Idiot America: How Stupidity Became a Virtue in the Land of the Free (16 page)

John R. also promoted and produced new artists. It was he who got a hot young guitar player named James Stephens to call himself Guitar Slim. In 1967, Jim Stewart, cofounder of Stax
Records in Memphis, signed over his share of the publishing rights to a single called “These Arms of Mine,” by an unknown soul belter named Otis Redding. Richbourg “must have played that record for six months literally, every night, over and over, and finally broke it,” Stewart later recalled. With the Grand Ole Opry two blocks away, he helped turn Nashville into a center for R&B.

“One city in particular that tends to be associated with a single genre of music is Nashville, Tennessee,” wrote David Sanjek, in a study of African-American entrepreneurship after World War II. “… Nashville has been a thriving center for the playing of a wide range of African American musical forms over the public airwaves—principally through the disc jockeys Gene Nobles and John Richbourg (John R.) of … WLAC.”

Gradually, John R. and WLAC were integrating the country, even if the country pretended not to notice. They recognized no rules, so they abided by none. They introduced the country to a soul it didn’t know it had, one so vast and indomitable that it was able to overcome—in the three minutes it took to play a 45 record—even the artificial barriers of race and class and region. John R. carved a niche big enough for everyone, and he helped develop the next generation of artists, who would break down the barriers entirely. WLAC was deeply and truly subversive, and you could buy baby chicks from its advertisers if you wanted.

It couldn’t last, although John R. hung on for three decades. Top 40, ironically, did him in. WLAC went to a tightly programmed musical format, and John R. hated it. He did his last shift on June 28, 1973. He kept his hand in, producing some records and teaching broadcasting. In 1985, his health went bad. Phil Walden of Capricorn Records put together an all-star tribute to him in Nashville. Walden was one of the thousands of
southern kids who’d fallen asleep by the light of the radio. “I am a better person just for knowing you,” Walden wrote to him in a letter not long before the show. Rufus and Carla Thomas played. So did B. B. King and James Brown. John R. died a year later, at seventy-five. Ella Washington sang “Amazing Grace” at his funeral.

WLAC moved out of the old insurance building. It’s now in an office on a hill not far from the gleaming towers that have housed Music Row since the record companies moved up and out and the Opry moved out of the Ryman Auditorium. WLAC is now owned by Clear Channel, the massive media conglomerate, and you can see from the signs by the door how radio has resegregated itself, not by race, but by niche. There’s WUBT (“The Beat”) and WNRQ (“The Rock”), and WRVW (“The River”). And there’s WLAC, 1510 AM, now Nashville’s “News-Talk Leader.” Except for Steve Gill, who does a local show in the afternoon, WLAC relies on nationally syndicated talk shows for its basic programming.

The station is the state of the art. It is a quiet place. Nobody bustles from room to room. Phones ring softly in small cubicles. There is a low buzz of quiet conversation, but there’s no sense that anyone is really working here. Even the sales department is placid. You can no more imagine a whiskey-soaked poker game breaking out than you can imagine an elephant stampede in the hallway. The inside of the building is of a piece with the sign on the wall outside. It is a place made of niches, each one carefully cut and shaped to fit a specific audience, each making its quotas, the space between them dull and impermeable.

The national shows all come in by satellite. “Every commercial break, every news break, has a tone that we receive, so we know they’re coming,” says Patrick Blankenship, a young man who’s engineering the programming at WLAC the afternoon of
my visit. He’s heard the history of the station, and he thinks it might have been fun to work here “when they were doing R&B, and there was that kind of frenzy.”

Every day from three
P.M.
to six
P.M.
, Sean Hannity’s show goes sailing out over the 50,000 watts of WLAC, saying exactly the same thing that he’s saying to thirteen million people on five hundred other stations, talking to this particular part of a country full of people grown bored with talking to themselves. Once, WLAC did something remarkable—it developed and sustained a subversive unity that would help undermine the divisions that held America together. Now, though, far away, one computer talks to a satellite, and the satellite talks to another computer down in Nashville in an office filled with the low and melancholy hum of remorseless corporate efficiency. Nobody sells baby chicks here anymore.

