Remember my post about mean-spirited, childish right-wingers? I’d like to add this guy to the list.
His name is Michael Savage. He’s a radio personality in the mold of Mark Levin and Rush Limbaugh. He’s a nasty, angry, middle-aged white man. I couldn’t tell you why he’s angry. He’s successful, famous in his genre and lives a pretty good life. But it bothers him that there are other people out there who want good lives, too. He can’t imagine why they would try to get that good life by whatever means possible. He doesn’t believe that there is an experience beyond his own that has any value.
He doesn’t work for Fox, but I’m sure they’d be happy to have him.
Savage is `the guy who has a sweeping back-end answer to everything. Put the homeless in jail, make undocumented immigrants into indentured servants. Don’t look behind the curtain. Don’t consider long-term solutions that would help alleviate the problems. We should always do something big and grandiose and obvious to show how macho and in-control we are. Besides, social problems that might cause homelessness or anything else are all figments of the extreme left’s imagination.
Savage is both too self-absorbed and to immature to look at the big picture. If there’s a problem, sweep it away. Never mind that it hasn’t really gone. To him the poor, the homeless and the mentally ill are only that way to annoy him and to ruin his view. Yes, that makes perfect sense. I’m sure a quick survey of people taking shelter in doorways or pushing shopping carts around would reveal that they are willing to suffer endless suffering and humiliation just to make Michael Savage’s life slightly less pleasant.
OR Savage is a charlatan, a poseur, a flim-flam man. He may be smart enough to know better. He may know that every salacious word that comes out of his mouth is adolescent crap. In this scenario, he isn’t one of the sad, deluded people who listen to him. Instead, he’s manipulating them to his own ends. In this alternate, but not inconceivable world, Savage is a rational guy who doesn’t throw bombs, pull “facts” out of his ass and wouldn’t propose nutty, simplistic solutions to huge and complex problems – in his private life.
In this world, Savage knows how badly his listeners want to believe not only that they can “have their country back,” but that they can have it back quickly and relatively easily if they can just get Barack Obama out of the White House and put the government back in the hands of good, white, xenophobic Christians who’ll drive everyone else out and leave America to be the decent, exceptional, Jesus-loving place that they remember – even though that American never actually existed. He knows it and he uses it. It’s not that hard. Rush Limbaugh has been doing it for million-dollar after multi-million-dollar year. Start screaming about something – anything, really, but it’s best if there’s a racial component – blow it completely out of proportion, vilify the other side and then propose the most inhumane “solution” possible. The millions who think there’s a Red or a terrorist around every corner will eat it up.
Either way, it’s working for the Savages and Limbaughs and Alex Joneses of media. They’re all doing great. In the process, they’ve created public personas that are a reflection of the worst of what America is. Savage chose an appropriate nom de broadcast. (Michael Alan Weiner would have been kind of laughable for a guy trying so hard to be tough.) His ideas are savage and he seems comfortable with that.
Who in God’s name listens to guys like this and how can we bring them back to the real world?