Categorical Aperitif

Rory O'Connor ("with Aaron Cutler") has some thoughts on Michael Savage, formerly Michael Weiner, aka Savage Weiner. This is my favorite passage:

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 [Beat icons Allen] Ginsberg and [Lawrence] Ferlinghetti, including a note to Ginsberg that read, “Watched a tourist from New Zealand taking pictures of Fijian people in the marketplace [and] 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.”

I long ago gave up trying to figure out whether Savage Weiner's well-documented nastiness was the result of pitiable insanity or damnable malevolence; mostly, I just worry about the fact that there are millions of people who sacrifice valuable hours of their lives listening to him:

In an interview with the right-wing Web site NewsMax.com, Savage said, “I guess people love my show because of my hard edge combined with humor and education. Those who listen to me say they hear a bit of Plato, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Moses, Jesus, and Frankenstein.”

Yeah, 'cause Plato was really big on telling people to choke on sausages. That's somewhere in the Symposium, right?