Flat, Crowded, And Moronic

The Article: Matt Taibbi’s review of Thomas Friedmans latest book, Hot, Flat and Crowded.

The Text: When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 11,400 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.

I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Thomas Friedman for more than a decade now. For most of that time, I just thought he was funny. And admittedly, what I thought was funniest about him was the kind of stuff that only another writer would really care about—in particular his tortured use of the English language. Like George W. Bush with his Bushisms, Friedman came up with lines so hilarious you couldn’t make them up even if you were trying—and when you tried to actually picture the “illustrative” figures of speech he offered to explain himself, what you often ended up with was pure physical comedy of the Buster Keaton/Three Stooges school, with whole nations and peoples slipping and falling on the misplaced banana peels of his literary endeavors.

Remember Friedman’s take on Bush’s Iraq policy? “It’s OK to throw out your steering wheel,” he wrote, “as long as you remember you’re driving without one.” Picture that for a minute. Or how about Friedman’s analysis of America’s foreign policy outlook last May:

The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging.When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.”

First of all, how can any single person be in three holes at once? Secondly, what the fuck is he talking about? If you’re supposed to stop digging when you’re in one hole, why should you dig more in three? How does that even begin to make sense? It’s stuff like this that makes me wonder if the editors over at the New York Times editorial page spend their afternoons dropping acid or drinking rubbing alcohol. Sending a line like that into print is the journalism equivalent of a security guard at a nuke plant waving a pair of mullahs in explosive vests through the front gate. It should never, ever happen.

Even better was this gem from one of Friedman’s latest columns: “The fighting, death and destruction in Gaza is painful to watch. But it’s all too familiar. It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? Can the Jews have a room? And shouldn’t we blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque?” There are many serious questions one could ask about this passage, but the one that leaped out at me was this: In the “title” of that long-running play, is it supposed to be the same person asking all three of those questions? If so, does that person suffer from multiple personality disorder? Because in the first question, he is a neutral/ignorant observer of the Mideast drama; in the second he sympathizes with the Jews; in the third he’s a radical Muslim. Moreover, after you blow up the bar and replace it with a mosque, is the surrounding hotel still there? Why would anyone build a mosque in a half-blown-up hotel? Perhaps Friedman should have written the passage like this: “It’s the latest version of the longest-running play in the modern Middle East, which, if I were to give it a title, would be called: “Who owns this hotel? And why did a person suffering from multiple personality disorder build a mosque inside it after blowing up the bar and asking if there was a room for the Jews? Why? Because his editor’s been drinking rubbing alcohol!” OK, so maybe all of this is unfair.There are a lot of people out there who think Friedman has not been treated fairly by critics like me, that focusing on his literary struggles is a snobbish, below-the-belt tactic—a cheap shot that belies the strength of his overall “arguments.” Who cares, these people say, if Friedman’s book The World is Flat should probably have been titled Theif he had wanted the book’s title to match its “point” about living in an age of increased global interconnectedness? And who cares if it doesn’t quite make sense when Friedman says that Iraq is like a “vase we broke in order to get rid of the rancid water inside?”Who cares that you can just pour water out of a vase, that only a fucking lunatic breaks a perfectly good vase just to empty it of water? You’re missing the point, folks say, and the point is all in Friedman’s highly nuanced ideas about world politics and the economy—if you could just get past his well-meaning attempts to explain himself, you’d see that, and maybe you’d even learn something.

My initial answer to that is that Friedman’s language choices over the years have been highly revealing: When a man who thinks you need to break a vase to get the water out of it starts arguing that you need to invade a country in order to change the minds of its people, you might want to start paying attention to how his approach to the vase problem worked out.Thomas Friedman is not a president, a pope, a general on the field of battle or any other kind of man of action. He doesn’t actually do anything apart from talk about shit in a newspaper. So in my mind it’s highly relevant if his manner of speaking is fucked.

But whatever, let’s concede the point, forget about the crazy metaphors for a moment, and look at the actual content of Hot, Flat and Crowded. Many people have rightly seen this new greenish pseudo-progressive tract as an ideological departure from Friedman’s previous works, which were all virtually identical exercises in bald greed-worship and capitalist tent-pitching. Approach-and-rhetoric wise, however, it’s the same old Friedman, a tireless social scientist whose research methods mainly include lunching, reading road signs, and watching people board airplanes.

Like The World is Flat, a book borne of Friedman’s stirring experience of seeing IBM sign in the distance while golfing in Bangalore, Hot,Flat and Crowded is a book whose great insights come when Friedman golfs (on global warming allowing him more winter golf days:“I will still take advantage of it—but I no longer think of it as something I got for free”), looks at Burger King signs (upon seeing a “nightmarish neon blur” of KFC, BK and McDonald’s signs in Texas, he realizes: “We’re on a fool’s errand”), and reads bumper stickers (the “Osama Loves your SUV” sticker he read turns into the thesis of his “Fill ‘er up with Dictators” chapter). This is Friedman’s life: He flies around the world, eats pricey lunches with other rich people and draws conclusions about the future of humanity by looking out his hotel window and counting the Applebee’s signs.

Friedman frequently uses a rhetorical technique that goes something like this: “I was in Dubai with the general counsel of BP last year, watching 500 Balinese textile workers get on a train, when suddenly I said to myself, ‘We need better headlights for our tri-plane.’” And off he goes.You the reader end up spending so much time wondering what Dubai, BP and all those Balinese workers have to do with the rest of the story that you don’t notice that tri-planes don’t have headlights.And by the time you get all that sorted out, your well-lit tri-plane is flying from chapter to chapter delivering a million geo-green pizzas to a million Noahs on a million Arks. And you give up. There’s so much shit flying around the book’s atmosphere that you don’t notice the only action is Friedman talking to himself.

In The World is Flat, the key action scene of the book comes when Friedman experiences his pseudo-epiphany about the Flat world while talking with himself in front of InfoSys CEO Nandan Nilekani. In Hot, Flat and Crowded, the money shot comes when Friedman starts doodling on a napkin over lunch with Moisés Naím, editor of Foreign Policy magazine. The pre-lunching Friedman starts drawing, and the wisdom just comes pouring out:

I laid out my napkin and drew a graph showing how there seemed to be a rough correlation between the price of oil, between 1975 and 2005, and the pace of freedom in oil-producing states during those same years.

Friedman then draws his napkin-graph, and much to the pundit’s surprise, it turns out that there is almost an exact correlation between high oil prices and “unfreedom”! The graph contains two lines, one showing a rising and then descending slope of “freedom,” and one showing a descending and then rising course of oil prices.

Friedman plots exactly four points on the graph over the course of those 30 years. In 1989, as oil prices are falling, Friedman writes, “Berlin Wall Torn Down.” In 1993, again as oil prices are low, he writes, “Nigeria Privatizes First Oil Field.” 1997, oil prices still low, “Iran Calls for Dialogue of Civilizations.” Then, finally, 2005, a year of high oil prices: “Iran calls for Israel’s destruction.”Take a look for yourself: I looked at this and thought: “Gosh, what a neat trick!” Then I sat down and drew up my own graph, called SIZE OF VALERIE BERTINELLI’S ASS, 1985-2008, vs. HAP- PINESS. It turns out that there is an almost exact correlation! Note the four points on the graph:

1990: Release of Miller’s Crossing

1996-97: Crabs

2001: Ate bad tuna fish sandwich at Times Square Blimpie; felt sick 2008: Barack Obama elected

That was so much fun, I drew another one! This one is called AMERICAN PORK BELLY PRICES vs. WHAT MIDGETS THINK ABOUT AUSTRALIA 1972-2002.

Or how about this one, called NUMBER OF ONE- EYED RETARDED FLIES IN THE STATE OF NORTH CAROLINA vs. LIKELIHOOD OF NUCLEAR COM- BAT ON INDIAN SUBCONTINENT.

Obviously this sounds like a flippant analysis, but that’s more or less exactly what Friedman is up to here. If you’re going to draw a line that measures the level of “freedom” across the entire world and on that line plot just four randomly-selected points in time over the course of 30 years—and one of your top four “freedom points” in a 30-year period of human history is the privatization of a Nigerian oil field—well, what the fuck? What can’t you argue, if that’s how you’re going to make your point? He could have graphed a line in the opposite direction by replacing Berlin with Tiananmen Square, substituting Iraqi elections for Iran’s call for Israel’s destruction (incidentally, when in the last half-century or so have Islamic extremists not called for Israel’s destruction?), junking Iran’s 1997 call for dialogue for the U.S. sanctions against Iran in ’95, and so on. It’s crazy, a game of Scrabble where the words don’t have to connect on the board, or a mathematician coming up with the equation A B -3X = Swedish girls like chocolate.

Getting to the “ideas” in the book: Its basic premise is that America’s decades-long habit of gluttonous energy consumption has adversely affected humanity because a) while the earth could support America’s indulgence, it can’t sustain two billion endlessly-copulating Chinese should they all choose to live in American-style excess, and b) the exploding global demand for oil artificially subsidizes repressive Middle Eastern dictatorships that would otherwise have to rely on tax revenue (read: listen to their people) in order to survive, and this subsidy leads to terrorism and a spread of “unfreedom.”

Regarding the first point, Friedman writes:

Because if the spread of freedom and free markets is not accompanied by a new approach to how we produce energy and treat the environment… then Mother Nature and planet earth will impose their own constraints and limits on our way of life—constraints that will be worse than communism.

Three observations about this touching and seemingly remarkable development, i.e. onetime unrepentant free-market icon Thomas Friedman suddenly coming out huge for the environment and against the evils of gross consumerism:

1. The need for massive investment in green energy is an idea so obvious and inoffensive that even presidential candidates from both parties could be seen fighting over who’s for it more in nationally televised debates last fall;

2. I wish I had the balls to first spend six long years madly cheering on an Iraq war that not only reintroduced Sharia law to the streets of Baghdad, but radicalized the entire Islamic world against American influence—and then write a book blaming the spread of fundamentalist Islam on the ignorant consumers of the middle American heartland, who bought too many Hummers and spent too much time shopping for iPods in my wife’s giganto-malls.

3. To review quickly, the “Long Bomb” Iraq war plan Friedman supported as a means of transforming the Middle East blew up in his and everyone else’s face; the “Electronic Herd” of highly volatile international capital markets he once touted as an economic cure-all not only didn’t pan out, but led the world into a terrifying chasm of seemingly irreversible economic catastrophe; his beloved “Golden Straitjacket” of American-style global development (forced on the world by the “hidden fist” of American military power) turned out to be the vehicle for the very energy/ecological crisis Friedman himself warns about in his new book; and, most humorously, the “Flat World” consumer economics Friedman marveled at so voluminously turned out to be grounded in such total unreality that even his wife’s once-mighty shopping mall empire, General Growth Properties, has lost 99 percent of its value in this year alone.

So, yes, Friedman is suddenly an environmentalist of sorts.

What the fuck else is he going to be? All the other ideas he spent the last ten years humping have been blown to hell. Color me unimpressed that he scrounged one more thing to sell out of the smoldering, discredited wreck that should be his career; that he had the good sense to quickly reinvent himself before angry Gods remembered to dash his brains out with a lightning bolt. But better late than never, I suppose. Or as Friedman might say, “Better two cell phones than a fish in your zipper.”

See Also: Matt Taibbi: Someone Take Away Thomas Friedman’s Computer Before He Types Another Sentence, Thomas Friedman is a buncombe dealer, More Friedman follies, Clipping the Mustache, and The trouble with Friedman.

[tags]matt taibbi, matt taibi, review of hot flat and crowded, thomas friedman, tom friedman, review, book review, hot flat and crowded, the world is flat, economics, globalization, thomas friedman is a fucking idiot, new york times[/tags]

John Ziegler: Professional Prick

The Article: Host by the late David Foster Wallace from the April 2005 edition of the Atlantic.

The Text: Mr. John Ziegler, thirty-seven, late of Louisville’s WHAS, is now on the air, “Live and Local,” from 10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. every weeknight on southern California’s KFI, a 50,000-watt megastation whose hourly ID and Sweeper, designed by the station’s Imaging department and featuring a gravelly basso whisper against licks from Ratt’s 1984 metal classic “Round and Round,” is “KFI AM-640, Los Angeles—More Stimulating Talk Radio.” This is either the eighth or ninth host job that Mr. Ziegler’s had in his talk-radio career, and far and away the biggest. He moved out here to LA over Christmas—alone, towing a U-Haul—and found an apartment not far from KFI’s studios, which are in an old part of the Koreatown district, near Wilshire Center.

The John Ziegler Show is the first local, nonsyndicated late-night program that KFI has aired in a long time. It’s something of a gamble for everyone involved. Ten o’clock to one qualifies as late at night in southern California, where hardly anything reputable’s open after nine.

It is currently right near the end of the program’s second segment on the evening of May 11, 2004, shortly after Nicholas Berg’s taped beheading by an al-Qaeda splinter in Iraq. Dressed, as is his custom, for golf, and wearing a white-billed cap w/ corporate logo, Mr. Ziegler is seated by himself in the on-air studio, surrounded by monitors and sheaves of Internet downloads. He is trim, clean-shaven, and handsome in the somewhat bland way that top golfers and local TV newsmen tend to be. His eyes, which off-air are usually flat and unhappy, are alight now with passionate conviction. Only some of the studio’s monitors concern Mr. Z.’s own program; the ones up near the ceiling take muted, closed-caption feeds from Fox News, MSNBC, and what might be C-SPAN. To his big desk’s upper left is a wall-mounted digital clock that counts down seconds. His computer monitors’ displays also show the exact time.

