The three faces of Michael Savage.

[riverdeep]

This article brings up some things on Michael Savage, who I found out a couple of days ago has the third largest radio audience, that reveal his inner tensions.

Dig deeper, however, and the question of who Savage is, and how truly savage he is, becomes far more complicated. "Savage" isn't his real name; it seems to speak to his heightened sense of masculinity, his aggression, and his antipathy toward minorities. Born Michael Alan Weiner, "Savage" is the child of Russian-Jewish immigrants. He earned two master's degrees and a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomedicine from that liberal bastion the University of California, Berkeley.

(snip)

Before the vitriolic monologist emerged, there was another, kinder and gentler Michael. This one roamed Greenwich Village and the Bay Area in the early 1970s, kept a weathered copy of On the Road in his back pocket, and lay on the beach with the renowned beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti whenever he wasn't working on stand-up comedy routines. He guarded Timothy Leary's LSD supply, and he even once posed naked in a photograph with Ginsberg, a well-known and very public homosexual, which he distributed among friends in an attempt to prove himself part of the counterculture.

(snip)

The shift in Savage's attitudes toward homosexuality may be the most revealing of his complex persona. When he was younger, his father mocked Savage's sexuality. "Michael would have on tight black jeans and a boat-necked sweater, and his dad would say, 'I don't like the way you're dressed. You look like a fag,'" childhood friend Alan Zaitz has said. In his first and only novel, Vital Signs, the protagonist (a fortyish Jew named Samuel Trueblood who shares many of Savage's biographical details) says, "I choose to override my desires for men when they swell in me, waiting out the passions like a storm, below decks." There are Savage's years with Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, including a note to Ginsberg that read, "Watched a tourist from New Zealand taking pictures of Fijian people in the marketplace thought of inserting my camera's lens in your A-hole to photograph the walls of your rectum." These days, his attitude is outright hostility, with, for instance, his continual assertion of a "homosexual mafia" trying to control the state of world affairs. Savage has also said that gay parenting is "child abuse" and that the sight of a gay couple "makes me want to puke."

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture/86237/?page=entire

The author describes these identities as moralist, healer and hedonist. Could explain why he's the craziest guy on mainstream radio.

[villager]

1. More evidence that *all* rightwing politics is simply projection....

n/t

[Drunken Irishman]

2. Reminds me of Andrew Dice Clay.

[tom_paine]

3. Savage is a closeted something: homosexual, bestialist, child molestor, who knows?

There is only one thing that is abundantly clear...that level and type of spewing insanity can ONLY be projection.

But he is definitely a closeted something. When he rails about "liberal sexual deviance" he is clearly speaking from his own black Bushie heart.

[AlCzervik]

4. i think he totally hates himself but like many with his problem he tries to cover it up

with projection and nasty rhetoric.

I'd feel bad for him but he's just done too much harm imo.

[LaStrega]

5. and they're all ugly n/t

[lurky]

6. My three competing theories:

A. The old Wiener was the real Wiener. His repressed homosexuality has driven him mad and stupid, turned him into this deranged dumbfuck called "Michael Savage".

B. The old Wiener was the real Wiener. "Michael Savage" is just a persona he has cynically created to make lots of money and gratify his ego, just as Ann Coulter and any number of other political bottom-feeders have. He doesn't actually believe the stuff he spews, but it pays well.

C. The old Wiener was a fake. He was a spy, sent to infiltrate the Beat scene and collect information for the FBI or whoever else. Remember, this was the heyday of J. Edgar Hoover and COINTELPRO, and they certainly would have wanted to keep a close eye on "subversives" like Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg. To gain entry to the scene, and the trust of its leaders, an informant would have had to play at being a little freaky and sexually ambiguous, even if it was just an act.

I have similar suspicions about other 60's radicals like David Horowitz who have since "transformed" into neo-fascists (I don't use the f-word lightly, but most of these guys have long ago dropped even the trappings of democratic thought.) How many of these "neo-cons" were actually informants playing at leftism to gain the trust of their colleagues in academia, activism, etc?

[riverdeep]

7. I think it's a little bit of A and a little of B.

A happy confluence (for him) of putting aside past demons and if being able to do so with a fervor over and above that he would normally reign down makes hims a comfortable living, what's the harm?

Your third scenario is most intriguing. I know that many of the groups during the sixties were infiltrated and these infiltrators often were the ones who sparked the violence, which, by the way, nothing has really changed. Look at the story of the FBI's plan of putting moles into vegan potlucks around the upcoming RNC convention.

Maybe they have a heretical personality that causes them to latch onto the extremes of the times. The hippie lifestyle concealed many people who were just into the more pragmatic, superficial, selfish benefits of the scene, rather than any greater commitment or philosophy. The worst and most obvious example may be Charles Manson.

Whatever he is, even if it's just a persona (maybe especially if it's just a persona), it's a dark and twisted world he resides in.