is your "liberal media" -- always willing to give a vicious ideologue the benefit of the doubt, always operating on the assumption that it's rude to take one's own side in an argument, even when (or especially when) the person on the other side is an unreconstructed hatemonger. You go to the "liberal" press and read puff pieces on Megyn Kelly and tongue baths for Tom Cotton, and you think, Well, those two are within the pale, more or less. There are limits, right? Well, yes, there are limits. If you actually don a sheet and declare yourself a Klansman, as David Duke did, yes, the liberal media will allow as how you're really rather de trop. But short of that, any frothing hater can be an underappreciated genius in the eyes of the coastal media.

9 comments:

Victor said...

Properly cleaned and cooked, tripe is delicious.

That piece, was raw un-cleaned swine intestines, full of shit, and stinking to high Heaven.

I guess that because the subject gave time to interview him/her, our media people feel the need to puff them up and take off the edges that make razors look dull, as a thank you - and, please give me further access if I should need it.

Oy...

BKT said...

I guess I can understand reviewing a pundit's style as a thought exercise-- essentially, let's admire the way he says something-- but if you ignore WHAT he is saying, you're not really reporting. Context is critical.

Do they not teach that in journalism school? It seems like something that is fairly crucial to an understanding of any story...

aimai said...

No Hitlers unless they have those teeny, tiny, toothbrush mustaches! No KKK without white sheets. No radio shock jock ever means the things he says. He's just spitballing, doing performance art, being "absurd" as Limbaugh always says.

Unknown said...

Ummm, maybe the history books at my school crossed up some pics, but I was under the impression that Hitler was White, also.
Maybe it doesn't occur to these freaks, but their reckless characterizations of Obama's mindset and temperament can only lead any logical person to conclude that their hatred is entirely based on racism. Obama is such a disarmingly normal, even-tempered person that it makes these accusations exceedingly laughable.

J said...

If Savage thinks that the reference to Hitler as an enemy will mask the obvious affinities between his appeals to racial hatred and the Nazis', it isn't working.

Roger said...

It was the white man who WAS Superman in World War II.

And the United States Army had a million African-Americans, among other non-whites, in its ranks.

Savage is a racist piece of shit.

Professor Chaos said...

The media has fallen into this cult of "objectivity" wherein no matter how offensive or deranged some right-wing ranter is, he has to be treated as if he has some kind of a point. Just a different point of view than sane people.

Chai T. Ch'uan said...

Funny, whenever I'm reminded of the ugliness of Savage's soul, I think back to that real-life story about him eating out at a restaurant all by his miserable pathetic self, and heaping abuse on the wait staff:
http://tavernwench.blogspot.com/2005/09/semi-famous-radio-gasbags-behave.html
Oh, he tries hard to cheer himself up by undertipping and, as soon as he gets home, furiously kicking his tiny dog... But none of it seems to help his self-loathing, so he cries himself to sleep another night.

Steve M. said...

Thank you -- that's an amazing story.