Across the soundproof glass of the opposite wall, another monitor in the Airmix room is running an episode of The Simpsons, also muted, which both the board op and the call screener are watching with half an eye.

Pendent in front of John Ziegler’s face, attached to the same type of hinged, flexible stand as certain student desk lamps, is a Shure-brand broadcast microphone that is sheathed in a gray foam filtration sock to soften popped p’s and hissed sibilants. It is into this microphone that the host speaks:

“And I’ll tell you why—it’s because we’re better than they are.”

A Georgetown B.A. in government and philosophy, scratch golfer, former TV sportscaster, possible world-class authority on the O.J. Simpson trial, and sometime contributor to MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, Mr. Ziegler is referring here to America versus what he terms “the Arab world.” It’s near the end of his “churn,” which is the industry term for a host’s opening monologue, whose purpose is both to introduce a show’s nightly topics and to get listeners emotionally stimulated enough that they’re drawn into the program and don’t switch away. More than any other mass medium, radio enjoys a captive audience—if only because so many of the listeners are driving—but in a major market there are dozens of AM stations to listen to, plus of course FM and satellite radio, and even a very seductive and successful station rarely gets more than a five or six percent audience share.

“We’re not perfect, we suck a lot of the time, but we are better as a people, as a culture, and as a society than they are, and we need to recognize that, so that we can possibly even begin to deal with the evil that we are facing.”

When Mr. Z.’s impassioned, his voice rises and his arms wave around (which obviously only those in the Airmix room can see). He also fidgets, bobs slightly up and down in his executive desk chair, and weaves. Although he must stay seated and can’t pace around the room, the host does not have to keep his mouth any set distance from the microphone, since the board op, ‘Mondo Hernandez, can adjust his levels on the mixing board’s channel 7 so that Mr. Z.’s volume always stays in range and never peaks or fades. ‘Mondo, whose price for letting outside parties hang around Airmix is one large bag of cool-ranch Doritos per evening, is an immense twenty-one-year-old man with a ponytail, stony Mesoamerican features, and the placid, grandmotherly eyes common to giant mammals everywhere. Keeping the studio signal from peaking is one of ‘Mondo’s prime directives, along with making sure that each of the program’s scheduled commercial spots is loaded into Prophet and run at just the right time, whereupon he must confirm that the ad has run as scheduled in the special Airmix log he signs each page of, so that the station can bill advertisers for their spots. ‘Mondo, who started out two years ago as an unpaid intern and now earns ten dollars an hour, works 7:00—1:00 on weeknights and also board-ops KFI’s special cooking show on Sundays. As long as he’s kept under forty hours a week, which he somehow always just barely is, the station is not obliged to provide ‘Mondo with employee benefits.

The Nick Berg beheading and its Internet video compose what is known around KFI as a “Monster,” meaning a story that has both high news value and tremendous emotional voltage. As is SOP in political talk radio, the emotions most readily accessed are anger, outrage, indignation, fear, despair, disgust, contempt, and a certain kind of apocalyptic glee, all of which the Nick Berg thing’s got in spades. Mr. Ziegler, whose program is in only its fourth month at KFI, has been fortunate in that 2004 has already been chock-full of Monsters—Saddam’s detention, the Abu Ghraib scandal, the Scott Peterson murder trial, the Greg Haidl gang-rape trial, and preliminary hearings in the rape trial of Kobe Bryant. But tonight is the most angry, indignant, disgusted, and impassioned that Mr. Z.’s gotten on-air so far, and the consensus in Airmix is that it’s resulting in some absolutely first-rate talk radio.

John Ziegler, who is a talk-radio host of unflagging industry, broad general knowledge, mordant wit, and extreme conviction, makes a particular specialty of media criticism. One object of his disgust and contempt in the churn so far has been the U.S. networks’ spineless, patronizing decision not to air the Berg videotape and thus to deny Americans “a true and accurate view of the barbarity, the utter depravity, of these people.” Even more outrageous, to Mr. Z., is the mainstream media’s lack of outrage about Berg’s taped murder versus all that same media’s hand-wringing and invective over the recent photos of alleged prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison, which he views as a clear indication of the deluded, blame-America-first mentality of the U.S. press. It is an associated contrast between Americans’ mortified response to the Abu Ghraib photos and reports of the Arab world’s phlegmatic reaction to the Berg video that leads to his churn’s climax, which is that we are plainly, unambiguously better than the Arab world—whereupon John Ziegler invites listeners to respond if they are so moved, repeats the special mnemonic KFI call-in number, and breaks for the :30 news and ads, on time to the second, as ‘Mondo takes ISDN feed from Airwatch and the program’s associate producer and call screener, Vince Nicholas—twenty-six and hiply bald—pushes back from his console and raises both arms in congratulation, through the glass.

It goes without saying that there are all different kinds of stimulation. Depending on one’s politics, sensitivities, and tastes in argumentation, it is not hard to think of objections to John Ziegler’s climactic claim, or at least of some urgent requests for clarification. Like: Exactly what and whom does “the Arab world” refer to? And why are a few editorials and man-on-the-street interviews sufficient to represent the attitude and character of a whole diverse region? And why is al-Jazeera’s showing of the Berg video so awful if Mr. Z. has just castigated the U.S. networks for not showing it? Plus, of course, what is “better” supposed to mean here? More moral? More diffident about our immorality? Is it not, in our own history, pretty easy to name some Berg-level atrocities committed by U.S. nationals, or agencies, or even governments, and approved by much of our populace? Or perhaps this: Leaving aside whether John Ziegler’s assertions are true or coherent, is it even remotely helpful or productive to make huge, sweeping claims about some other region’s/culture’s inferiority to us? What possible effect can such remarks have except to incite hatred? Aren’t they sort of irresponsible?

It is true that no one on either side of the studio’s thick window expresses or even alludes to any of these objections. But this is not because Mr. Z.’s support staff is stupid, or hateful, or even necessarily on board with sweeping jingoistic claims. It is because they understand the particular codes and imperatives of large-market talk radio. The fact of the matter is that it is not John Ziegler’s job to be responsible, or nuanced, or to think about whether his on-air comments are productive or dangerous, or cogent, or even defensible. That is not to say that the host would not defend his “we’re better”—strenuously—or that he does not believe it’s true. It is to say that he has exactly one on-air job, and that is to be stimulating. An obvious point, but it’s one that’s often overlooked by people who complain about propaganda, misinformation, and irresponsibility in commercial talk radio. Whatever else they are, the above-type objections to “We’re better than the Arab world” are calls to accountability. They are the sort of criticisms one might make of, say, a journalist, someone whose job description includes being responsible about what he says in public. And KFI’s John Ziegler is not a journalist—he is an entertainer. Or maybe it’s better to say that he is part of a peculiar, modern, and very popular type of news industry, one that manages to enjoy the authority and influence of journalism without the stodgy constraints of fairness, objectivity, and responsibility that make trying to tell the truth such a drag for everyone involved. It is a frightening industry, though not for any of the simple reasons most critics give.

Distributed over two walls of KFI’s broadcast studio, behind the monitors and clocks, are a dozen promotional KFI posters, all in the station’s eye-catching Halloween colors against the Sweeper’s bright white. On each poster, the word “stimulating” is both italicized and underscored. Except for the door and soundproof window, the entire studio is lined in acoustic tile with strange Pollockian patterns of tiny holes. Much of the tile is grayed and decaying, and the carpet’s no color at all; KFI has been in this facility for nearly thirty years and will soon be moving out. Both the studio and Airmix are kept chilly because of all the electronics. The overhead lights are old inset fluorescents, the kind with the slight flutter to them; nothing casts any sort of shadow. On one of the studio walls is also pinned the special set of playing cards distributed for the invasion of Iraq, these with hand-drawn Xs over the faces of those Baathists captured or killed so far. The great L-shaped table that Mr. Z. sits at nearly fills the little room; it’s got so many coats of brown paint on it that the tabletop looks slightly humped. At the L’s base is another Shure microphone, used by Ken Chiampou of 3:00—7:00’s John & Ken, its hinged stand now partly folded up so that the mike hangs like a wilted flower. The oddest thing about the studio is a strong scent of decaying bananas, as if many peels or even whole bananas were rotting in the room’s wastebaskets, none of which look to have been emptied anytime recently. Mr. Ziegler, who has his ascetic side, drinks only bottled water in the studio, and certainly never snacks, so there is no way he is the source of the banana smell.

It is worth considering the strange media landscape in which political talk radio is a salient. Never before have there been so many different national news sources—different now in terms of both medium and ideology. Major newspapers from anywhere are available online; there are the broadcast networks plus public TV, cable’s CNN, Fox News, CNBC, et al., print and Web magazines, Internet bulletin boards, The Daily Show, e-mail newsletters, blogs. All this is well known; it’s part of the Media Environment we live in. But there are prices and ironies here. One is that the increasing control of U.S. mass media by a mere handful of corporations has—rather counterintuitively—created a situation of extreme fragmentation, a kaleidoscope of information options. Another is that the ever increasing number of ideological news outlets creates precisely the kind of relativism that cultural conservatives decry, a kind of epistemic free-for-all in which “the truth” is wholly a matter of perspective and agenda. In some respects all this variety is probably good, productive of difference and dialogue and so on. But it can also be confusing and stressful for the average citizen. Short of signing on to a particular mass ideology and patronizing only those partisan news sources that ratify what you want to believe, it is increasingly hard to determine which sources to pay attention to and how exactly to distinguish real information from spin.

This fragmentation and confusion have helped give rise to what’s variously called the “meta-media” or “explaining industry.” Under most classifications, this category includes media critics for news dailies, certain high-end magazines, panel shows like CNN’s Reliable Sources, media-watch blogs like instapundit.com and talkingpointsmemo.com, and a large percentage of political talk radio. It is no accident that one of the signature lines Mr. Ziegler likes to deliver over his opening bumper music at :06 is “… the show where we take a look at the news of the day, we provide you the facts, and then we give you the truth.” For this is how much of contemporary political talk radio understands its function: to explore the day’s news in a depth and detail that other media do not, and to interpret, analyze, and explain that news.

Which all sounds great, except of course “explaining” the news really means editorializing, infusing the actual events of the day with the host’s own opinions. And here is where the real controversy starts, because these opinions are, as just one person’s opinions, exempt from strict journalistic standards of truthfulness, probity, etc., and yet they are often delivered by the talk-radio host not as opinions but as revealed truths, truths intentionally ignored or suppressed by a “mainstream press” that’s “biased” in favor of liberal interests. This is, at any rate, the rhetorical template for Rush Limbaugh’s program, on which most syndicated and large-market political talk radio is modeled, from ABC’s Sean Hannity and Talk Radio Network’s Laura Ingraham to G. G. Liddy, Rusty Humphries, Michael Medved, Mike Gallagher, Neal Boortz, Dennis Prager, and, in many respects, Mr. John Ziegler.

KFI AM-640 carries Rush Limbaugh every weekday, 9:00 a.m. to noon, via live ISDN feed from Premiere Radio Networks, which is one of the dozen syndication networks that own talk-radio shows so popular that it’s worth it for local stations to air them even though it costs the stations a portion of their spot load. The same goes for Dr. Laura Schlessinger, who’s based in southern California and used to broadcast her syndicated show from KFI until the mid-nineties, when Premiere built its own LA facility and was able to offer Schlessinger more-sumptuous digs. Dr. Laura airs M-F from noon to 3:00 on KFI, though her shows are canned and there’s no live feed. Besides 7:00—10:00 p.m.’s Phil Hendrie (another KFI host whose show went into national syndication, and who now has his own private dressing room and studio over at Premiere), the only other weekday syndication KFI uses is Coast to Coast With George Noory, which covers and analyzes news of the paranormal throughout the wee hours.

Whatever the social effects of talk radio or the partisan agendas of certain hosts, it is a fallacy that political talk radio is motivated by ideology. It is not. Political talk radio is a business, and it is motivated by revenue. The conservatism that dominates today’s AM airwaves does so because it generates high Arbitron ratings, high ad rates, and maximum profits.

Radio has become a more lucrative business than most people know. Throughout most of the past decade, the industry’s revenues have increased by more than 10 percent a year. The average cash-flow margin for major radio companies is 40 percent, compared with more like 15 percent for large TV networks; and the mean price paid for a radio station has gone from eight to more than thirteen times cash flow. Some of this extreme profitability, and thus the structure of the industry, is due to the 1996 Telecommunications Act, which allows radio companies to acquire up to eight stations in a given market and to control as much as 35 percent of a market’s total ad revenues. The emergence of huge, dominant radio conglomerates like Clear Channel and Infinity is a direct consequence of the ’96 Act (which the FCC, aided by the very conservative D.C. Court of Appeals, has lately tried to make even more permissive). And these radio conglomerates enjoy not just substantial economies of scale but almost unprecedented degrees of business integration.

