The Bewitching Hour is NOW

...below is a piece I just wrote for my church's service bulletin. Thought y'all might be interested too...


The Bewitching Hour is Now

“O Foolish Galatians, who hath bewitched you, that ye should not obey the truth, before whose eyes Jesus Christ hath been evidently set forth, crucified among you?”

 Galatians 3:1

The problem that Paul found the Galatians suffering from was hardly kept to the First Century A.D., or to a certain former Roman province in Asia Minor.

We are approaching the 72nd anniversary of one of the greatest hoaxes in broadcasting history. At 8:00 P.M. on October 30, 1938, the CBS Radio network broadcast an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ classic fantasy tale The War of the Worlds. This time, the invading army of Martians were portrayed in simulated news reports as landing in Central New Jersey, and wreaking destruction at such a rapid pace that New York City had been destroyed within 20 minutes.

A Princeton University study of the audience who tuned into that program – 6,000,000 listeners across the United States and Canada – found that 1,700,000 of those listeners believed the events portrayed in the drama to actually be happening, leading 1,200,000 of them to act upon their panic across the continent. Listeners in Connecticut telephoned local police and declared they could “see the fire” the Martians were supposedly causing to their Southwest. The Kansas City bureau of The Associated Press received inquiries on the "meteors" from Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Beaumont, Texas, and St. Joseph, Missouri. A man in Pittsburgh said he returned home in the midst of the broadcast and found his wife in the bathroom, a bottle of poison in her hand, and screaming: "I'd rather die this way than like that."

Thankfully, no actual fatalities were known to have resulted from the panic. But there was talk about the U.S. Congress, the Federal Communications Commission, and various state and local government entities investigating CBS and the producer and star of the broadcast, Broadway theatrical director and actor Orson Welles. There was even talk of a Canadian government investigation, because one of the stations broadcasting the drama, CFRB, was located in Toronto.

But, after a few days, most of that talk died down. In part, this was due to the influential newspaper columnist Dorothy Thompson, who pointed out that, if anything, Welles and CBS had merely shown how open America was to being bamboozled by our own fears; just imagine, Thompson said, what could have happened if Nazi saboteurs had somehow captured a major radio station and created a similar panic.

Within a week, Welles’ radio show obtained a new sponsor, Campbell Soups, and Welles’ Mercury Theatre group got offers to move from Broadway to Hollywood, where they would make such classic films as Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, and MacBeth. Orson Welles became a household name across America because of a panic he hadn’t realised he was creating when he made it.

Ironically, one of the people competing with Welles at that same hour, 8:00 P.M. Eastern Time on Sundays, was the Detroit-based “Radio Priest,” Fr. Charles Coughlin. Coughlin’s weekly audience was many times larger than Welles’ – 40,000,000 – but, unlike Welles, who was simply intending to tell an entertaining tale, Coughlin was intent on bewitching his audience with a fraudulent gospel.

Ten days after the Welles broadcast, on November 9-10, 1938, supposedly in response to the assassination of a Nazi German diplomat in Paris by a German-born Polish Jew, Nazis across Germany and Austria attacked Jews on a level never before seen in German history. This round of mass destruction of synagogues, Jewish-owned businesses and the homes of German and Austrian Jews became known as Kristallnicht, or The Night of Broken Glass, and led directly to the development of Hitler’s program to exterminate European Jews.

Ten days later, on November 20, 1938, Coughlin took to the radio airwaves and claimed that Nazi rule in Germany and Austria was merely a defence against Jewish-inspired Soviet-style Communism, and that "Jewish persecution only followed after Christians first were persecuted." The December 5, 1938, issue of Coughlin’s own magazine, ironically named Social Justice, carried a piece credited to Coughlin but clearly plagiarized from a speech by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels. At a rally in the Bronx, New York, shortly afterward, Coughlin was seen giving a Nazi salute and quoted as saying, "When we get through with the Jews in America, they'll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing."

On December 18, 1938 two thousand of Coughlin's followers marched in New York protesting potential asylum law changes that would allow more Jews (including refugees from Hitler's persecution) into the U.S., chanting, "Send Jews back where they came from in leaky boats!" and "Wait until Hitler comes over here!"

