Michael Savage and Imus
Savage
Beasts
Before
I created Coulter Shock,
I listened to other pundits, including Michael Savage, who advocated increasing
prison torture and sticking lit dynamite in the anuses of Arab detainees. The problem with Michael Savage is that
he does not mean to be taken seriously.
He's like Howard Stern. His
use of "irony" provides a shield where he can say completely
offensive and racist things and then later claim he didn't mean them. Ha ha only serious. His voice is also somewhat unpleasant
and uninteresting. People clearly
listen to him for his insane content rather than his dulcet tones. I put him aside, temporarily to work on
Coulter and then Limbaugh.
After
I finished with Limbaugh, I went back online to search for new material for my
next piece. I downloaded a Media
Matters clip from a morning show on NBS called Imus in the Morning.
He was showing pictures of Palestinians mourning the death of Yassir
Arafat. One of the voice-overs
from the Imus show was calling the Palestinians “animals” and was advocating
dropping “the bomb” on them and killing everyone. The other co-hosts laughed along with this idea. Later that morning, they played a clip
of someone pretending to be General Patton, speaking about how an embedded
reporter had just filmed footage of a US Marine shooting an injured, unarmed
Iraqi insurgent. “Patton” used the
term “raghead,” and the phrase “bearded fatwa fairy.” Imus’ racism was thus
clearly linked to his homophobia. (If
anyone doubts that these struggles aren’t linked.) In the first half of the program, one of the male voices
said something about the “fat pig wife of [Arafat] living in Paris.” Thus he added Francophobia and sexism
to the mix. Another commentator,
noting the emotion of the Palestinians said, “It’s like the worst Woodstock.” Hippies are liberals are feminists are
Palestinians are ragheads are gay are women are Iraqis are French. Every group is standing in for every
other group. And while they
laughed, one of the commentators kept repeating “animals” and “kill them all.”
This,
of course, reminded me of the Michael Savage calls to kill all the prisoners in
Abu Graib, whom he called “subhuman.”
His comments were interspersed with bizarre attacks on media
organizations for being communist, apparently because they published photos of
prisoner abuse. As if Al Jazeera
would have ignored the pictures if the “communist” New York Times hadn’t run
them. He called for more prisoner
abuse and then dared listeners to report him to the FCC for it. Then he claimed that it was the
American People who were really going to suffer. Because of having a poor image abroad? Because we could no longer torture
prisoners? It wasn’t clear. “We the people” still don’t seem to be
suffering as much as tortured prisoners.
And certain not as much as would prisoners if, like Savage recommended,
they had dynamite stuffed in their orifices and were dropped out of airplanes.
Savage
and Imus are both entertainment.
They were both going for a shocking laugh. Savage, like Limbaugh and Coulter, is completely caught up
in himself. All of those people
are in love with their own voices.
They are completely pleased by their clever sophistry and smug beyond
belief. At the same time, they
think themselves to be victims.
Hence, Savage dared people to report him.
Savage
seemed to be addressing several different issues in his comments, many of them
along the popular right-wing logic that the media lost the Vietnam War by
demoralizing the American people by telling them what was going on. (If only they had lied, we would have
colonized all of Vietnam!) These were neither here nor there, so I cut them
along with the FCC dares. I
returned to Imus and made one track that just contained the laughing and
“animals!”. Then I made another
track that just contained racism and calls for violence, eliminating “fat pig
wife” and “worst Woodstock.” I
skipped “Patton” entirely. All
these issues are connected, clearly, in the words of the pundits, but I just
focused on calls for genocide and violence. I looped the laughing track and played violent phrases from
Imus and Savage on top. Thus the
Imus men laugh hysterically at themselves and at Savage. The entertainment value of genocide,
violence and torture is thus highlighted.
91Angels
comments on this approach, “Cutting away the fluff and feathers and presenting
what they really say in it's ugliness and baseness, everyone able to see what
is at the end of their fork, engages the listener so they have to make a judgment
(one that you hope will be in favor of what you are trying to communicate, of
course) instead of just being preached to.” (http://www.livejournal.com/users/celestehblog/66886.html?thread=15686#t15686) However, as I worked on the piece, I
became discouraged. NBC was forced
to apologize for the content of the Imus show, but the piece only reminded me
of the left’s failure to turn torture into a mainstream issue. I decided that offensive statements
about the desirability of torture were not enough to support the piece, as
clearly, not enough people would care.
Also, “here’s a guy saying something offensive” seemed too weak to carry
a piece.
I remembered a piece about laughter made
by Kingston, an undergraduate who took MUSC 220 in the fall of 2003. His piece started out cheerfully, with
friendly laughter, but turned dark and ended with mocking, menacing
laughter. In our culture, we
generally think of laughter as friendly, beneficial and desirable. Clubs have even formed where member
gather and laugh, believing it to have health benefits. Kingston’s piece changed the way that I
think about laughter by articulating its dark side.
The laughter from Imus initially seems as
innocent as all laughter seems.
However the words “animals” and a disgusted “look at this!” left in the
laugh track showed it’s true, cruel nature. I decided to make the laughter the focus of the piece. I create an increasingly heavy overlap
of laughter, using my spatilization algorithm, so that the overlapping laughter
does not interfere with itself or with non-spatialized racist comments played
on top of it. I used my
phrase-finding algorithm again in this piece, to break up Imus and Savage into
their sound bites.
This piece is only a few minutes
long. I recorded a realization
that came in at 2:22. However,
when I play that recording, it seems to go interminably. I would have sworn it was at least
seven or ten minutes. This piece
had serious crash bugs until the spring break of 2005 and so has never been
performed. This is absolutely my
last right wing voice piece.
Unless I take on Bill O’Reilley and Fred Phelps to do a piece concerning
homophobia. God help me, I don’t
know if I could stand it.
This post is not creative commons. It is copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All rights reserved
Tag: Micheal Savage
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