Example: Clear Channel Communications Inc. now owns KFI AM-640, plus two other AM stations and five FMs in the Los Angeles market. It also owns Premiere Radio Networks. It also owns the Airwatch subscription news/traffic service. And it designs and manufactures Prophet, KFI’s operating system, which is state-of-the-art and much too expensive for most independent stations. All told, Clear Channel currently owns some 1,200 radio stations nationwide, one of which happens to be Louisville, Kentucky’s WHAS, the AM talk station from which John Ziegler was fired, amid spectacular gossip and controversy, in August of 2003. Which means that Mr. Ziegler now works in Los Angeles for the same company that just fired him in Louisville, such that his firing now appears—in retrospect, and considering the relative sizes of the Louisville and LA markets—to have been a promotion. All of which turns out to be a strange and revealing story about what a talk-radio host’s life is like.

For obvious reasons, critics of political talk radio concern themselves mainly with the programs’ content. Talk station management, on the other hand, tends to think of content as a subset of personality, of how stimulating a given host is. As for the hosts—ask Mr. Ziegler off-air what makes him good at his job, and he’ll shrug glumly and say, “I’m not really all that talented. I’ve got passion, and I work really hard.” Taken so for granted that nobody in the business seems aware of it is something that an outsider, sitting in Airmix and watching John Ziegler at the microphone, will notice right away. Hosting talk radio is an exotic, high-pressure gig that not many people are fit for, and being truly good at it requires skills so specialized that many of them don’t have names.

To appreciate these skills and some of the difficulties involved, you might wish to do an experiment. Try sitting alone in a room with a clock, turning on a tape recorder, and starting to speak into it. Speak about anything you want—with the proviso that your topic, and your opinions on it, must be of interest to some group of strangers who you imagine will be listening to the tape. Naturally, in order to be even minimally interesting, your remarks should be intelligible and their reasoning sequential—a listener will have to be able to follow the logic of what you’re saying—which means that you will have to know enough about your topic to organize your statements in a coherent way. (But you cannot do much of this organizing beforehand; it has to occur at the same time you’re speaking.) Plus, ideally, what you’re saying should be not just comprehensible and interesting but compelling, stimulating, which means that your remarks have to provoke and sustain some kind of emotional reaction in the listeners, which in turn will require you to construct some kind of identifiable persona for yourself—your comments will need to strike the listener as coming from an actual human being, someone with a real personality and real feelings about whatever it is you’re discussing. And it gets even trickier: You’re trying to communicate in real time with someone you cannot see or hear responses from; and though you’re communicating in speech, your remarks cannot have any of the fragmentary, repetitive, garbled qualities of real interhuman speech, or speech’s ticcy unconscious “umm”s or “you know”s, or false starts or stutters or long pauses while you try to think of how to phrase what you want to say next. You’re also, of course, denied the physical inflections that are so much a part of spoken English—the facial expressions, changes in posture, and symphony of little gestures that accompany and buttress real talking. Everything unspoken about you, your topic, and how you feel about it has to be conveyed through pitch, volume, tone, and pacing. The pacing is especially important: it can’t be too slow, since that’s low-energy and dull, but it can’t be too rushed or it will sound like babbling. And so you have somehow to keep all these different imperatives and structures in mind at the same time, while also filling exactly, say, eleven minutes, with no dead air and no going over, such that at 10:46 you have wound things up neatly and are in a position to say, “KFI is the station with the most frequent traffic reports. Alan LaGreen is in the KFI Traffic Center” (which, to be honest, Mr. Z. sometimes leaves himself only three or even two seconds for and has to say extremely fast, which he can always do without a flub). So then, ready: go.

It’s no joke. See for example the John Ziegler Show’s producer, Emiliano Limon, who broke in at KFI as a weekend overnight host before moving across the glass:

“What’s amazing is that when you get new people who think that they can do a talk-radio program, you watch them for the first time. By three minutes into it, they have that look on their face like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve got ten minutes left. What am I going to say?’ And that’s what happened to me a lot. So you end up talking about yourself [which, for complex philosophical reasons, the producer disapproves of], or you end up yammering.” Emiliano is a large, very calm and competent man in his mid-thirties who either wears the same black LA Times T-shirt every day or owns a whole closetful of them. He was pulled off other duties to help launch KFI’s experimental Live and Local evening show, an assignment that obviously involves working closely with Mr. Z., which Emiliano seems to accept as his karmic punishment for being so unflappable and easy to get along with. He laughs more than everyone else at KFI put together.

“I remember one time, I just broke after five minutes, I was just done, and they were going, ‘Hey, what are you doing, you have another ten minutes!’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know what else to say!’ And that’s what happens. For those people who think ‘Oh, I could do talk radio,’ well, there’s more to it. A lot of people can’t take it once they get that taste of, you know, ‘Geez, I gotta fill all this time and sound interesting?’

“Then, as you keep on doing it over the days, there’s something that becomes absolutely clear to you. You’re not really acting on the radio. It’s you. If no one really responds and the ratings aren’t good, it means they don’t like you.” Which is worth keeping very much in mind.

An abiding question: Who exactly listens to political talk radio? Arbitron Inc. and some of its satellites can help measure how many are listening for how long and when, and they provide some rough age data and demographic specs. A lot of the rest is guesswork, and Program Directors don’t like to talk about it.

From outside, though, one of the best clues to how a radio station understands its audience is spots. Which commercials it runs, and when, indicate how the station is pitching its listeners’ tastes and receptivities to sponsors. In how often particular spots are repeated lie clues to the length of time the station thinks people are listening, how attentive it thinks they are, etc. Specific example: Just from its spot load, we can deduce that KFI trusts its audience to sit still for an extraordinary amount of advertising. An average hour of the John Ziegler Show consists of four program segments: :06–:17, :23–:30, :37–:46, and :53–:00, or thirty-four minutes of Mr. Z. actually talking. Since KFI’s newscasts are never more than ninety seconds, and since quarterly traffic reports are always bracketed by “live-read” spots for Traffic Center sponsors, that makes each hour at least 40 percent ads; the percentage is higher if you count Sweepers for the station and promos for other KFI shows. And this is the load just on a local program, one for which the Clock doesn’t have to be split with a syndicator.

It’s not that KFI’s unaware of the dangers here. Station management reads its mail, and as Emiliano Limon puts it, “If there’s one complaint listeners always have, it’s the spot load.” But the only important issue is whether all the complaints translate into actual listener behavior. KFI’s spot load is an instance of the kind of multivariable maximization problem that M.B.A. programs thrive on. It is obviously in the station’s financial interest to carry just as high a volume of ads as it can without hurting ratings—the moment listeners begin turning away from KFI because of too many commercials, the Arbitron numbers go down, the rates charged for ads have to be reduced, and profitability suffers. But anything more specific is, again, guesswork. When asked about management’s thinking here, or whether there’s any particular formula KFI uses to figure out how high a spot load the market will bear, Ms. Bertolucci will only smile and shrug as if pleasantly stumped: “We have more commercials than we’ve ever had, and our ratings are the best they’ve ever been.”

How often a particular spot can run over and over before listeners just can’t stand it anymore is something else no one will talk about, but the evidence suggests that KFI sees its audience as either very patient and tolerant or almost catatonically inattentive. Canned ads for local sponsors like Robbins Bros. Jewelers, Sit ‘n Sleep Mattress, and the Power Auto Group play every couple hours, 24/7, until one knows every hitch and nuance. National saturation campaigns for products like Cortislim vary things somewhat by using both endorsements and canned spots. Pitches for caveat emptor—type nostrums like Avacor (for hair loss), Enzyte (“For natural male enhancement!”), and Altovis (“Helps fight daily fatigue!”) often repeat once an hour through the night. As of spring ’04, though, the most frequent and concussive ads on KFI are for mortgage and home-refi companies—Green Light Financial, HMS Capital, Home Field Financial, Benchmark Lending. Over and over. Pacific Home Financial, U.S. Mortgage Capital, Crestline Funding, Advantix Lending. Reverse mortgages, negative amortization, adjustable rates, APR, FICO … where did all these firms come from? What were these guys doing five years ago? Why is KFI’s audience seen as so especially ripe and ready for refi? Betterloans.com, lendingtree.com, Union Bank of California, on and on and on.

Emiliano Limon’s “It’s you” seems true to an extent. But there is also the issue of persona, meaning the on-air personality that a host adopts in order to heighten the sense of a real person behind the mike. It is, after all, unlikely that Rush Limbaugh always feels as jaunty and confident as he seems on the air, or that Howard Stern really is deeply fascinated by porn starlets every waking minute of the day. But a host’s persona is not the same as outright acting. For the most part, it’s probably more like the way we are all slightly different with some people than we are with others.

In some cases, though, the personas are more contrived and extreme. In the slot preceding Mr. Z.’s on KFI, for instance, is the Phil Hendrie Show, which is actually a cruel and complicated kind of meta—talk radio. What happens every night on this program is that Phil Hendrie brings on some wildly offensive guest—a man who’s leaving his wife because she’s had a mastectomy, a Little League coach who advocates corporal punishment of players, a retired colonel who claims that females’ only proper place in the military is as domestics and concubines for the officers—and first-time or casual listeners will call in and argue with the guests and (not surprisingly) get very angry and upset. Except the whole thing’s a put-on. The guests are fake, their different voices done by Hendrie with the aid of mike processing and a first-rate board op, and the show’s real entertainment is the callers, who don’t know it’s all a gag—Hendrie’s real audience, which is in on the joke, enjoys hearing these callers get more and more outraged and sputtery as the “guests” yank their chain. It’s all a bit like the old Candid Camera if the joke perpetrated over and over on that show were convincing somebody that a loved one had just died. So obviously Hendrie—whose show now draws an estimated one million listeners a week—lies on the outer frontier of radio persona.

A big part of John Ziegler’s on-air persona, on the other hand, is that he doesn’t have one. This may be just a function of all the time he’s spent in the abattoir of small-market radio, but in Los Angeles it plays as a canny and sophisticated meta-radio move. Part of his January introduction to himself and his program is “The key to the John Ziegler Show is that I am almost completely real. Nearly every show begins with the credo ‘This is the show where the host says what he believes and believes what he says.’ I do not make up my opinions or exaggerate my stories simply to stir the best debate on that particular broadcast.”

Though Mr. Z. won’t ever quite say so directly, his explicit I-have-no-persona persona helps to establish a contrast with weekday afternoons’ John Kobylt, whose on-air voice is similar to Ziegler’s in pitch and timbre. Kobylt and his sidekick Ken Chiampou have a hugely popular show based around finding stories and causes that will make white, middle-class Californians feel angry and disgusted, and then hammering away at these stories/causes day after day. Their personas are what the LA Times calls “brash” and Chiampou himself calls “rabid dogs,” which latter KFI has developed into the promo line “The Junkyard Dogs of Talk Radio.” What John & Ken really are is professional oiks. Their show is credited with helping jump-start the ’03 campaign to recall Governor Gray Davis, although they were equally disgusted by most of the candidates who wanted to replace him (q.v. Kobylt: “If there’s anything I don’t like more than politicians, it’s those wormy little nerds who act as campaign handlers and staff … We just happened to on our own decide that Davis was a rotting stool that ought to be flushed”). In ’02, they organized a parade of SUVs in Sacramento to protest stricter vehicle-emissions laws; this year they spend at least an hour a day attacking various government officials and their spokesholes for failing to enforce immigration laws and trying to bullshit the citizens about it; and so on. But the John & Ken Show’s real specialty is gruesome, high-profile California trials, which they often cover on-site, Kobylt eschewing all PC pussyfooting and legal niceties to speak his mind about defendants like 2002’s David Westerfield and the current Scott Peterson, both “scumbags that are guilty as sin.” The point is that John Kobylt broadcasts in an almost perpetual state of affronted rage; and, as more than one KFI staffer has ventured to observe off the record, it’s unlikely that any middle-aged man could really go around this upset all the time and not drop dead. It’s a persona, in other words, not exactly fabricated but certainly exaggerated … and of course it’s also demagoguery of the most classic and unabashed sort.

But it makes for stimulating and profitable talk radio. As of Arbitron’s winter ’04 Book, KFI AM-640 has become the No. 1 talk station in the country, beating out New York’s WABC in both Cume and AQH for the coveted 25—54 audience. KFI also now has the second highest market share of any radio station in Los Angeles, trailing only hip-hop giant KPWR. In just one year, KFI has gone from being the eighteenth to the seventh top-billing station in the country, which is part of why it received the 2003 News/Talk Station of the Year Award from Radio and Records magazine. Much of this recent success is attributed to Ms. Robin Bertolucci, the Program Director brought in from Denver shortly after Clear Channel acquired KFI, whom Mr. Z. describes as “a real superstar in the business right now.” From all reports, Ms. Bertolucci has done everything from redesigning the station’s ID and Sweeper and sound and overall in-your-face vibe to helping established hosts fine-tune their personas and create a distinctively KFI-ish style and ‘tude for their shows.

Every Wednesday afternoon, Ms. Bertolucci meets with John Ziegler to review the previous week and chat about how the show’s going. The Program Director’s large private office is located just off the KFI prep room (where Mr. Z.’s own office is a small computer table with a homemade THIS AREA RESERVED FOR JOHN ZIEGLER taped to it). Ms. B. is soft-spoken, polite, unpretentious, and almost completely devoid of moving parts. Here is her on-record explanation of the Program Director’s role w/r/t the John Ziegler Show:

“It’s John’s show. He’s flying the airplane, a big 747. What I am, I’m the little person in the control tower. I have a different perspective—”

“I have no perspective!” Mr. Z. interrupts, with a loud laugh, from his seat before her desk.