The reaction to Coughlin’s sharp increase in anti-Semitic rhetoric was itself immediate. The utility announcer WMCA in New York used for its Coughlin broadcasts ended the November 20th broadcast by saying, “Unfortunately, Father Coughlin has uttered mistakes of fact.” The next day, WMCA management terminated Coughlin’s contract with the station; within weeks, fellow New York station WINS also took Coughlin off their air. Other stations from Boston to Kansas City also gradually dropped his program from their schedules, to the point where even his long-time flagship station, WJR Detroit, ended its association with him, and he could only buy time to broadcast to his local audience over a Canadian station, CKLW in Windsor, Ontario. His local broadcasts continued until after the United States had entered the Second World War, by which time Coughlin had become almost universally recognised as a “sympathiser with the enemy.” On May 1, 1942, Detroit Archbishop Most Rev. Edward Rooney finally ordered Coughlin to end his broadcasting and political activities.

Sound vaguely familiar? Sound like any religious radio programs you’ve heard about lately? Or any candidate for public office who’d like to make sure your civil rights are revoked simply because of who you love? In 1944, the great radio comedian Jack Benny announced on a national program that making fun of Hitler “used to be easy, but it isn’t anymore. If you could cleanse Hitler of the blood of Europe’s millions, he’d show up as the fancy little Schickelgruber we used to laugh at before we knew better. But that blood won’t wash off.”

Are you still laughing at the wild claims some hate talkers and wannabe politicians are saying about you? Or, knowing the truth, are you refusing to be bewitched into that laughter and instead take the strongest stance you can to push back at that hatred? Paul got his response from the Galatians over nineteen centuries ago. What’s yours?

KJLL Needs to Cancel Laura Schlessinger and Replace Her with King Daevid MacKenzie

KJLL Needs to Cancel Laura Schlessinger and Replace Her with King Daevid MacKenzie

