Prescient Heckler

Back in the day, before talk radio became a stroke inducing wingnut nightmare (and before Air America) I used to listen to KABC in Los Angeles, which has always been an all talk station. In the mornings it had Michael Jackson (not that one) a very erudite, well informed personality who had the world’s most impressive rolodex. He could get Nelson Mandela or Margaret Thatcher on the phone and callers, before everybody became a right wing asshole, were invariably polite and well informed. It was the kind of talk radio that people like me — the snoozers who watch the History Channel and Lehrer — love. No yelling, no controversy, just a bunch of smart people palavering endlessly. Needless to say, this is so far out of fashion it might as well be a Nehru jacket.

Jackson was on from 9 to 1 and then that sanctimonious prick, Dennis Prager, would come on and blow the whole mood. Guys like him are a dime a dozen today, but he was my first modern wingnut gasbag, so he holds a special place in my … digestive system.

Today, on the Huffington Post, he says that the guy who heckled Ann Coulter is a Hitler youth. But the universities are also like Weimar Germany and Phd’s led the way to the death camps and the gulags.

None of that is factual or makes any sense. Weimar “decadence” was the target of Nazism, not the cause — unless you want to adopt the abuser excuse “she made me do it because she was bad.” And Nazism may have ostensibly been “secular, but it sure as hell used Christian nationalism when it suited them:

In his first radio address to the German people, twenty-four hours after coming to power, Hitler declared, “The National Government will preserve and defend those basic principles on which our nation has been built up. They regard Christianity as the foundation of our national morality and the family as the basis of national life.”

But whatever. That’s just typical Dennis Prager dribbling confusedly about barbarians and brown shirts because somebody was rude to Ann Coulter. Rude to Ann Coulter — something one would think he’d be embarrassed to bring up considering what a nasty piece of work she is.

Does everyone remember what the student’s outrageous question in that Q&A was?

“You say that you believe in the sanctity of marriage,” said Ajai Raj, an English sophomore. “How do you feel about marriages where the man does nothing but fuck his wife up the ass?”

Think about that for a minute. When I first heard about it I thought he was saying something for the pure purpose of being (as he admits) a jackass and trying to put Coulter off balance. But considering the revelations of this week, in which it was revealed that a prominent religious leader enjoyed forcing sodomy on his wife against her will, it’s actually a serious question.

I agree with Prager that there are barbarians in our midst, but I think he needs to look a little bit closer to his own social circle.

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