“I’ve
heard the stories,” said Steve Gill, whose show precedes Sean Hannity’s on WLAC. Gill’s a big, friendly bear of a guy with a down-home accent that stands out at the New Media Conference. “One time, Jesse Jackson was in Nashville,” Gill recalled, “and he came on the station and talked about how he used to listen to WLAC when he was coming up in North Carolina.

“When I started there, Hoss Allen [another legendary WLAC DJ, whose show followed John R.’s back in the old days] used to still be around, and he used to talk about how surprised people always used to be back in his day to find out he was white. I mean, everybody thought he was black.”

Gill stood talking outside the movie theater in which the conference was about to give its coveted Freedom of Speech Award
to a nationally syndicated talk host named Michael Savage. It is not a major exaggeration to say that Savage makes Gordon Liddy sound like Bertrand Russell. Not to put too fine a point upon it, Michael Savage, whose work this conference is preparing to drape in ermine, is a raving public nutcase.

Born Michael Weiner, he studied anthropology and ethnobiology, picking up two master’s degrees at the University of Hawaii and a Ph.D. from the University of California. In the latter field, he briefly came into the public eye in the 1980s, when he took an obscure research paper concerning the high incidence of Alzheimer’s disease in Canadian bauxite miners and turned it into something of an international brouhaha in which aluminum came to be blamed for the disease. People threw out aluminum cookware. Glass bottlers ran TV commercials meant to scare the people who still drank their beer out of cans. The frenzy didn’t truly abate until the genetic markers for AD began to be discovered.

But Weiner didn’t go off the rails until he’d changed his name and become a talk show host. Based in San Francisco—on KGO, the station run by the same Jack Swanson who would have fired Don Imus and then himself—Savage quickly went national. An estimated six million listeners on three hundred stations were treated to rambling, barely coherent babble about “Turd World” immigrants, gay people, treasonous liberals (“They’ll kill you because they’re deranged!”), castrating feminists (“human wreckage in high heels”), self-hating Jews, and other denizens of the menagerie that Savage apparently has running around between his ears. The Million Mom March was “the Million Dyke March.” Speaking of high school students who were spending time feeding the homeless, Savage suggested that, “There’s always the thrill and possibility that they’ll be raped in a Dumpster while giving out a turkey sandwich.”

And he’d said all of this before MSNBC decided to put him on television.

Savage, said Erik Sorensen, the alleged adult who hired him, was “brash, passionate, and smart.” Thus Sorensen pretended, in vain, that he wasn’t just trying to bring in those six million listeners attracted by someone who celebrates Yom Kippur by running tapes of Adolf Hitler’s speeches.

Mercifully, the TV show proved short-lived, Savage celebrated the Fourth of July by stuffing sausages into his mouth while telling a gay caller to “get AIDS and die, you pig,” thus burying himself beneath a half ton of Freudian irony. This might have been enough to sink most careers but, once carved, a niche is forever. Now a victim of the dreaded censorious liberal media—and not, as reality would have it, of a rare spasm of common decency in the world of pundit television—Savage found his talk radio career flourishing even more, until we all gathered in New York to honor him. Less than a year later, Savage would pass along the shocking news that childhood autism was “a fraud and a racket…. I’ll tell you what autism is. In ninety-nine percent of the cases, it’s a brat who hasn’t been told to cut the act out. That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent. They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Stop acting like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there screaming and crying, idiot.’”

The autism community exploded in rage. Savage lost some sponsors, and some stations even canceled his show. Mark Masters, whose Talk Radio Network brings Michael Savage to the nation, summoned up all the spine of a ficus to complain: “Unfortunately, by condensing his multifaceted concerns into 84 seconds of commentary, the … context for his remarks was not apparent.”