KJLL-AM 1330, here in Tucson, must be demanded by its potential audience to scrap its daily two-hour carriage of the Laura Schlessinger Show and give me, a broadcaster of 40 years’ experience (more than Schlessingers’, may I add) the same program time each weekday.
Every weekday from 1:00 to 3:00 P.M. Arizona Time, KJLL currently airs the Los Angeles-based radio program of Laura Schlessinger, a notorious bigot on many issues, historically including sexuality and most recently emphasizing racism.
This bigotry is forced on her audience under the guise of psychological therapy and “tough love” advice. Her syndicator, Talk Radio Networks, unethically promotes her show under the name “Dr. Laura,” and indeed she does hold a doctorate from Columbia University. However, that doctorate is in physiology, the science of the bodies of living things. She only holds a master’s degree in psychology. The medical board in California specifies that, even if one holds a doctorate, only those who hold a clinical license in the field they work in may call themselves “Doctor” in public; why they have not nailed Schlessinger on this fraud (as they did Barbara De Angelis, one of Schlessinger’s former co-workers at Los Angeles station KFI), many are still wondering.
Last week, Schlessinger, whose flagship station is now the CBS-owned KFWB, took a call from an African-American woman who was married to a Caucasian man and was extremely upset with the racially disrespectful comments her husband and his friends made around her. For whatever lack of reason, Schlessinger used this incident to start using the “N-word” on the air (she uttered it no less than eleven times within a couple of minutes of programming time), told the woman that “if [you don’t] have a sense of humor, don’t marry outside of your race,” and stated that many African-Americans “unthinkingly” voted for President Barack Obama simply because of his African racial heritage.
This kind of hardcore bigotry is certainly not surprising to the GLBT communities. Schlessinger has historically uttered vicious statements in relation to us since the mid-‘90s. "A huge portion of the male homosexual populace is predatory on young boys." "If you're gay or lesbian it's a biological error." "When we have the word 'homosexual,' we are clarifying the dysfunction, the deviancy, the reality." "When homosexuals adopt children, these children are intentionally robbed of a necessary mom and dad." All of these are direct quotes from Laura Schlessinger’s mouth and writings.
Curiously, after Schlessinger made these vicious attacks on us, CBS handed her a syndicated daily one-hour television show in 2000. Through the efforts of the legendary entertainer and social activist Robin Tyler and her allies in the StopDrLaura.com website, Schlessinger’s TV show was indeed stopped. Proctor & Gamble, a major advertiser on daytime TV, was the first to publicly drop Schlessinger, leading to no less than 170 other advertiser cancellations across the United States and Canada. United Airlines refused to allow its own in-flight magazine to sell ad space to CBS’ Paramount Television subsidiary to publicise the show. And 30 more advertisers dropped her radio show, costing her an additional $30 million in annual income.
Despite these widespread rejections of her hate speech, over 400 radio stations across the United States, most of which are either owned or otherwise affiliated with the Salem pseudoChristian hate talk radio chain, still give her daily airtime to spew her bigotry today, a decade after her TV show was stopped. She has since “moderated” her stance on homosexuality but continues to oppose marriage equality, establishing that she has not adequately modified her hatred of us.
Schlessinger’s bigotry continues to plague our public airwaves because her distributors over the years – formerly the Clear Channel subsidiary Premiere Radio Networks, currently an outfit calling itself Talk Radio Networks – offer her program to local stations who want to operate on the cheap. The distributor “barters” the program, offering it to a station without cost in exchange for the first one or two commercials in each set of ads aired within and directly adjacent to each hour of the program. Why, the station reasons, should they pay people to operate the program locally when here’s a national show being handed to it on a silver platter with that one little string attached? Any local spots sold are automatically profit as a result.
Consequently, many local stations have absolutely no locally-based programs. They are simply feeder plants for nationally-satellited material produced by people who would never bother setting foot in the station’s community of service, let alone live there – or here.
KJLL, the Tucson affiliate for Schlessinger, largely operates as one such station. Its only daily program host ased here in Tucson is John C. Scott, who, as the station’s Program Director, hands himself those two late afternoon hours (significantly, immediately following Schlessinger’s show on KJLL’s schedule). The remainder of the time is given to national programs offered on barter by syndicators, ranging from the similarly racist Don Imus and Lou Dobbs to the politically progressive Ed Schultz, Thom Hartmann and Stephanie Miller (the last of which, incidentally, came out of the closet as a lesbian on last Friday’s program). An additional three or four hours a day are sold by KJLL for $500 an hour (the price had been quoted to me when I inquired about joining the station two years ago) for vanity programs that essentially wind up becoming infomercials for the host’s primary business (realtors, restaurateurs and the like).
KJLL has absolutely no issue-oriented talk programming personnel outside of the schedule territory Scott hands himself.
This policy is all too common across the country. It is designed to prevent local discourse on community matters by experienced program hosts that the stations don’t want to have to pay a salary to.
Unfortunately, I am one such experienced program host. I have been involved in broadcasting in one form or another since I was 9 years old, starting out as a child actor in supermarket commercials. I have been news director and talk programming host in the Chicago radio market; hosted talk programs in Phoenix, Milwaukee and Oshkosh, Wisconsin; and performed many on-air tasks in both radio and television on the regional CKY-TV Network in Manitoba, Wisconsin Public Radio, the “LesBiGay Radio” daily program in Chicago, and various stations across the country with my historical Public Radio series “Echoes of a Century.”
As well, and particularly pertinent to the GLBT communities, I have always been open about my bisexuality, never closeted.
I am also physically disabled, having severe degenerative disc disease and lumbar stenosis. Thus, I currently qualify for SSI-Disability payments as a partially disabled person. However, I still retain all of my skills as a broadcaster.
KJLL’s office phone number is 520-529-5865. Everyone reading this article needs to telephone John C. Scott at KJLL and demand that he cancel his station’s airing of Laura Schlessinger’s program and, as a replacement, give me the same air time to start a daily two-hour talk program that will, for a change, not insult or harass its audience. That is the very least Scott owes Tucson and the online listening audience for KJLL polluting the Southern Arizona airwaves with Schlessinger’s hateful bilge for these many years.

Adventures in (Non-)Communication with Sirius OutQ and MSNBC

For a business allegedly based in communication, SiriusXM OutQ doesn’t seem to be all that communicative. At least the guy allegedly in charge of their programming, Dave Gorab, isn’t.


For the last six weeks at least, I’ve been calling Gorab’s office – SiriusXM’s main office switchboard is at 212-584-5100; try it yourself sometime – and leaving voicemail messages asking why, if OutQ plugs itself as being “America’s GLBT Radio Station,” it has never had any Bisexual or Transgendered program hosts in its years of operation? The only program hosts they’ve ever had have all been either Gay men or Lesbian women.