“—which might be of value. Like, ‘You may want to pull up because you’re heading for a mountain.'” They both laugh. It’s an outrageous bit of understatement: nine months ago John Ziegler’s career was rubble, and Ms. B. is the only reason he’s here, and she’s every inch his boss, and he’s nervous around her—which you can tell by the way he puts his long legs out and leans back in his chair with his hands in his slacks’ pockets and yawns a lot and tries to look exaggeratedly relaxed.

The use of some esoteric technical slang occasions a brief Q & A on how exactly Arbitron works, while Mr. Z. joggles his sneaker impatiently. Then they go over the past week. Ms. B. gently chides the new host for not hitting the Greg Haidl trial harder, and for usually discussing the case in his show’s second hour instead of the first. Her thrust: “It’s a big story for us. It’s got sex, it’s got police, class issues, kids running amok, video, the courts, and who gets away with what. And it’s in Orange County.” When Mr. Ziegler (whose off-air method of showing annoyance or frustration is to sort of hang his head way over to one side) protests that both Bill Handel and John & Ken have already covered the story six ways from Sunday every day and there is no way for him to do anything fresh or stimulating with it, Ms. B. nods slowly and responds: “If we were KIIS-FM, and we had a new Christina Aguilera song, and they played it heavy on the morning show and the afternoon show, wouldn’t you still play it on the evening show?” At which Mr. Z. sort of lolls his head from side to side several times—”All right. I see your point. All right”—and on tonight’s (i.e., May 19’s) program he does lead with and spend much of the first hour on the latest Haidl developments.

By way of post-meeting analysis, it is worth noting that a certain assumption behind Ms. B.’s Christina Aguilera analogy—namely, that a criminal trial is every bit as much an entertainment product as a Top 40 song—was not questioned or even blinked at by either participant. This is doubtless one reason for KFI’s ratings éclat—the near total conflation of news and entertainment. It also explains why KFI’s twice-hourly newscasts (which are always extremely short, and densely interwoven with station promos and live-read ads) concentrate so heavily on lurid, tabloidish stories. Post—Nick Berg, the station’s newscasts in May and early June tend to lead with child-molestation charges against local clerics and teachers, revelations in the Peterson and Haidl trials, and developments in the Kobe Bryant and Michael Jackson cases. With respect to Ms. Bertolucci’s on-record description of KFI’s typical listener—”An information-seeking person that wants to know what’s going on in the world and wants to be communicated to in an interesting, entertaining, stimulating sort of way”—it seems fair to observe that KFI provides a peculiar and very selective view of what’s going on in the world.

Ms. B.’s description turns out to be loaded in a number of ways. The role of news and information versus personal and persona-driven stuff on the John Ziegler Show, for example, is a matter that Mr. Z. and his producer see very differently. Emiliano Limon, who’s worked at the station for over a decade and believes he knows its audience, sees “two distinct eras at KFI. The first was the opinion-driven, personal, here’s-my-take-on-things era. The second is the era we’re in right now, putting the information first.” Emiliano refers to polls he’s seen indicating that most people in southern California get their news from local TV newscasts and Jay Leno’s monologue on the Tonight show. “We go on the presumption that the average driver, average listener, isn’t reading the news the way we are. We read everything.” In fact, this voracious news-reading is a big part of Emiliano’s job. He is, like most talk-radio producers, a virtuoso on the Internet, and he combs through a daily list of sixty national papers, ‘zines, and blogs, and he believes that his and KFI’s main function is to provide “a kind of executive news summary” for busy listeners. In a separate Q & A, though, Mr. Ziegler’s take on the idea of his show’s providing news is wholly different: “We’re trying to get away from that, actually. The original thought was that this would be mostly an informational show, and now we’re trying to get a little more toward personality” … which, since Mr. Z. makes a point of not having a special on-air persona, means more stuff about himself, John Ziegler—his experiences, his résumé, his political and cultural outlook and overall philosophy of life.

If we’re willing to disregard the complicating precedents of Joe Pyne and Alan Burke, then the origins of contemporary political talk radio can be traced to three phenomena of the 1980s. The first of these involved AM music stations’ getting absolutely murdered by FM, which could broadcast music in stereo and allowed for much better fidelity on high and low notes. The human voice, on the other hand, is mid-range and doesn’t require high fidelity. The eighties’ proliferation of talk formats on the AM band also provided new careers for some music deejays—e.g., Don Imus, Morton Downey Jr.—whose chatty personas didn’t fit well with FM’s all-about-the-music ethos.

The second big factor was the repeal, late in Ronald Reagan’s second term, of what was known as the Fairness Doctrine. This was a 1949 FCC rule designed to minimize any possible restrictions on free speech caused by limited access to broadcasting outlets. The idea was that, as one of the conditions for receiving an FCC broadcast license, a station had to “devote reasonable attention to the coverage of controversial issues of public importance,” and consequently had to provide “reasonable, although not necessarily equal” opportunities for opposing sides to express their views. Because of the Fairness Doctrine, talk stations had to hire and program symmetrically: if you had a three-hour program whose host’s politics were on one side of the ideological spectrum, you had to have another long-form program whose host more or less spoke for the other side. Weirdly enough, up through the mid-eighties it was usually the U.S. right that benefited most from the Doctrine. Pioneer talk syndicator Ed McLaughlin, who managed San Francisco’s KGO in the 1960s, recalls that “I had more liberals on the air than I had conservatives or even moderates for that matter, and I had a hell of a time finding the other voice.”

The Fairness Doctrine’s repeal was part of the sweeping deregulations of the Reagan era, which aimed to liberate all sorts of industries from government interference and allow them to compete freely in the marketplace. The old, Rooseveltian logic of the Doctrine had been that since the airwaves belonged to everyone, a license to profit from those airwaves conferred on the broadcast industry some special obligation to serve the public interest. Commercial radio broadcasting was not, in other words, originally conceived as just another for-profit industry; it was supposed to meet a higher standard of social responsibility. After 1987, though, just another industry is pretty much what radio became, and its only real responsibility now is to attract and retain listeners in order to generate revenue. In other words, the sort of distinction explicitly drawn by FCC Chairman Newton Minow in the 1960s—namely, that between “the public interest” and “merely what interests the public”—no longer exists.

More or less on the heels of the Fairness Doctrine’s repeal came the West Coast and then national syndication of The Rush Limbaugh Show through Mr. McLaughlin’s EFM Media. Limbaugh is the third great progenitor of today’s political talk radio partly because he’s a host of extraordinary, once-in-a-generation talent and charisma—bright, loquacious, witty, complexly authoritative—whose show’s blend of news, entertainment, and partisan analysis became the model for legions of imitators. But he was also the first great promulgator of the Mainstream Media’s Liberal Bias idea. This turned out to be a brilliantly effective rhetorical move, since the MMLB concept functioned simultaneously as a standard around which Rush’s audience could rally, as an articulation of the need for right-wing (i.e., unbiased) media, and as a mechanism by which any criticism or refutation of conservative ideas could be dismissed (either as biased or as the product of indoctrination by biased media). Boiled way down, the MMLB thesis is able both to exploit and to perpetuate many conservatives’ dissatisfaction with extant media sources—and it’s this dissatisfaction that cements political talk radio’s large and loyal audience.

In the best Rush Limbaugh tradition, Mr. Ziegler takes pride in his on-air sense of humor. His media criticism is often laced with wisecracks, and he likes to leaven his show’s political and cultural analyses with timely ad-lib gags, such as “It’s maybe a good thing that Catholics and Muslims don’t tend to marry. If they had a kid, he’d grow up and then, what, abuse some child and then blow him up?” And he has a penchant for comic maxims (“Fifty percent of all marriages are confirmed failures, while the other fifty percent end in divorce”; “The female figure is the greatest known evidence that there might be a God, but the female psyche is an indication that this God has a very sick sense of humor”) that he uses on the air and then catalogues as “Zieglerisms” on his KFI Web site.

Mr. Z. can also, when time and the demands of prep permit, go long-form. In his program’s final hour for May 22, he delivers a mock commencement address to the Class of 2004, a piece of prepared sit-down comedy that is worth excerpting, verbatim, as a sort of keyhole into the professional psyche of Mr. John Ziegler:

Class of 2004, congratulations on graduation … I wish to let you in on a few secrets that those of you who are not completely brain-dead will eventually figure out on your own, but, if you listen to me, will save a lot of time and frustration. First of all, most of what you have been taught in your academic career is not true. I am not just talking about the details of history that have been distorted to promote the liberal agenda of academia. I am also referring to the big-picture lessons of life as well. The sad truth is that, contrary to what most of you have been told, you cannot do or be anything you want. The vast majority of you … will be absolutely miserable in whatever career you choose or are forced to endure. You will most likely hate your boss because they will most likely be dumber than you think you are, and they will inevitably screw you at every chance they get … The boss will not be the only stupid person you encounter in life. The vast majority of people are much, much dumber than you have ever been led to believe. Never forget this. And just like people are far dumber than you have been led to believe, they are also far more dishonest than anyone is seemingly willing to admit to you. If you have any doubt as to whether someone is telling you the truth, it is a safe bet to assume that they are lying to you … Do not trust anyone unless you have some sort of significant leverage over him or her and they know that you have that leverage over them. Unless this condition exists, anyone—and I mean anyone—can and probably will stab you in the back.

That is about one sixth of the address, and for the most part it speaks for itself.

One of many intriguing things about Mr. Ziegler, though, is the contrast between his deep cynicism about backstabbing and the naked, seemingly self-destructive candor with which he’ll discuss his life and career. This candor becomes almost paradoxical in Q & As with an outside correspondent, a stranger whom Mr. Z. has no particular reason to trust at those times when he winces after saying something and asks that it be struck from the record. As it happens, however, nearly all of what follows is from an autobiographical time-line volunteered by John Ziegler in late May ’04 over a very large medium-rare steak. Especially interesting is the time-line’s mixture of raw historical fact and passionate editorial opinion, which Mr. Z. blends so seamlessly that one really can believe he discerns no difference between them.

1967–1989: Mr. John Ziegler grows up in suburban Philadelphia, the elder son of a financial manager and a homemaker. All kinds of unsummarizable evidence indicates that Mr. Z. and his mother are very close. In 1984, he is named High School Golfer of the Year by the Bucks County Courier Times. He’s also a three-year golf letterman at Georgetown, where his liberal arts studies turn out to be “a great way to prepare for a life of being unemployed, which I’ve done quite a bit of.”

1989–1995: Mr. Z.’s original career is in local TV sports. He works for stations in and around Washington DC, in Steubenville OH, and finally in Raleigh NC. Though sports news is what he’s wanted to do ever since he was a little boy, he hates the jobs: “The whole world of sports and local news is so disgusting … local TV news is half a step above prostitution.”

1994–1995: Both personally and professionally, this period constitutes a dark night of the soul for John Ziegler. Summer ’94: O.J. Simpson’s ex-wife is brutally murdered. Fall ’94: Mr. Ziegler’s mother is killed in a car crash. Winter ’95: During his sportscast, Mr. Z. makes “an incredibly tame joke about O.J. Simpson’s lack of innocence” w/r/t his wife’s murder, which draws some protest from Raleigh’s black community. John Ziegler is eventually fired from WLFL because the station “caved in to Political Correctness.” The whole nasty incident marks the start of (a) Mr. Z.’s deep, complex hatred for all things PC, and (b) “my history with O.J.” He falls into a deep funk, decides to give up sports broadcasting, “pretty much gave up on life, actually.” Mr. Z. spends his days watching the O.J. Simpson trial on cable television, often sitting through repeat broadcasts of the coverage late at night; and when O.J. is finally acquitted, “I was nearly suicidal.” Two psychiatrist golf buddies talk him into going on antidepressants, but much of the time O.J. is still all Mr. Ziegler can think and talk about. “It got so bad—you’ll find this funny—at one point I was so depressed that it was my goal, assuming that he’d be acquitted and that [O.J.’s] Riviera Country Club wouldn’t have the guts to kick him out, that I was going to become a caddy at Riviera, knock him off, and see whether or not [a certain lawyer Mr. Z. also played golf with, whose name is here omitted] could get me off on jury nullification. That’s how obsessed I was.” The lawyer/golfer/friend’s reaction to this plan is not described.

Late 1995: Mr. Z. decides to give life and broadcasting another shot. Figuring that “maybe my controversial nature would work better on talk radio,” he takes a job as a weekend fill-in host for a station in Fuquay-Varina NC—”the worst talk-radio station on the planet … to call the station owner a redneck was insulting to rednecks”—only to be abruptly fired when the station switches to an automated Christian-music format.

Early 1996: “I bought, actually bought, time on a Raleigh talk-radio station” in order to start “putting together a Tape,” although Mr. Z. is good enough on the air that they soon put him on as a paid host. What happens, though, is that this station uses a certain programming consultant, whose name is being omitted—”a pretty big name in the industry, who [however] is a snake, and, I believe, extremely overrated—and he at first really took a shine to me, and then told me, told me, to do a show on how I got fired from the TV job, and I did the show,” which evidently involves retelling the original tame O.J. joke, after which the herpetic consultant stands idly by as the station informs Mr. Z. that “‘We’re done with you, no thank you,’ which was another blow.”