Savage’s remarks could not have come as any shock to anyone who’d been in the theater on the afternoon of the Free Speech presentation. Michael Savage got this award because people were willing to pay him to say exactly the kind of thing he said.

The award was preceded by a speech by Alan Colmes, a tall, passive-looking man who once played the role of Sean Hannity’s heavy-bag every night on Fox television. Colmes took the pseudo-Lockean high road previously trod by Michael Harrison: “As much as I find much of what Michael Savage says despicable,” he intoned, “I am reminded that there are many people who find what I say despicable. I don’t want to live in a country where Michael Savage can’t say the things he says, because I’m next, or any one of us could be next.”

Colmes declined to mention how many times he’s speculated on his show how lucky it would be for, say, comely freshmen at Bob Jones University to experience the “thrill” of being raped behind an athletic dorm. He also failed to explain exactly how Michael Savage has been imperiled by anyone save the voices in his own head. But, good liberal that he was, he did mention that Savage had been “the first conservative to speak out against this so-called conservative administration.”

Of course, Savage did so because the administration had declined to fulfill his fondest wish, which was to clap in irons everyone who looked like an illegal immigrant and drop them into San Francisco Bay. Savage was operating well within his niche, selling the product he was paid to sell. To do anything else would be to throw on the table a new intellectual commodity, for which his market might not pay. What Colmes praised as an act of intellectual courage really was little more than Savage’s reluctance to try to sell New Coke to his established audience. “Who gets to decide?” Colmes meeped. The answer, apparently, was nobody. We are all ennobled by the blessings of a country in
which someone can make a fortune talking about “dog-grilling” Koreans on the radio.

One tires of this easily. Colmes’s attempt to graft an intellectual conscience onto an industry based on profitable ignorance was exhausting. It was like watching someone try to explain that his hippo could conjugate verbs. Fortunately, Mark Masters came along with precisely the right corrective. “When I heard Michael Savage,” he said, “I thought this was the spark that might give life to independent syndication. Everyone thought I was crazy, and we didn’t get paid for two years. But, eventually, Savage proved we could do it, and I’m grateful for that. If it hadn’t been for Michael Savage, I couldn’t have relaunched Talk Radio Network.”

Savage didn’t come to New York to pick up his award. Unexplained “personal reasons” kept him home in the city he calls “San Fran Sicko.” Instead, he sent a DVD of his acceptance speech. The house lights dimmed. Savage appeared on screen, mysteriously walking down a dock by the ocean. He looked like someone who’d gotten drunk at the yacht club cotillion and spent the next four days sleeping in the boat basin. The video mysteriously kept jump-cutting between Savage on the dock and Savage standing in front of what appeared to be a clam shack. It was an altogether remarkable film. It looked like a hostage tape.

Savage veered wildly between truckling gratitude for the recognition, and paranoid ramblings about the people who have set about to destroy him, and thus, presumably, all of us. These included adherents of the “environmental faith” who “want to make it a crime to deny global warming.” The identity of these Tofu Torquemadas remains a mystery.

There is some stirring in the theater. This display is not what many of those present had in mind. This is the acknowledged
leader of their profession, and he’s acting like a guy you’d run away from on the sidewalk. He waves his arms. He shouts at the sky. If there were a moon out, he’d be howling at it.

“Freedom of speech has never been in such a perilous state as it is today,” Savage bellowed, as a few people in the distant rows begin to filter toward the back doors of the theater. “That is because in Venezuela, the dictator Hugo Chavez just shut down a TV network. That can’t happen here, you say? Oh, it can’t?

“As I speak, Congressman [Maurice] Hinchey of New York … and others are circulating a bill in Congress to return the so-called Fairness Doctrine. Which means that people like Michael Savage will not be able to speak freely. Is that any different than Chavez shutting down a TV network? Is that not dictatorship?”