Gorab hasn’t returned any of the calls. I’ve recently added calls to Jeremy Coleman, Gorab’s immediate superior in the SiriusXM brass; he hasn’t returned any calls, either, but it’s only been two from me thus far to him. If you’d like to know what gives, I suggest – plead, even – that you give them a holler yourself.

In addition to the channel’s half-fulfilled claim, none of OutQ’s current programming originates in full from the West Coast on a regular basis (The Frank DeCaro Show is split between DeCaro in New York and supporting mouth Doria Bittle in L.A.), even though other SiriusXM talk programming has and does. (Repeats of the weekday programming start at the ridiculously early hour of 7:00 P.M. Pacific Time, with DeCaro.) One of OutQ’s original programs, Harrison On The Edge, originated from Los Angeles for its relatively brief tenure on the schedule; Mojo Nixon’s programs have all originated from the San Diego suburb of Coronado, California; and one entire channel, Playboy Radio, is headquartered on Hugh Hefner’s estate in Holmby Hills, California, the Los Angeles suburb.

Strangely enough, Playboy Radio has employed more Bisexuals on its daily air staff – Juli Ashton, Tiffany Granath, Ginger Lynn Allen, Christy Canyon, Andrea Lowell, Kylie Ireland – than OutQ ever has on its entire, air and office, staff. (And we have the photographic evidence to establish the point regarding madams Ashton, Allen, Canyon, et. Al. It’s not exactly difficult to find.) Hell, when Playboy Radio first cranked itself up, its entire air staff was Ashton and Granath doing a radio version of their popular Night Calls TV program (Canyon and Nicki Hunter are that program’s current radio hosts).

Oh, and on a somewhat related note, Bill Wolff, executive producer of Rachel Maddow’s MSNBC program, is scheduled to be at a meet-up in Tucson tonight. I’ll ask him why MSNBC keeps having the Biphobe extraordinaire Dan Savage as a guest on the Olbermann and Maddow shows (See the 29 May 2010 note on this blog, below); Brother Wolff’s answer, if any, will be posted here in the next few days. Should you not want to wait, Rachel and Keith’s production offices are reachable through 212-664-4444, the main switchboard for NBC in New York and the network’s owned-and-operated TV station there, WNBC-TV Channel 4 (hence all those 4s in the phone number; NBC's original radio station in New York was at 660 kHz on the AM dial, hence that "66" at the beginning). Have fun there too, folks.

Why I love Roller Derby Women

If you’re one of the few people who haven’t heard of the resurgence in Roller Derby of the last nine years or so, welcome back from your coma and I’m glad you’re able to read this. You have some catching up to do.


I make no bones about it – I love roller derby women. They represent to me the perfect modern type of the opposite sex. To be honest about it, it’s been that way throughout my life (if you remember the names Francine Cochu, Sherri Erich and Darlene Langois de la Chapelle, you recall exactly why). But the women making up the current-day version of the sport have added some very important elements to that image.

This ain’t your grandpa’s roller derby we’re dealing with here. Mind you, I loved that version, too. In junior high school, how I wished roller derby was a scholastic sport, put on the same level of respect as basketball, football or softball. My Wisconsin classmates idolised Oscar Robertson, Ray Nitschke or Henry Aaron. My sports idol? Psycho Ronnie Raines of the Los Angeles Thunderbirds, who would gleefully goad fans into throwing their paper Coke cups at him when he played the heel on the banked track – and just as gleefully chewed those cups directly in front of the ticked-off fans and spit them right back out. Then he’d punctuate his response by racking up a few points on the next jam just to stuff it up their noses. Now there was a man.

I even attended a match on what turned out to be one of the last tours of the original Roller Derby league, the San Francisco-based International Roller Derby League, in 1972. It was at Kolf Sports Center on the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh campus. I know the Cincinnati Jolters were one of the teams, but I forget who they skated against (maybe Jerry Seltzer can fill me in sometime). I was so captivated by the action on the banked track that I insisted on standing on the floor a few feet closer than the bleachers were; after my dad convinced me to sit back down, one of the Jolter skaters took a spill over the railing and landed almost exactly where I had been standing only a few minutes before. (Dad never let me hear the end of that one.)