1996–1997: Another radio consultant recommends Mr. Z. for a job at WWTN, a Nashville talk station, where he hosts an evening show that makes good Book and is largely hassle-free for several months. Of his brief career at WWTN, the host now feels that “I kind of self-destructed there, actually, in retrospect. I got frustrated with management. I was right, but I was stupid as well.” The trouble starts when Tiger Woods wins the 1997 Masters. As part of his commentary on the tournament, Mr. Z. posits on-air that Tiger constitutes living proof of the fact that “not all white people are racists.” His supporting argument is that “no white person would ever think of Tiger as a nigger,” because whites draw a mental distinction “between people who just happen to be black and people who act like niggers.” His reason for broadcasting the actual word “nigger”? “This all goes back to O.J. I hated the fact that the media treated viewers and listeners like children by saying ‘Mark Fuhrman used the N-word.’ I despised that, and I think it gives the word too much power. Plus there’s the whole hypocrisy of how black people can use it and white people can’t. I was young and naive and thought I could stand on principle.” As part of that principled stand, Mr. Z. soon redeploys the argument and the word in a discussion of boxer Mike Tyson, whereupon he is fired, “even though there was very little listener reaction.” As Mr. Z. understands it, the reason for his dismissal is that “a single black employee complained,” and WWTN’s parent, “a lily-white company,” feared that it was “very vulnerable” to a discrimination lawsuit.

1998–1999: Mr. Z. works briefly as a morning fill-in at Nashville’s WLAC, whose studios are right across the street from the station that just fired him. From there, he is hired to do overnights at WWDB, an FM talk station in Philadelphia, his home town. There are again auspicious beginnings … “except my boss, [the P.D. who hired him], is completely unstable and ends up punching out a consultant, and gets fired. At that point I’m totally screwed—I have nobody who’s got my back, and everybody’s out to get me.” Mr. Z. is suddenly fired to make room for syndicated raunchmeister Tom Leykis, then is quickly rehired when listener complaints get Leykis’s program taken off the air … then is refired a week later when the station juggles its schedule again. Mr. Z. on his time at WWDB: “I should have sued those bastards.”

Q: So what exactly is the point of a host’s having a contract if the station can evidently just up and fire you whenever they feel like it?

A: “The only thing a contract’s worth in radio is how much they’re going to pay you when they fire you. And if they fire you ‘For Cause,’ then they don’t have to pay you anything.”

2000: John Ziegler moves over to WIP, a famous Philadelphia sports-talk station. “I hated it, but I did pretty well. I can do sports, obviously, and it was also a big political year.” But there is both a general problem and a specific problem. The general problem is that “The boss there, [name omitted], is an evil, evil, evil, evil man. If God said, ‘John, you get one person to kill for free,’ this would be the man I would kill. And I would make it brutally painful.” The specific problem arises when “Mike Tyson holds a press conference, and calls himself a nigger. And I can’t resist—I mean, here I’ve gotten fired in the past for using the word in relation to a person who calls himself that now. I mean, my God. So I tell the story [of having used the word and gotten fired for it] on the air, but I do not use the N-word—I spell the N-word, every single time, to cover my ass, and to also make a point of the absurdity of the whole thing. And we get one, one, postcard, from a total lunatic black person—misspellings, just clearly a lunatic. And [Mr. Z.’s boss at WIP] calls me in and says, ‘John, I think you’re a racist.’ Now, first of all, this guy is a racist, I mean he is a real racist. I am anything but a racist, but to be called that by him just made my blood boil. I mean, life’s too short to be working overnights for this fucking bastard.” A day or two later Mr. Z. is fired, For Cause, for spelling the N-word on-air.

Q: It sounds like you’ve got serious personal reasons for disliking Political Correctness.

A: “Oh my God, yes. My whole life has been ruined by it. I’ve lost relationships, I can’t get married, I can’t have kids, all because of Political Correctness. I can’t put anybody else through the crap I’ve been through. I can’t do it.”

2001: While writing freelance columns for the Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News, Mr. Ziegler also gets work at a small twenty-four-hour Comcast cable-TV network in Philly, where he’s a writer and commentator on a prime-time issues-related talk show. Although Comcast is “an evil, evil, evil company, [which] created that network for the sole purpose of giving blowjobs to politicians who vote on Comcast legislation,” Mr. Z. discovers that “I’m actually really good at talk TV. I was the best thing that ever happened to this show. I actually ended up winning an Emmy, which is ironic.” There are, however, serious and irresolvable problems with a female producer on the show, the full story of which you are going to be spared (mainly because of legal worries).

2002: John Ziegler is hired as the mid-morning host at Clear Channel’s WHAS in Louisville, which Arbitron lists as the fifty-fifth largest radio market in the U.S. According to a local paper, the host’s “stormy, thirteen-month tenure in Louisville was punctuated by intrigue, outrage, controversy and litigation.” According to John Ziegler, “The whole story would make a great movie—in fact, my whole life would make a great movie, but this in particular would make a great movie.” Densely compressed synopsis: For several quarters, Mr. Z.’s program is a great success in Louisville. “I’m doing huge numbers—in one Book I got a fifteen share, which is ridiculous.” He is also involved in a very public romance with one Darcie Divita, a former LA Lakers cheerleader who is part of a morning news show on the local Fox TV affiliate. The relationship is apparently Louisville’s version of Ben & J.Lo, and its end is not amicable. In August ’03, prompted by callers’ questions on his regular “Ask John Anything” feature, Mr. Z. makes certain on-air comments about Ms. Divita’s breasts, underwear, genital grooming, and libido. Part of the enduring controversy over John Ziegler’s firing, which occurs a few days later, is exactly how much those comments and/or subsequent complaints from listeners and the Louisville media had to do with it. Mr. Z. has a long list of reasons for believing that his P.D. was really just looking for an excuse to can him. As for all the complaints, Mr. Z. remains bitter and perplexed: (1) “The comments I made about Darcie’s physical attributes were extremely positive in nature”; (2) “Darcie had, in the past, volunteered information about her cleavage on my program”; (3) “I’ve gone much further with other public figures without incident … I mocked [Kentucky Governor] Paul Patton for his inability to bring Tina Conner to orgasm, [and] no one from management ever even mentioned it to me.”

John Ziegler on why he thinks he was hired for the Live and Local job by KFI: “They needed somebody ‘available.'” And on the corporate logic behind his hiring: “It’s among the most bizarre things I’ve ever been involved in. To simultaneously be fired by Clear Channel and negotiate termination in a market where I had immense value and be courted by the same company in a market where I had no current value is beyond explicable.”

Mr. Z. on talk radio as a career: “This is a terrible business. I’d love to quit this business.” On why, then, he accepted KFI’s offer: “My current contract would be by far the toughest for them to fire me of anyplace I’ve been.”

Compared with many talk-radio hosts, John Ziegler is unusually polite to on-air callers. Which is to say that he doesn’t yell at them, call them names, or hang up while they’re speaking, although he does get frustrated with some calls. But there are good and bad kinds of frustration, stimulation-wise. Hence the delicate art of call screening. The screener’s little switchboard and computer console are here in the Airmix room, right up next to the studio window.

JZS Producer Emiliano Limon: “There are two types of callers. You’ve got your hard-core talk-radio callers, who just like hearing themselves on-air”—these listeners will sometimes vary the first names and home cities they give the screener, trying to disguise the fact that they’ve been calling in night after night—”and then there are the ones who just, for whatever reason, respond to the topic.” Of these latter a certain percentage are wackos, but some wackos actually make good on-air callers. Assoc. prod. and screener Vince Nicholas: “The trick is knowing what kooks to get rid of and what to let through. People that are kooky on a particular issue—some of these Zig likes; he can bust on them and have fun with them. He likes it.”

Vince isn’t rude or brusque with the callers he screens out; he simply becomes more and more laconic and stoned-sounding over the headset as the person rants on, and finally says, “Whoa, gotta go.” Especially obnoxious and persistent callers can be placed on Hold at the screener’s switchboard, locking up their phones until Vince decides to let them go. Those whom the screener lets through enter a different, computerized Hold system in which eight callers at a time can be kept queued up and waiting, each designated on Mr. Z.’s monitor by a different colored box displaying a first name, city, one-sentence summary of the caller’s thesis, and the total time waiting. The host chooses, cafeteria-style, from this array.

In his selections, Mr. Z. has an observable preference for female callers. Emiliano’s explanation: “Since political talk radio is so white male—driven, it’s good to get female voices in there.” It turns out that this is an industry convention; the roughly 50-50 gender mix of callers one hears on most talk radio is because screeners admit a much higher percentage of female callers to the system.

One of the last things that Emiliano Limon always does before airtime is to use the station’s NexGen Audio Editing System to load various recorded sound bites from the day’s broadcast news onto a Prophet file that goes with the Cut Sheet. This is a numbered list of bites available for tonight’s John Ziegler Show, of which both Mr. Z. and ‘Mondo get a copy. Each bite must be precisely timed. It is an intricate, exacting process of editing and compilation, during which Mr. Z. often drums his fingers and looks pointedly at his watch as the producer ignores him and always very slowly and placidly edits and compresses and loads and has the Cut Sheet ready at the very last second. Emiliano is the sort of extremely chilled-out person who can seem to be leaning back at his station with his feet up on the Airmix table even when he isn’t leaning back at all. He’s wearing the LA Times shirt again. His own view on listener calls is that they are “overrated in talk radio,” that they’re rarely all that cogent or stimulating, but that hosts tend to be “overconcerned with taking calls and whether people are calling. Consider: This is the only type of live performance with absolutely no feedback from the audience. It’s natural for the host to key in on the only real-time response he can get, which is the calls. It takes a long time with a host to get him to forget about the calls, to realize the calls have very little to do with the wider audience.”

Vince, meanwhile, is busy at the screener’s station. A lady with a heavy accent keeps calling in to say that she has vital information: a Czech newspaper has revealed that John Kerry is actually a Jew, that his grandfather changed his distinctively Jewish surname, and that this fact is being suppressed in the U.S. media and must be exposed. Vince finally tries putting her on punitive Hold, but her line’s light goes out, which signifies that the lady has a cell phone and has disengaged by simply turning it off. Meaning that she can call back again as much as she likes, and that Vince is going to have to get actively rude. ‘Mondo’s great mild eyes rise from the board: “Puto, man, what’s that about?” Vince, very flat and bored: “Kerry’s a Jew.” Emiliano: “Another big advent is the cell phone. Before cells you got mostly homebound invalids calling in. [Laughs] Now you get the driving invalid.”

Historically, the two greatest ratings periods ever for KFI AM-640 have been the Gray Davis gubernatorial recall and the O.J. Simpson trial. Now, in early June ’04, the tenth anniversary of the Ron Goldman/Nicole Brown Simpson murders is approaching, and O.J. starts to pop up once again on the cultural radar. And Mr. John Ziegler happens to be more passionate about the O.J. Simpson thing than maybe any other single issue, and feels that he “know[s] more about the case than anyone not directly involved,” and is able to be almost unbearably stimulating about O.J. Simpson and the utter indubitability of his guilt. And the confluence of the murders’ anniversary, the case’s tabloid importance to the nation and business importance to KFI, and its deep personal resonance for Mr. Z. helps produce what at first looks like the absolute Monster talk-radio story of the month.

On June 3, in the third segment of the John Ziegler Show’s second hour, after lengthy discussions of the O.J. anniversary and the Michael Jackson case, Mr. Z. takes a phone call from one “Daryl in Temecula,” an African-American gentleman who is “absolutely astounded they let a Klansman on the radio this time of night.” The call, which lasts seven minutes and eighteen seconds and runs well over the :46 break, ends with John Ziegler’s telling the audience, “That’s as angry as I’ve ever gotten in the history of my career.” And Vince Nicholas, looking awed and spent at his screener’s station, pronounces the whole thing “some of the best talk radio I ever heard.”

Some portions of the call are untranscribable because they consist mainly of Daryl and Mr. Z. trying to talk over each other. Daryl’s core points appear to be (1) that Mr. Z. seems to spend all his time talking about black men like Kobe and O.J. and Michael Jackson—”Don’t white people commit crimes?”—and (2) that O.J. was, after all, found innocent in a court of law, and yet Mr. Z. keeps “going on about ‘He’s guilty, he’s guilty—'”

“He is,” the host inserts.

Daryl: “He was acquitted, wasn’t he?”

“That makes no difference as to whether or not he did it.”

“O.J., Kobe: You just thrive on these black guys.”

It is here that Mr. Z. begins to pick up steam. “Oh yeah, Daryl, right, I’m a racist. As a matter of fact, I often say, ‘You know what? I just wish another black guy would commit a crime, because I hate black people so much.'”

Daryl: “I think you do have more to talk about on black guys. I think that’s more ‘news'” … which actually would be kind of an interesting point to explore, or at least address; but Mr. Z. is now stimulated.

“As a matter of fact, Daryl, oftentimes when we go through who’s committed the crimes, there are times when the white people who control the media, we get together and go, ‘Oh, we can’t talk about that one, because that was a white guy.’ This is all a big conspiracy, Daryl. Except, to be serious for a second, Daryl, what really upsets me, assuming you’re a black guy, is that you ought to be ten times more pissed off at O.J. Simpson than I am, because you know why?”

Daryl: “You can’t tell me how I should feel. As a forty-year-old black man, I’ve seen racism for forty years.”

