Michael Savage and Imus<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Savage
\nBeasts<\/i><\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Before
\nI created Coulter Shock<\/i>,
\nI listened to other pundits, including Michael Savage, who advocated increasing
\nprison torture and sticking lit dynamite in the anuses of Arab detainees. The problem with Michael Savage is that
\nhe does not mean to be taken seriously.
\nHe’s like Howard Stern. His
\nuse of "irony" provides a shield where he can say completely
\noffensive and racist things and then later claim he didn’t mean them. Ha ha only serious. His voice is also somewhat unpleasant
\nand uninteresting. People clearly
\nlisten to him for his insane content rather than his dulcet tones. I put him aside, temporarily to work on
\nCoulter and then Limbaugh.<\/p>\n
After
\nI finished with Limbaugh, I went back online to search for new material for my
\nnext piece. I downloaded a Media
\nMatters clip from a morning show on NBS called Imus in the Morning<\/i>.
\nHe was showing pictures of Palestinians mourning the death of Yassir
\nArafat. One of the voice-overs
\nfrom the Imus show was calling the Palestinians \u201canimals\u201d and was advocating
\ndropping \u201cthe bomb\u201d on them and killing everyone. The other co-hosts laughed along with this idea. Later that morning, they played a clip
\nof someone pretending to be General Patton, speaking about how an embedded
\nreporter had just filmed footage of a US Marine shooting an injured, unarmed
\nIraqi insurgent. \u201cPatton\u201d used the
\nterm \u201craghead,\u201d and the phrase \u201cbearded fatwa fairy.\u201d Imus\u2019 racism was thus
\nclearly linked to his homophobia. (If
\nanyone doubts that these struggles aren\u2019t linked.) In the first half of the program, one of the male voices
\nsaid something about the \u201cfat pig wife of [Arafat] living in Paris.\u201d Thus he added Francophobia and sexism
\nto the mix. Another commentator,
\nnoting the emotion of the Palestinians said, \u201cIt\u2019s like the worst Woodstock.\u201d Hippies are liberals are feminists are
\nPalestinians are ragheads are gay are women are Iraqis are French. Every group is standing in for every
\nother group. And while they
\nlaughed, one of the commentators kept repeating \u201canimals\u201d and \u201ckill them all.\u201d<\/p>\n
This,
\nof course, reminded me of the Michael Savage calls to kill all the prisoners in
\nAbu Graib, whom he called \u201csubhuman.\u201d
\nHis comments were interspersed with bizarre attacks on media
\norganizations for being communist, apparently because they published photos of
\nprisoner abuse. As if Al Jazeera
\nwould have ignored the pictures if the \u201ccommunist\u201d New York Times hadn\u2019t run
\nthem. He called for more prisoner
\nabuse and then dared listeners to report him to the FCC for it. Then he claimed that it was the
\nAmerican People who were really going to suffer. Because of having a poor image abroad? Because we could no longer torture
\nprisoners? It wasn\u2019t clear. \u201cWe the people\u201d still don\u2019t seem to be
\nsuffering as much as tortured prisoners.
\nAnd certain not as much as would prisoners if, like Savage recommended,
\nthey had dynamite stuffed in their orifices and were dropped out of airplanes.<\/p>\n
Savage
\nand Imus are both entertainment.
\nThey were both going for a shocking laugh. Savage, like Limbaugh and Coulter, is completely caught up
\nin himself. All of those people
\nare in love with their own voices.
\nThey are completely pleased by their clever sophistry and smug beyond
\nbelief. At the same time, they
\nthink themselves to be victims.
\nHence, Savage dared people to report him.<\/p>\n
Savage
\nseemed to be addressing several different issues in his comments, many of them
\nalong the popular right-wing logic that the media lost the Vietnam War by
\ndemoralizing the American people by telling them what was going on. (If only they had lied, we would have
\ncolonized all of Vietnam!) These were neither here nor there, so I cut them
\nalong with the FCC dares. I
\nreturned to Imus and made one track that just contained the laughing and
\n\u201canimals!\u201d. Then I made another
\ntrack that just contained racism and calls for violence, eliminating \u201cfat pig
\nwife\u201d and \u201cworst Woodstock.\u201d I
\nskipped \u201cPatton\u201d entirely. All
\nthese issues are connected, clearly, in the words of the pundits, but I just
\nfocused on calls for genocide and violence. I looped the laughing track and played violent phrases from
\nImus and Savage on top. Thus the
\nImus men laugh hysterically at themselves and at Savage. The entertainment value of genocide,
\nviolence and torture is thus highlighted.<\/p>\n
91Angels
\ncomments on this approach, \u201cCutting away the fluff and feathers and presenting
\nwhat they really say in it’s ugliness and baseness, everyone able to see what
\nis at the end of their fork, engages the listener so they have to make a judgment
\n(one that you hope will be in favor of what you are trying to communicate, of
\ncourse) instead of just being preached to.\u201d (http:\/\/www.livejournal.com\/users\/celestehblog\/66886.html?thread=15686#t15686) However, as I worked on the piece, I
\nbecame discouraged. NBC was forced
\nto apologize for the content of the Imus show, but the piece only reminded me
\nof the left\u2019s failure to turn torture into a mainstream issue. I decided that offensive statements
\nabout the desirability of torture were not enough to support the piece, as
\nclearly, not enough people would care.
\nAlso, \u201chere\u2019s a guy saying something offensive\u201d seemed too weak to carry
\na piece. <\/p>\n
I remembered a piece about laughter made
\nby Kingston, an undergraduate who took MUSC 220 in the fall of 2003. His piece started out cheerfully, with
\nfriendly laughter, but turned dark and ended with mocking, menacing
\nlaughter. In our culture, we
\ngenerally think of laughter as friendly, beneficial and desirable. Clubs have even formed where member
\ngather and laugh, believing it to have health benefits. Kingston\u2019s piece changed the way that I
\nthink about laughter by articulating its dark side.<\/p>\n
The laughter from Imus initially seems as
\ninnocent as all laughter seems.
\nHowever the words \u201canimals\u201d and a disgusted \u201clook at this!\u201d left in the
\nlaugh track showed it\u2019s true, cruel nature. I decided to make the laughter the focus of the piece. I create an increasingly heavy overlap
\nof laughter, using my spatilization algorithm, so that the overlapping laughter
\ndoes not interfere with itself or with non-spatialized racist comments played
\non top of it. I used my
\nphrase-finding algorithm again in this piece, to break up Imus and Savage into
\ntheir sound bites.<\/p>\n
This piece is only a few minutes
\nlong. I recorded a realization
\nthat came in at 2:22. However,
\nwhen I play that recording, it seems to go interminably. I would have sworn it was at least
\nseven or ten minutes. This piece
\nhad serious crash bugs until the spring break of 2005 and so has never been
\nperformed. This is absolutely my
\nlast right wing voice piece.
\nUnless I take on Bill O\u2019Reilley and Fred Phelps to do a piece concerning
\nhomophobia. God help me, I don\u2019t
\nknow if I could stand it.
\nThis post is not creative commons. It is copyright 2005 Celeste Hutchins. All rights reserved<\/p>\n
Tag: Micheal Savage<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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. … Continue reading Michael Savage draft<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":4,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1102","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorised"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1102"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3352,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1102\/revisions\/3352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1102"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1102"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.celesteh.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1102"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}