One of the images above is of the label of the British 45 r.p.m. single release of “Roller Derby Queen” by Jim Croce. I realise that, to the derby skaters of today, that song comes off as an insult – more than a handful of them have said as much to me. But Croce wrote songs about characters that made up street-level America, some bad (the pimp in “Bad, Bad Leroy Brown,” the pool hustlers in “You Don’t Mess Around With Jim”) but most good (the truck driver in “Speedball Tucker,” the down-on-his-luck musician in “Box #10,” the stock car driver in “Rapid Roy”). Most of these images were icons of Americana that even Merle Haggard and Willie Nelson weren’t singing about yet. In the concert album Jim Croce Live, he told the story of how he came to write “Roller Derby Queen”: a patron at the bar applauded particularly enthusiastically at one of Jim’s earliest performances at a Country & Western tavern, and when they conversed after the performance she’d told him that she used to be a Roller Derby skater in Texas. She was the very kind of person Croce loved to immortalise in his songs.

Alas, the IRDL ran out of gas a few months after that, and the Bill Griffiths-operated league in L.A., for whose T-Birds Psycho Ronnie skated, somewhat limped along for another dozen years, eventually even landing a weekly slot on ESPN in ’85 before everything finally ground to a halt. The less said about two later attempts to revive it commercially – that over-hyped Griffith monstrosity RollerGames in 1988, and the flaky figure-8-tracked RollerJam that used AWA and WWF reject Ken Resnick as a commentator ten years later – the better.

A few years ago, a curious thing began to happen in Austin, Texas, and Phoenix and Tucson, Arizona – all-female leagues of roller derby teams began competing, independently of any commercial structures. Rather than being held in a top-down business model, the skaters were putting on the bouts – making fun of the kayfabe aspects of the Griffiths product instead of practicing it – as a grassroots-up experience. The Austin TXRD Lonestar league used the banked track of yore, but Phoenix’s AZRD and Tucson’s TRD used simple plastic rings of lights on a flat surface for their tracks. Although there have been other leagues that have adopted the banked-track structure – the Los Angeles Derby Dolls, Phoenix’s Arizona Derby Dames and Oklahoma City’s Red Dirt Rebellion Rollergirls are among the more notable – by far the flat-track version has proven to be the most popular, with over 200 municipal flat-track leagues of one form or another popping up across North America, Australia and Europe.

There are five character traits that these women all possess that make them my favourites:

1. INDEPENDENCE. Yes, it’s a team sport (the occasional match race notwithstanding). But every woman associated with these teams and leagues display fierce independence by the simple act of organising these bouts in the first place. There’s no George Steinbrenners (thank God!) or Ted Turners owning these leagues, and no Michael Jordans making tons of money from playing the game. The vast majority of leagues are skater-organised cooperatives made up entirely of amateur competitors, many of which are registered with the IRS as not-for-profit organisations. Often, they never get serious attention from area media (when was the last time KNBC in Los Angeles gave the score of a Long Beach Roller Derby bout?) And, let’s face it, Roller Derby was, for all intents and purposes, dead for the dozen-plus years before the Lonestars cranked it back up. Hitching your wagon to a dormant star and getting the star moving again is damned independent.

2. COURAGE. Most people of either sex wouldn’t have the guts to even venture onto a baseball diamond or a hockey rink, let alone a roller derby track.

3. INTENSE DEDICATION. These women practice their skills for hours on end at least two days a week (many three) on top of those weekends when bouts are scheduled.

4. OUTRAGEOUS WIT. Only in roller derby can somebody calling themselves Dr. Mary Lu Botomy compete as a top jammer for a team called The Coffin Draggers, as is the case with who is probably my very favourite skater in the Arizona Derby Dames. It takes a truly wicked sense of humour to keep coming up with event names like Girl on Girl Traction (Long Beach), The Final Smackdown (Stuttgart Valley Roller Girlz), It Came From The Roller Rink! (Colorado’s Castle Rock ‘n’ Rollers), Autumn Slaughter (Derby Revolution of Bakersfield), Coal Miners Slaughter (Australia’s Sydney Roller Derby), 2010: A Rollerderby Odyssey (Edmonton’s E-Ville Roller Derby), Hassle at the Castle (Edinburgh’s Auld Reekie Roller Girls) and Boutin’ for Boobies (a Central Oklahoma Roller Derby fundraiser for breast cancer research).