Mr. Z. is starting to move his upper body back and forth excitedly in his chair. “I bet you have. I bet you have. And here’s why you ought to be pissed off: Because, out of all the black guys who deserved to get a benefit of the doubt because of the history of racism which is real in this country, and which is insidious, the one guy—the one guy—who gets the benefit of all of that pain and suffering over a hundred years of history in this country is the one guy who deserves it less than anybody else, who sold his race out, who tried to talk white, who only had white friends, who had his ass kissed all over the place because he decided he wasn’t really a black guy, who was the first person in the history of this country ever accepted by white America, who was actually able to do commercial endorsements because he pretended to be white, and that’s the guy? That’s the guy? That’s the guy who gets the benefit of that history, and that doesn’t piss you off, that doesn’t piss you off?” And then an abrupt decrescendo: “Daryl, I can assure you that the last thing I am is racist on this. This is the last guy who should benefit.”

And then June 4, the night following the Daryl interchange, turns out to be a climactic whirlwind of production challenges, logistical brinksmanship, meta-media outrage, Simpsonian minutiae, and Monster-grade stimulation. As is SOP, it starts around 7:00 p.m. in KFI’s large central prep room, which is where all the local hosts and their producers come in to prepare for their shows.

The prep room, which station management sometimes refers to as the production office, is more or less the nerve center of KFI, a large, complexly shaped space perimetered with battered little canted desks and hutches and two-drawer file cabinets supporting tabletops of composite planking. There are beat-up computers and pieces of sound equipment and funny Scotch-taped bits of office humor (e.g., pictures with staffers’ heads Photoshopped onto tabloid celebrities’ bodies). Like the studio and Airmix, the prep room is also a D.P.H.-grade mess: half the overhead fluorescents are either out or flickering nauseously, and the gray carpet crunches underfoot, and the wastebaskets are all towering fire hazards, and many of the tabletops are piled with old books and newspapers. One window, which is hot to the touch, overlooks KFI’s gated parking lot and security booth and the office of a Korean podiatrist across the street.

Overall, the layout and myriad tactical functions of the prep room are too complicated to try to describe this late in the game. At one end, it gives on to the KFI newsroom, which is a whole galaxy unto itself. At the other, comparatively uncluttered end is a set of thick, distinguished-looking doors leading off into the offices of the Station Manager, Director of Marketing & Promotions, Program Director, and so on, with also a semi-attached former closet for the P.D.’s assistant, a very kindly and eccentric lady who’s been at KFI for over twenty years and wears a high-tech headset that one begins, only over time, to suspect isn’t really connected to anything.

There are three main challenges facing tonight’s John Ziegler Show. One is that Emiliano Limon is off on certain personal business that he doesn’t want described, and therefore Mr. Vince Nicholas is soloing as producer for the very first time. Another is that last night’s on-air exchange with Daryl of Temecula is the type of intensely stimulating talk-radio event that cries out for repetition and commentary; Mr. Z. wants to rerun certain snippets of the call in a very precise order so that he can use them as jumping-off points for detailing his own “history with O.J.” and explaining why he’s so incandescently passionate about the case.

The third difficulty is that Simpson’s big anniversary Q & A with Ms. Katie Couric is airing tonight on NBC’s Dateline, and the cuts and discussions of the Daryl call are going to have to be interwoven with excerpts from what Mr. Z. refers to several times as “Katie’s blowjob interview.” An additional complication is that Dateline airs in Los Angeles from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m., and it has also now run teases for stories on the health hazards of the Atkins diet and the dangerously lax security in U.S. hotels. Assuming that Dateline waits and does the O.J. interview last (which it is clearly in the program’s interests to do), then the interview’s highlights will have to be recorded off TiVo, edited on NexGen, loaded onto Prophet, and queued up for the Cut Sheet all very quickly, since Mr. Z.’s opening segment starts at 10:06 and it’s hard to fiddle with logistics once his show’s under way.

Thus Vince spends 7:00—8:00 working two side-by-side computers, trying simultaneously to assemble the cuts from last night’s call, load an MSNBC interview with Nicole Brown Simpson’s sister directly into NexGen, and track down a Web transcript of tonight’s Dateline (which on the East Coast has already aired) so that he and Mr. Z. can choose and record bites from the Couric thing in real time. ‘Mondo, who is back board-opping the ISDN feed of 7:00—10:00’s Phil Hendrie Show, nevertheless comes in from Airmix several times to stand behind Vince at the terminals, ostensibly to see what’s going on but really to lend moral support. ‘Mondo’s shadow takes up almost half the room’s east wall.

John Ziegler, who is understandably quite keyed up, spends some of the pre-Dateline time standing around with an extremely pretty News-department intern named Kyra, watching the MSNBC exchange with half an eye while doing his trademark stress-relieving thing of holding two golf balls and trying to align the dimples so that one ball stays balanced atop the other. He is wearing a horizontally striped green-and-white golf shirt, neatly pressed black shorts, and gleaming New Balance sneakers. He keeps saying that he cannot believe they’re even giving Simpson air time. No one points out that his shock seems a bit naive given the business realities of network TV news, realities about which John Ziegler is normally very savvy and cynical. Kyra does venture to observe, quietly, that the Simpson thing draws even bigger ratings than today’s Scott Peterson, who—

“Don’t even compare the two,” Mr. Z. cuts her off. “O.J.’s just in his own world in terms of arrogance.”

The designated JZS intern, meanwhile, is at the prep room’s John & Ken Show computer, working (in Vince’s stead) on a comic review feature called “What Have We Learned This Week?,” which is normally a Friday standard but which there may or may not be time for tonight. At 7:45 p.m. it is still 90° out, and smoggy. The windows’ light makes peoplelook greenish in the areas where the room’s fluorescents are low. A large spread of takeout chicken sits uneaten and expensively congealing. Mr. Z.’s intern spends nearly an hour composing a mock poem to Ms. Amber Frey, the mistress to whom Scott Peterson evidently read romantic verse over the phone. The poem’s final version, which is “Roses are red / Violets are blue / If I find out you’re pregnant / I’ll drown your ass too,” takes such a long time because of confusions about the right conjugation of “to drown.”

“And to top it off,” Mr. Z. is telling Kyra as her smile becomes brittle and she starts trying to edge away, “to top it off, he leaves Nicole’s body in a place where the most likely people to find it are his children. It’s just a fluke that couple found her. I don’t know if you’ve ever walked by there, but it’s really dark at night, and they were in a, like [gesturing, one golf ball in each hand], cave formation out at the front.”

Sure enough, Dateline runs the anti-Atkins story first. For reasons involving laser printers and a special editing room off the on-air news cubicle, there’s suddenly a lot of running back and forth.

In Airmix, ‘Mondo is eating Koo Koo Roo’s chicken while watching Punk’d, an MTV show where friends of young celebrities collude with the producers to make the celebrities think they’re in terrible legal trouble. ‘Mondo is very careful about eating anywhere near the mixing board. It’s always around 60° in this room. On the board’s channel 6 and the overhead speakers, Phil Hendrie is pretending to mediate between apoplectic callers and a man who’s filing sexual-harassment charges against female co-workers who’ve gotten breast implants. For unknown reasons, a waist-high pile of disconnected computer keyboards has appeared in the Airmix room’s north corner, just across the wall from KFI’s Imaging studio, whose door is always double-locked.

It is only right that John Ziegler gets the spot directly in front of the prep room’s TV, with everyone else’s office chairs sort of fanned out to either side behind him. Seated back on his tailbone with his legs out and ankles crossed, Mr. Z. is able simultaneously to watch Dateline’s are-you-in-danger-at-luxury-hotels segment, to hear and help rearrange Vince’s cuts from the MSNBC exchange, and to highlight those parts of the O.J.–Katie Couric transcript that he wants to make absolutely sure to have Vince load from TiVo into Prophet when the greedy bastards at Dateline finally air the interview. It must be said, too, that Vince is an impressive surprise as a producer. He’s a veritable blur of all-business competence and technical savvy. There are none of Emiliano’s stoic shrugs, sotto wisecracks, or passive-aggressive languor. Nor, tonight, is Vince’s own slackerish stoner persona anywhere in view. It is the same type of change as when you put a fish back in the water and it seems to turn electric in your hand. Watching Vince and the host work so well as a team induces the night’s first strange premonitory jolt: Emiliano’s days are numbered.

The broadcast studio is strange when no one’s in here. Through the soundproof window, ‘Mondo’s head looks small and far away as he inclines over the spot log. It seems like a lonely, cloistered place in which to be passionate about the world. Mr. Z.’s padded host chair is old and lists slightly to port; it’s the same chair that John Kobylt sits in, and morning drive’s Bill Handel, and maybe even Dr. Laura back in the day. The studio wastebaskets have been emptied, but the banana scent still lingers. It might simply be that John and/or Ken eats a lot of bananas during afternoon drive. All the studio’s monitors are on, though none is tuned to NBC. On the Fox News monitor up over the digital clock, Sean Hannity and Susan Estrich are rerunning the Iowa Caucuses clip of Howard Dean screaming at the start of his concession speech. They play the scream over and over. Ms. Estrich is evidently filling in on Hannity and Colmes. “They have hatred for George W. Bush, but they don’t have ideas,” Sean Hannity says. “Where are the ideas on the left? Where is the thinking liberal?” Susan Estrich says, “I don’t know. I don’t have a full-time job on TV, so I can’t tell you.”

All multi-tasking ends when Dateline, after two teases and an extra-long spot break, finally commences the interview segment. It is Katie Couric and O.J. Simpson and Simpson’s attorney in a living room that may or may not be real. One tends to forget how unusually, screen-fillingly large O.J.’s head is. Mr. Ziegler is now angled forward with his elbows on his knees and his fingers steepled just under his nose. Although he does, every so often, let loose with a “Katie Couric sucks!” or “Katie Couric should be fucking shot!,” for the most part a person seated on the host’s far flank has to watch his upper face—his right eye’s and nostril’s dilations—to discern when Mr. Z.’s reacting strongly or thinking about how he’ll respond to some specific bit of Simpson’s “sociopathic BS” when it’s his turn to talk.

It’s odd: if you’ve spent some time watching Mr. Z. perform in the studio, you can predict just what he’ll look like, how his head and arms will move and eyes fill with life as he says certain things that it’s all but sure he’ll say on-air tonight, such as “I have some very, very strong opinions about how this interview was conducted,” and “Katie Couric is a disgrace to journalism everywhere,” and that O.J.’s self-presentation was “delusional and arrogant beyond all belief,” and that the original trial jury was “a collection of absolute nimrods,” and that to believe in Simpson’s innocence, as Ms. Couric says a poll shows some 70 percent of African-Americans still do, “you have to be either crazy, deluded, or stupid—there are no other explanations.”

To be fair, though, there truly are some dubious, unsettling things about the Dateline interview, such as for instance that NBC has acceded to O.J. Simpson’s “no editing” condition for appearing, which used to be an utter taboo for serious news organizations. Or that O.J. gets to sit there looking cheery and unguarded even though he has his lawyer almost in his lap; or that most of Katie Couric’s questions turn out to be Larry King—size fluffballs; or that O.J. Simpson responds to one of her few substantive questions—about 1994’s eerie, slow-motion Bronco chase and its bearing on how O.J.’s case is still perceived—by harping on the fact that the chase “never ever, in three trials that I had, it never came up,” as if that had anything to do with whatever his behavior in the Bronco really signified (and at which non-answer, and Ms. Couric’s failure to press or follow up, Mr. Z. moans and smears his hand up and down over his face). Or that O.J.’s cheerful expression never changes when Katie Couric, leaning forward and speaking with a delicacy that’s either decent or obscene, inquires whether his children ever ask him about the crime. And when someone in the arc of chairs around John Ziegler says, almost to himself, that the one pure thing to hope for here is that Simpson’s kids believe he’s innocent, Mr. Z. gives a snort of reply and states, very flatly, “They know, and he knows they know, that he did it.” To which, in KFI’s prep room, the best response would probably be compassion, empathy. Because one can almost feel it: what a bleak and merciless world this host lives in—believes, nay, knows for an absolute fact he lives in. I’ll take doubt.

See Also: Nate Silver’s Nemesis, Crazy Obama-Hater Curses Out Statistician for Questioning His Racist Poll, The Best Interview You’ll Read Today, Better to Remain Silent and be Thought a Fool…, and The Zogby Poll.

[tags]David Foster Wallace, Atlantic article on john ziegler, april 2005, profile, Host, push polling, right wing pundit, far-right, ultra-right, neo-conservative[/tags]

Ron Paul on What’s Ailing the United States and Republican Party

The Article: GOP should ask why U.S. is on the wrong track by Ron Paul on CNN.

The Text: The questions now being asked are: Where to go from here and who’s to blame for the downfall of the Republican Party?

Too bad the concern for the future of the Republican Party had not been seriously addressed in the year 2000 when the Republicans gained control of the House, Senate, and the Presidency.

Now, in light of the election, many are asking: What is the future of the Republican Party?

But that is the wrong question. The proper question should be: Where is our country heading? There’s no doubt that a large majority of Americans believe we’re on the wrong track. That’s why the candidate demanding “change” won the election. It mattered not that the change offered was no change at all, only a change in the engineer of a runaway train.

Once it’s figured out what is fundamentally wrong with our political and economic system, solutions can be offered. If the Republican Party can grasp hold of the policy changes needed, then the party can be rebuilt.