5. LOYALTY. Not only to their fellow skaters, even on opposing teams and leagues, but especially to the fans who keep coming to the bouts to support their efforts.

In all of my relationships with women throughout my life, I have yet to find a partner that displayed independence, courage, dedication, loyalty, or a tolerance for my admittedly sick sense of humour. (One woman wondered aloud within my hearing range, exactly what the hospital did with the tissue taken from breast reduction surgery? I instinctively responded that she may want to avoid the meatloaf in the cafeteria. That relationship didn’t last much longer.) That’s probably why, if I ever do pursue another relationship with a woman, it’ll almost definitely have to be with a modern-day derby skater. Any Derby women reading this – especially between Tucson and San Francisco -- interested in taking me up on that idea? You know where to find me…

The Doctor is Out, and you’re not looking all that well yourself…

Mind you, The Dr. Demento Show is still heard in one community over the terrestrial airwaves, thanks to a contractual obligation with KACV in Amarillo, Texas, although that’s simply an edit of his online show. And the show will still be available as an Internet stream at drdemento.com for future programs. But, for all intents and purposes, Dr. Demento as we knew him for the last 40 years is gone from the airwaves, and the era of creative radio programming went with him when he left.

The illustration for this post happens to be the front cover of Dr. Demento’s Delights, a 1975 Warner Brothers concoction of novelty songs ranging from the brightly amusing (Jim Kweskin’s revival of “If You’re a Viper”) to, frankly, the disturbingly demented (Napoleon XIV’s “They’re Coming to Take Me Away, Ha-Haaa!” has never generated a laugh out of anyone with a loved one who has been institutionalized for mental problems, or for that matter anyone who has had to deal with a stalker). It was my first exposure to the good Doctor’s works, as I lived at the time in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, a community that didn’t have any radio stations hip enough to add the show to their schedules. A few months after the purchase, I moved to Kenosha, where I got a weekly fix of Dementia over WRKR in Racine (somehow fittingly, on Sunday nights, right before falling asleep for the next day’s scholastic traumas). This just proved to me that Kenosha has always been cooler than Oshkosh.

Dr. Demento, born Barret Hansen in Minneapolis (also cooler than Oshkosh) on the day after April Fool’s Day 1941, was the last living morsel of the era of creative radio programming known as “Underground FM.” After making his daily bread by writing liner notes for those $2 two-record LP mail-order sets that Warner Brothers used to advertise on their inner sleeves, and being a talent scout for Specialty Records before that, Ol’ Barry Hansen got a radio gig at one of the country’s first outlets of the hippie counterculture, KPPC-FM in Pasadena, California. After a couple of 1970 hours of material like Harry “The Hipster” Gibson’s “Who Put the Benzedrine in Mrs. Murphy’s Ovaltine” and The Novas’ affectionate immortalisation of The Wrestler That Made Milwaukee Famous, “The Crusher,” relief jock The Obscene Steven Clean took over the KPPC airwaves by uttering, “Man, you gotta be demented to play that stuff on the radio.” Ol’ Barry relished the recognition of what his work had thus accomplished, and the Demento handle stuck.

Flash forward to the end of May, 2010. The last major affiliate of Dr. Demento’s syndicated radio show, WLUP in Chicago, cancelled the program after running it for over 30 years. (For a while, when WLUP used Steve Dahl as the big “star” of its roster, Dr. Demento was the only thing worth listening to on the station.) From a peak of over 100 affiliates – including KMET and, later, KLSX in Los Angeles and WNBC in New York, all now long gone from those communities’ dials – the show’s affiliate roster is now down to one, that straggler in Amarillo. And at the end of the summer, even Amarillo will most likely be gone, too.

Thanks in large part to Bill Clinton’s signing that horrendous broadcasting deregulation bill in 1996, terrestrial radio has now become 57 boring varieties of the same basic glop. There may be more stations licensed in the United States than ever before, but there are less station owners in the United States than at the end of the Coolidge Administration (1929, for the historically-challenged). Music radio is invariably plucked off a satellite or a computer file sent from Nashville or Hollywood, regardless of the type of music it is. “Air personalities” (if there are any left with actual personality, please let me know) are invariably not at the radio stations’ studios when you hear their voices over the signal, and in most cases have never even set foot in the stations’ offices or cities of license, either. Talk radio has mutated from thoughtful conversations featuring flesh-and-blood humans (Good God, how I miss Tom Snyder, Chicago Eddie Schwartz and Don Vogel) to five tiers of satellite-fed fascist demons pounding into their audiences’ heads who their Orwellian daily three-minute hate should be aimed at today. Past, say, my old acquaintances Steve King & Johnnie Putman on WGN Chicago and Danny Bonaduce on Philadelphia’s WYSP, Harry Shearer’s Le Show on KCRW Santa Monica, Duke & Banner on KBBF Santa Rosa (and dukeandbanner.com for you virgins) and maybe Tom Leykis’ Tasting Room syndicated show, there’s precious little justification in tuning to a terrestrial U.S. radio station anymore.

And I can’t exactly call what my business has turned into “iPod Radio,” since my own mp3 player is stocked with old KHJ and KRLA airchecks from the 1960s heyday of “Boss Angeles” radio. The Real Don Steele may have died a dozen years ago, but every day I still hear him at the peak of his powers, making even the worst of ‘60s pop music – Herb Alpert should never have taken that trumpet off his lips in order to sing – worth waiting through.

Whenever I visited with him, Tom Snyder would rib me about how twisted a mind I maintained in my brain. Well, it was he, along with Larry Lujack, Wolfman Jack, Connie Szerszen, Jerry & Dody Cowan and Dr. Demento who did the twisting. Now they’re all gone from the airwaves (and, in the cases of the Wolfman and Brother Snyder, gone from the planet). I weep at the thought of the newest crop of radio listeners having to draw inspiration from, horror of horrors, Ryan Seacrest. Perhaps that’s the real curse mentioned at the end of the Book of Malachi?

Elton John Kisses Rush Limbaugh's Cyst

I love the way that the French honour performing artists. When the seminal film director D.W. Griffith died, his colleague Erich von Stroheim eulogised him for the BBC and, in said process, explained why he had himself moved to France permanently after the Second World War. Stroheim explained (I’m paraphrasing here) that Hollywood only gave a damn about whether you had a film in production in the last three months and, if you didn’t, you were forgotten; in France, if you wrote one good book or made one good movie or made one good performance on a stage fifty years ago, regardless of whatever utter shite you may have had a part of perpetrating in the decades since then, you are still recalled for the good work you did generations ago and accordingly honoured as an artist.

It’s because I subscribe to that French philosophy of artistry that I must admit that Elton John, based on great admiration of only two songs in his catalogue – “Friends” and “Grow Some Funk Of Your Own,” neither of which, you’ll note, were among his biggest hits – is truly an artist. Those are the only two singles of his I can recall actually buying at the time they were on the pop charts, and yet today I enjoy their sound like very few other pieces of 1970s pop music. And I love 1970s pop music in general.

To quote Jerry Reed (a man whose own artistry is criminally underrated, about which I’ll be expounding on a Refried Vinyl post sometime later this month), I said all that to say all this. I also firmly believe that Elton John’s true talents are wildly overhyped, and his reputation as a superstar of the first water is hysterically undeserved. That his clumsy reworking of “Candle in the Wind” from a memorial piece for Marilyn Monroe to one for Princess Diana became the biggest-selling single in world history speaks vastly more to how beloved Diana was (Chumbawamba’s withering anti-royalist critiques of her notwithstanding) than anything John himself ever did with that dreary tune. The most charitable thing that can really be said about his success is that he was no more than a glam rocker who somehow got lucky and cashed in big, which can’t be said about more deserving glam rockers like, say, Beggars Opera or, outside of Canada anyway, Michel Pagliaro.

Thus, it doesn’t surprise me in the least, as it seems to have so many gay civil rights activists, that Elton John was the main entertainment at the wedding reception this weekend of Rush Limbaugh, one of the most virulently homophobic public figures ever to breathe syllabically within audible range of a microphone. (Had John sang for Michael “Savage” Weiner’s wedding reception, even I would have truly been surprised, not only that John would have consented to do so but also that any human being would consent to being the new spouse of such an acidic misanthrope like Weiner. At least with Limbaugh, sometimes it’s the oxycontin talking.)