In the rise and fall of the recent Republican reign of power these past decades, the goal of the party had grown to be only that of gaining and maintaining power — with total sacrifice of the original Republican belief in shrinking the size of government.

Most Republicans endorsed this view in order to achieve victories at the polls. Limiting government power and size with less spending and a balanced budget as the goal used to be a “traditional” Republican value. This is what Goldwater and Reagan talked about. That is what the Contract with America stood for.

The opportunity finally came in 2000 to do something about the cancerous growth of government. This clear message led to the Republican success at the polls.

Once the Republicans were in power, though, the promises faded, and all policies were directed at maintaining or increasing power by trying to whittle away at Democratic strength by acting like big-spending Democrats.

The Republican Congress never once stood up against the Bush/Rove machine that demanded support for unconstitutional wars, attacks on civil liberties here at home, and an economic policy based on more spending, more debt, and more inflation — while constantly preaching the flawed doctrine that deficits don’t matter as long as taxes aren’t raised.

But what the Republican leadership didn’t realize was that ALL spending is a tax on middle-class Americans through price inflation and that eventually the inevitable consequence is paying for the extravagance with a financial crisis.

Party leaders concentrated only on political tricks in order to maintain power and neglected the limited-government principles on which they were elected. The only solution for this is for Republicans to once again reassess their core beliefs and show how the country (not the party) can be put back on the right track. The problem, though, is regaining credibility.

After eight years of perpetual (and unnecessary and unconstitutional) war, persistent and expanded attacks on our privacy, runaway deficits, and now nationalization of the financial system, Republicans are going to have a tough time regaining the confidence of the American people. But that’s what must be done.

Otherwise, Republicans can only mimic Democrats and hope for an isolated victory here and there. And that’s just more of the same that brought on the disintegration of the party.

Since the new alignment of political power offers no real change, we will remain on the same track without even a pretense of slowing the growth of government. With the new administration we can expect things to go from bad to worse.

Opportunity abounds for anyone who can present the case for common sense in fiscal affairs, for protection of civil liberties here at home, and avoiding the senseless foreign entanglements which have bogged us down for decades and contributed so significantly to our fiscal and budgetary crisis.

During the debates in the Republican Presidential primary, even though I am a 10-term sitting Representative Member of Congress, I was challenged more than once on my Republican credentials. The fact that I was repeatedly asked how I could be a Republican when I was talking a different language than the other candidates answers the question of how the Republican Party can slip so far so fast.

My rhetorical answer at the time was simple: Why should one be excluded from the Republican Party for believing and always voting for:

• Limited government power

• A balanced budget

• Personal liberty

• Strict adherence to the Constitution

• Sound money

• A strong defense while avoiding all undeclared wars

• No nation-building and no policing the world

How can a party that still pretends to be the party of limited government distance itself outright from these views and expect to maintain credibility? Since the credibility of the Republican Party has now been lost, how can it regain credibility without embracing these views, or at least showing respect for them?

I concluded my answer by simply stating the Republican Party had lost its way and must reassess its values. And that is what needs to be done in a hurry.

But it might just take a new crop of leaders to regain the credibility needed to redirect the Party. It certainly won’t be done overnight. It took a long time to come out of the wilderness after 40 years of Democratic rule for the Republican Party to take charge. Today though, time moves more quickly. Opportunities will arise. The one thing for certain is that in the next four years we will not see the Republic restored. Instead the need for it will be greater than ever.

The problems are easily understood and the answers are not that difficult. Abusing the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution can be reversed. If the Republican Party can grasp hold of the needed reforms, it can lead the way and regain its credibility. If power is sought for power’s sake alone, the Party will never be able to wrench away the power of the opposition.

In the past two years, I found that when the young people heard the message of liberty, they overwhelmingly responded favorably, fully realizing the failure of the status quo and the need to once again endorse a system of self reliance, personal responsibility, sound money, and a non-interventionist foreign policy while rejecting the cradle-to-grave nanny state all based on the rule of law and the Constitution.

To ignore the political struggle and only “hope for the best” is pure folly. The march toward a dictatorial powerful state is now in double time.

All those who care — and especially those who understand the stakes involved — have an ominous responsibility to energetically get involved in the battle of survival for a free and prosperous America.

See Also: The GOP: Abusing the rule of law and ignoring the Constitution, The GOP is Open to Suggestions, There, there, Ron, Ron Paul, The Fed, Confederate Money, and Inflation, and The GOP opposition.

[tags]ron paul, state of the us economy, american economy, republican party, 2008 elections, 2008 campaign, future of republican party, small government, foreign policy, barack obama, united states, government[/tags]

The Economist Endorses Barack Obama For President

The Article: It’s Time by the Economist.

The Text: It is impossible to forecast how important any presidency will be. Back in 2000 America stood tall as the undisputed superpower, at peace with a generally admiring world. The main argument was over what to do with the federal government’s huge budget surplus. Nobody foresaw the seismic events of the next eight years. When Americans go to the polls next week the mood will be very different. The United States is unhappy, divided and foundering both at home and abroad. Its self-belief and values are under attack.

For all the shortcomings of the campaign, both John McCain and Barack Obama offer hope of national redemption. Now America has to choose between them. The Economist does not have a vote, but if it did, it would cast it for Mr Obama. We do so wholeheartedly: the Democratic candidate has clearly shown that he offers the better chance of restoring America’s self-confidence. But we acknowledge it is a gamble. Given Mr Obama’s inexperience, the lack of clarity about some of his beliefs and the prospect of a stridently Democratic Congress, voting for him is a risk. Yet it is one America should take, given the steep road ahead.

Thinking about 2009 and 2017

The immediate focus, which has dominated the campaign, looks daunting enough: repairing America’s economy and its international reputation. The financial crisis is far from finished. The United States is at the start of a painful recession. Some form of further fiscal stimulus is needed, though estimates of the budget deficit next year already spiral above $1 trillion. Some 50m Americans have negligible health-care cover. Abroad, even though troops are dying in two countries, the cack-handed way in which George Bush has prosecuted his war on terror has left America less feared by its enemies and less admired by its friends than it once was.

Yet there are also longer-term challenges, worth stressing if only because they have been so ignored on the campaign. Jump forward to 2017, when the next president will hope to relinquish office. A combination of demography and the rising costs of America’s huge entitlement programmes—Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid—will be starting to bankrupt the country. Abroad a greater task is already evident: welding the new emerging powers to the West. That is not just a matter of handling the rise of India and China, drawing them into global efforts, such as curbs on climate change; it means reselling economic and political freedom to a world that too quickly associates American capitalism with Lehman Brothers and American justice with Guantánamo Bay. This will take patience, fortitude, salesmanship and strategy.

At the beginning of this election year, there were strong arguments against putting another Republican in the White House. A spell in opposition seemed apt punishment for the incompetence, cronyism and extremism of the Bush presidency. Conservative America also needs to recover its vim. Somehow Ronald Reagan’s party of western individualism and limited government has ended up not just increasing the size of the state but turning it into a tool of southern-fried moralism.

The selection of Mr McCain as the Republicans’ candidate was a powerful reason to reconsider. Mr McCain has his faults: he is an instinctive politician, quick to judge and with a sharp temper. And his age has long been a concern (how many global companies in distress would bring in a new 72-year-old boss?). Yet he has bravely taken unpopular positions—for free trade, immigration reform, the surge in Iraq, tackling climate change and campaign-finance reform. A western Republican in the Reagan mould, he has a long record of working with both Democrats and America’s allies.

If only the real John McCain had been running

That, however, was Senator McCain; the Candidate McCain of the past six months has too often seemed the victim of political sorcery, his good features magically inverted, his bad ones exaggerated. The fiscal conservative who once tackled Mr Bush over his unaffordable tax cuts now proposes not just to keep the cuts, but to deepen them. The man who denounced the religious right as “agents of intolerance” now embraces theocratic culture warriors. The campaigner against ethanol subsidies (who had a better record on global warming than most Democrats) came out in favour of a petrol-tax holiday. It has not all disappeared: his support for free trade has never wavered. Yet rather than heading towards the centre after he won the nomination, Mr McCain moved to the right.

Meanwhile his temperament, always perhaps his weak spot, has been found wanting. Sometimes the seat-of-the-pants method still works: his gut reaction over Georgia—to warn Russia off immediately—was the right one. Yet on the great issue of the campaign, the financial crisis, he has seemed all at sea, emitting panic and indecision. Mr McCain has never been particularly interested in economics, but, unlike Mr Obama, he has made little effort to catch up or to bring in good advisers (Doug Holtz-Eakin being the impressive exception).

The choice of Sarah Palin epitomised the sloppiness. It is not just that she is an unconvincing stand-in, nor even that she seems to have been chosen partly for her views on divisive social issues, notably abortion. Mr McCain made his most important appointment having met her just twice.

Ironically, given that he first won over so many independents by speaking his mind, the case for Mr McCain comes down to a piece of artifice: vote for him on the assumption that he does not believe a word of what he has been saying. Once he reaches the White House, runs this argument, he will put Mrs Palin back in her box, throw away his unrealistic tax plan and begin negotiations with the Democratic Congress. That is plausible; but it is a long way from the convincing case that Mr McCain could have made. Had he become president in 2000 instead of Mr Bush, the world might have had fewer problems. But this time it is beset by problems, and Mr McCain has not proved that he knows how to deal with them.

Is Mr Obama any better? Most of the hoopla about him has been about what he is, rather than what he would do. His identity is not as irrelevant as it sounds. Merely by becoming president, he would dispel many of the myths built up about America: it would be far harder for the spreaders of hate in the Islamic world to denounce the Great Satan if it were led by a black man whose middle name is Hussein; and far harder for autocrats around the world to claim that American democracy is a sham. America’s allies would rally to him: the global electoral college on our website shows a landslide in his favour. At home he would salve, if not close, the ugly racial wound left by America’s history and lessen the tendency of American blacks to blame all their problems on racism.

So Mr Obama’s star quality will be useful to him as president. But that alone is not enough to earn him the job. Charisma will not fix Medicare nor deal with Iran. Can he govern well? Two doubts present themselves: his lack of executive experience; and the suspicion that he is too far to the left.

There is no getting around the fact that Mr Obama’s résumé is thin for the world’s biggest job. But the exceptionally assured way in which he has run his campaign is a considerable comfort. It is not just that he has more than held his own against Mr McCain in the debates. A man who started with no money and few supporters has out-thought, out-organised and outfought the two mightiest machines in American politics—the Clintons and the conservative right.

Political fire, far from rattling Mr Obama, seems to bring out the best in him: the furore about his (admittedly ghastly) preacher prompted one of the most thoughtful speeches of the campaign. On the financial crisis his performance has been as assured as Mr McCain’s has been febrile. He seems a quick learner and has built up an impressive team of advisers, drawing in seasoned hands like Paul Volcker, Robert Rubin and Larry Summers. Of course, Mr Obama will make mistakes; but this is a man who listens, learns and manages well.

It is hard too nowadays to depict him as soft when it comes to dealing with America’s enemies. Part of Mr Obama’s original appeal to the Democratic left was his keenness to get American troops out of Iraq; but since the primaries he has moved to the centre, pragmatically saying the troops will leave only when the conditions are right. His determination to focus American power on Afghanistan, Pakistan and proliferation was prescient. He is keener to talk to Iran than Mr McCain is— but that makes sense, providing certain conditions are met.

Our main doubts about Mr Obama have to do with the damage a muddle-headed Democratic Congress might try to do to the economy. Despite the protectionist rhetoric that still sometimes seeps into his speeches, Mr Obama would not sponsor a China-bashing bill. But what happens if one appears out of Congress? Worryingly, he has a poor record of defying his party’s baronies, especially the unions. His advisers insist that Mr Obama is too clever to usher in a new age of over-regulation, that he will stop such nonsense getting out of Congress, that he is a political chameleon who would move to the centre in Washington. But the risk remains that on economic matters the centre that Mr Obama moves to would be that of his party, not that of the country as a whole.

He has earned it

So Mr Obama in that respect is a gamble. But the same goes for Mr McCain on at least as many counts, not least the possibility of President Palin. And this cannot be another election where the choice is based merely on fear. In terms of painting a brighter future for America and the world, Mr Obama has produced the more compelling and detailed portrait. He has campaigned with more style, intelligence and discipline than his opponent. Whether he can fulfil his immense potential remains to be seen. But Mr Obama deserves the presidency.

See Also: Why was the financial crisis a turning point in the election?, John McCain: Dishonest and Dishonorable, It’s the economy, stupid, Economist Endorses Obama, The Economist…, Barack Obama Should Be The Next President of the United States, and The Economist Endorses Obama.

[tags]barack obama, the economist, endorsement, presidential endorsement, economist magazine, article, president of the united states of america[/tags]

The Death Of A Red State

The Article: The Death of a Red State by Matt Taibbi in this weeks Rolling Stone.

The Text: Driving down a rainy Colorado highway in October, I can see the misty white outline of the Rockies out one window and the arid brown flatlands of the Great Plains out the other. Overlaying it all is the faint but unmistakable stench of cattle.

I follow the smell.