More than anything, Elton John is what could probably be considered a “House Queer.” (My attitude towards the use of the word “Queer” in relation to homosexuals, bisexuals and transgendered people will be the subject of my next post. I’ll just say for now that I don’t like having to use the term in such a manner, or any other epithet for that matter.) I liken this to Malcolm X’s delineation of (in the terminology of Minister Malcolm’s day) “House Negroes” and “Field Negroes” during America’s slavery days. The “House Negro” was the personal servant slave that the slave owner permitted to live in the mansion on the plantation. S/he ate the same food as the slave owner, often wore the same clothes as the slave owner and, when it came down to it, probably loved the slave owner multiple times more than the slave owner loved himself. The “Field Negro,” on the other hand, was limited to working in the fields, planting and picking the crops that the slave owner made his money by selling. The “Field Negro” had to live in shacks and barns not horribly unlike those dwellings (like Mohandas Ghandi, I will never dignify them by calling them “homes”) in which the slave owner’s livestock were minimally sheltered. The food that the “Field Negro” had to eat was often unfit for human consumption. And the “Field Negro” was likely to hate both the slave owner and the “House Negro” with the same passionate loathing.

Since I reject the junk philosophy of sexual orientation identity that approves of the term “Queer” being applied to any human being, but a very significant amount (perhaps even a majority?) of BLGTs do, I have to consider Elton John to be a prime example of what a “House Queer” would be like. He is satisfied with second-class status in his native United Kingdom; he has publicly questioned why gay civil rights activists are so concerned with same-sex marriage, and has suggested to some that they should knock off their pursuit of equality when “civil unions” are “just as good.” Part of this comes from John’s social status, being one of the wealthiest entertainers the world has ever known and, therefore, able to afford the legal fees for the court filings that make his domestic relationship roughly equivalent to the rights of the most ardent heterosexist “married” couple. He can afford his own in-house doctor if he wishes. He can simply ignore the bigotry that maintains homophobia and heterosexist social supremacy if he so feels like it. His money, granted him in large part by a global society that loves his stage act and doesn’t mind his being “queer” as long as he doesn’t try to violate the limits of what “queer” really means to these people, cushions his very existence. And so what if he does challenge those limits and some fundamentalist imam issues a fatwa on John’s head for publicly stating his belief that Jesus Christ was and is a gay man? He can afford the costs of the additional security men, and he just won’t perform in the shadow of the Pyramids anymore, that’s all.

The money that has been dumped into Elton John’s lap has made him at least temporarily immune from the effects of what a Limbaugh, or “Savage” or O’Reilly or Coulter for that matter, does to the rest of us. The playwright and gay American man Terrence McNally wrote the stage play Corpus Christi, which displays Jesus Christ and his disciples as being homosexual men in the modern-day Corpus Christi, Texas. For his merely suggesting such a thing in fiction, McNally has himself been the target of a fatwa by the London-based Sheik Omar Bakri Mohammad of Al-Muhajiroun, an Islamic group with pre-9/11 connections to Osama bin Laden, as well as a propaganda campaign by William Donohue, chief of the self-styled (and ironically misnamed) Catholic League for Religious & Civil Rights. McNally may have won several Tony Awards for his other work, but he can ill afford the security force that would guarantee that some religious fanatic won’t take him off the count for writing a play the fanatic hasn’t even bothered to read or view.

If anything, this situation that finds John privately entertaining America’s leading propagandist of homophobia and other bigotries should (but probably still won’t) prove to every non-heterosexual American, once and for all, that nobody deserves to be considered a cultural leader in any manner, primarily based on his frequent habit of having sex with another man. Far too often, simply being one of us qualifies too many of us to be our collective heroes. Actual qualification of such leadership is only dependent on said individual’s demonstrated integrity and courage in publicly acting against said bigotry. By coming to the stage of Limbaugh’s party simply because the propagandist waved his checkbook, Elton John has proven himself to be a morally corrupt artist whose day has long passed and whose integrity has been lacking a core, or the core has become comfortably numb, for far too long for him to realise what he is really doing.

Oh, the bloody irony...