I have come to the 4th Congressional District in Colorado — a massive territory encompassing virtually all of the state north and east of Denver — to cover the re-election campaign of Rep. Marilyn Musgrave. Musgrave was Sarah Palin before Sarah Palin, a turbocharged born-again supermom who went into politics because she couldn’t stand all the naughtiness. Her first political gig was on the school board in Fort Morgan, where she devoted her energies to blacking out — literally blacking out — passages in sex-education textbooks. Later, as a state legislator, she pushed a concealed-weapon law that would have allowed guns on school grounds. She was a preposterous caricature of an evangelical politician, an Anita Bryant with a beer gut, but like Palin she was already on her way to a Major Elected Office by the time anyone thought to stop laughing. Her first act upon making it to Congress in 2003 was to introduce an amendment to ban gay marriage. She declared unequivocally — after 9/11 and the launching of two wars — that the union of same-sex couples is “the most important issue we face today.”

Musgrave was re-elected twice by a 4th District that since 1972 has been among the most solidly Republican territory in America. Her grandstanding against buggery and other forms of extra-biblical recreation has helped earn her a 100 percent rating and a top spot on the American Conservative Union’s list of the most right-wing members of Congress. She’s a living symbol of the Era of Rove, when all a politician needs to do to get elected is go to church, make freckled babies and whine about how things are going to shit because some minority group is queering the deal.

That strategy has worked for a long time — but now, suddenly, things are different in places like the 4th District. Not only does the torch-bearing evangelical Colorado of Ted Haggard and James Dobson appear poised to turn its nine electoral votes blue for a nonwhite presidential candidate, but the congressional seat belonging to one of America’s most celebrated gay-bashers in this once-impregnable Republican stronghold is also up for grabs. If Musgrave is ousted in November, as polls suggest she’ll be, it’s worth asking just what exactly is going on. Has there been a sea change in the electorate? Is there a place on the American map where you can actually see the country outgrowing the politics of bigotry?

In the city of Greeley, a small group of Democrats gathers on a Friday night to hold a fundraiser for Musgrave’s opponent, Betsy Markey. It’s a mostly middle-aged group, a lot of Sixties survivors, some Hispanics and a Native American, even a pair of married Peace Corps vets and their daughter.

Like Barack Obama, the up-ticket candidate whose coattails she hopes to ride, Markey is a prototypical modern Democrat — young, attractive and not overtly ideological. Markey is a reminder that the days of the Democratic congressman being whichever Irishman or Italian the relevant unions decided to back are long over.

Those days ended in most American towns when the factories that made steel, cars or, in Greeley’s case, beet sugar (the town’s huge Great Western Sugar factory closed in 2002) moved abroad or shut down. As organized blue-collar workers have disappeared, there has been a struggle to figure out just what constitutes the base of the Democratic Party.

It’s not an easy question to answer, which is one of the reasons the Democrats have been such an embarrassment for so many years. In the days of FDR and JFK, the party was a bunch of rich people whose bread-and-butter platform was a sort of noblesse-oblige advocacy for the voter-rich underclass. The party that sent Al Gore and John Kerry to the electoral gallows was made up of the same rich people — only now all they did for poor people was talk.

The Republicans, meanwhile, weren’t doing anything for the rank and file either, but at least their candidates were speaking the right language. They understood that in the absence of results, the average voter would settle for seeing someone in the White House who doesn’t make him feel bad about himself. The Republicans cannily targeted voters — and there were plenty of them — who don’t want to be talked down to by some Washington suit acting all smart and shit. And so for a long time the GOP won the battle of cultural preferences, sending to high offices all across the country a succession of blunt underachievers who didn’t aspire to anything that the ordinary American couldn’t achieve.

But even as Republicans were winning that battle, there was another shift taking place. Gay people started walking around in even the most remote parts of the country. Women became bosses, mayors, senators. Some of almost everybody’s best friends really were black. Next thing you know, even the most backward dickhead is quoting Dave Chappelle’s Rick James skit. So what the Democrats lost in their base, they gained in the form of a generalized tolerance that seeped unconsciously into the brains of a whole generation. They became more of a demographic than a political party united by common interests.

At the fundraiser in Greeley, the assembled Democrats look like a college discussion group — it’s a crowd where you’d worry more about a game of Trivial Pursuit breaking out than a revolution. But in truth it’s people like this, in places like this, who are on the front lines of one of the great cultural showdowns in our history. It’s a showdown that has been brought into stark relief by Obama, a contest between those who embrace the multicultural future and that segment of white America that is still holding its breath, waiting for the Earth to start spinning backward and erase all the unpleasant changes.

In Greeley, as in most of America, those two groups are defined by their racial attitudes — fault lines that these days are most visible in the battle over immigration. Immigrants comprise the bulk of the workforce at the local meat-processing plant owned by Swift and Co. The plant, which contributes to the town’s heavy cape of death-shit smell, was raided in December 2006 by agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who arrested 265 workers and drove a deep wedge into the local political scene.

Ever since, the city has been divided over the charges that the raid was unduly harsh and led to split families and abandoned children. When then-mayor Tom Selders went to D.C. and gave a speech about the ICE’s policies, local anti-immigration forces responded with savage, Swift-boat-style fliers. One, a model of racial subtlety, accused Selders of being a friend to “gangs.” The smear campaign worked, and in as perfect a metaphor for American politics as you’ll find, the professorial Selders was ousted in favor of Ed Clark, a hulking, shiny-headed retired police officer who ran on a get-tough-on-immigrants platform.

Everyone at the Markey fundraiser agrees that the anti-immigration sentiment expressed by Clark — what one woman calls the “frothing-at-the-mouth guys” — is a key reason this district has been a GOP stronghold since 1972. But the district might turn blue next month, and it’s no accident that it’s happening in a year when the presidential race has forced long-simmering racial issues out into the open. For all the fuss about the economy and terrorism, the battle between Obama and McCain is ultimately about bigotry and how much of it we’ll tolerate.

If you’re skeptical about the extent to which it always comes back to race, just listen to the arguments that conservatives are making about the causes of the financial crisis. Turn on any conservative radio station today and you can hear somebody blaming the entire crisis on the Community Reinvestment Act of 1977, which forced banks to make credit available in low-income neighborhoods. Through this bit of rhetorical gymnastics, conservatives have now pinned one of the most outrageous cases of fiscal irresponsibility in the history of rich white people on what Rush Limbaugh calls the “approved Democrat constituent.” They’re saying that the entire financial system has gone Krakatoa because poor black people didn’t make their payments.

Once you grasp that, you’ll understand that there isn’t anything on Earth these motherfuckers won’t try to pin on lazy minorities. And you’ll understand why this is more than just a presidential race. This is about an America that is steaming toward an uncertain future and has yet to decide whether it wants to face its problems or curl up in a ball and blame all the changes on Mexicans or blacks or whatever other “approved Democrat constituent” happens to be handy.

The day after the fund-raiser in Greeley, several hundred scruffy students gather for an Obama rally at the University of Northern Colorado, mulling around on a small rectangle of green lawn between two concrete high-rise dorms that look like some architect’s idea of a prison on the moon. Many of the students happily quaff beers, indifferent to a strong afternoon showing by the Greeley shit-wind. The stage is occupied by a bunch of white kids with dreadlocks offering an attempt at Obama-inspired bourgeois white-person protest reggae. “Change,” they sing, “is what we nee-eee-eeeed. . . .”

It’s a touchingly earnest scene — one that would probably win John McCain 10,000 votes an hour if broadcast live on cable stations around the country. After all, the Republicans want nothing more than to tell Middle America that Barack Obama is going to turn their kids into Ziggy Marley, or some even more sinister betray-your-race archetype, like Cat Stevens or John Walker Lindh.

If you think it’s silly to make a leap from digging Obama to supporting terrorism, consider that at this very moment, just south of here at Centennial Airport in the suburbs of Denver, Sarah Palin is about to make news by telling supporters that Obama was “palling around with terrorists” when he served on a charity board with Weather Underground founder Bill Ayers. The Republicans have made Ayers a central figure in the campaign because he was a white college kid who spent time trying to be black, dreaming as he did of forming a “white fighting force” to help a “Black Liberation movement” overthrow The Man.

All across America, if you scratch the surface of the current political jousting between the blues and reds, you’ll find race underneath. In America it’s always about race. Vietnam ended decades ago, but the civil rights movement never had a declared end — at least not according to conservatives, who have been running against it for 40 years, camouflaged in dog-whistle catchphrases like “law and order” (Nixon), “welfare queen” (Reagan) and “border security” (every Republican today). There isn’t a half-literate white person alive who doesn’t know what Palin is talking about when she says about Obama, “This is not a man who sees America as you and I do.”

And that, folks, is why Obama’s candidacy is so important. He is a living referendum on the civil rights movement — one might even say he is calling the bluff of the civil rights movement. He has been everything white America said it wanted from black America: Stay positive, work hard, go to Harvard, be more Martin and less Malcolm, and all obstacles will be cleared.

It’s happening because on college campuses like the University of Northern Colorado and every other place where progress has been allowed to penetrate, there now lives a whole generation who have been raised to believe implicitly in the virtue of a multicultural society. The election of Obama will prove once and for all the futility of using racism, camouflaged or not, to win elections. If Obama pulls this thing off, it might be a long time before you see a white candidate making transparent, panic-stricken appeals to “you and I” in the weeks before Election Day.

Two days after the Obama rally, I attend an “Old- Fashioned Political Rally” sponsored by the League of Women Voters at the fairgrounds in the town of Loveland, hoping to catch Musgrave live. Rumor has it that she’s toned down her act, that she’s no longer gay-bashing in the year of the Greatest Depression.

Only four years ago, a Republican like Musgrave could run on a wedge issue like gay marriage. One of the great traditions in American politics is the sudden arrival of a minority-baiting ballot initiative that drives the frustrated residents of swing states to the polls just in time to keep the map red. In 2004, it was gay-marriage bans offered in 11 states that helped turn out enough defenders of traditional “values” to sink Kerry. Two years later, a similar initiative in Colorado helped Musgrave beat her opponent by 7,000 votes.

At the Loveland event, I listen as a woman named Jessica Peck Corry stumps for this year’s race-baiting Trojan Horse ballot maneuver, a little thing called Amendment 46. This one actually calls itself a “Civil Rights Initiative” — which naturally turns out to be a law banning all forms of affirmative action.

Peck Corry, representing “the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative,” tells voters that affirmative action no longer makes sense. “There’s been a twentyfold increase in the number of interracial marriages” — leaving the races too mixed up to sort out who’s entitled to government help. She adds that, while her group “accepts the inevitable,” it doesn’t think giving preferential treatment to anyone is the right path for America after “getting it wrong on race for 200 years.”

Even worse is Donna Gallup, a GOP candidate for the state House. A stocky, anti-communist schoolmarm, Gallup gives a speech opposing “laws that blindly give criminals the opportunity to molest the innocent in public restrooms.” It turns out she’s referring to a bill that protects gays and lesbians from discrimination. Afterward, I ask Gallup what the hell the bill has to do with molestation. “If you’re perceived to be gay,” she says, “then you can go into a public restroom without any hostility toward you, according to this law.”

Only in America can a bill making it safe for gay people to take a piss inspire fear of “criminals” molesting the “innocent.”

After this show, it’s a letdown when Musgrave takes the stage. The district’s headline Republican has abandoned the rhetoric that made her famous, not once mentioning gay marriage or any social issues at all. She seems nervous, and her rants against Wall Street and the congressional bailout sound flat, like John Kerry trying to act religious.

But when you listen to Musgrave’s supporters, you still hear a lot of the railing against them and those people that Republicans like Peck Corry and Gallup are feeding the crowd, and which Musgrave herself rode into office years ago. “If we all have to follow the law, they should too,” says one Musgrave supporter at the rally, a former Air Force sergeant, in reference to illegal immigrants. When I ask about Sarah Palin’s claim that Obama doesn’t see America as “you and I” do, the 70-year-old agrees. “They don’t appreciate America,” he says.

This is why the makeover of someone like Marilyn Musgrave might be too little, too late. Racism and prejudice have festered at the core of the political identity of a generation of Republicans; you can’t simply excise those qualities from them overnight. Back them into a corner and they always produce a Willie Horton or a Bill Ayers or some other contagious graduate of the “University of Negroes and Communists” (as Jesse Helms once called his home-state school, UNC) ready to infect that never-was paradise of white culture with “crime” or “irresponsibility” or whatever the code word happens to be this week. They’re trying it even now, with the McCain campaign running ads showing Obama next to photos of a former Fannie Mae chairman who happens to be black but was never an adviser to Obama. “Shocking,” says the ad, as shots of the two black men fade to a picture of an aggrieved elderly white woman.

These tactics almost always worked in the past and have carried more than one man into the most powerful office in the world. But they were a house of cards all along, with no substance behind them, and when they are at last put to a vote next month, they’ll blow away forever. That’s what happens with weak ideas: They don’t die a slow, lingering death but lose their power all at once, like a broken spell.

See Also: Why He Endorsed, Bad Signs For The GOP, Quote of the day, The Palin Curse, Bad News For the Lunatic Fringe, Racists are on the march…, and McCain’s Two Americas Explained.

[tags]matt taibbi, the death of a red state, Marilyn Musgrave, rolling stone article, red states turning blue, battle ground states, racism, xenophobia, social issues, gay marriage, mexicans, blacks, african-americans, scapegoats, republican campaigning, white racism, conservatives, rural areas, changing demographics[/tags]