> I used to sit in staff meetings and think,
> "Who the fuck are you people and what am I doing here?"
Heh. I can imagine.
There was a conventicle of anti-anti-Semites in the station at one point in the early 80s -- I fell foul of them because of some stuff I wrote about Israel in a little community newspaper. I vaguely associate the name of John Fisk (since deceased, I gather) with this group, but perhaps my memory is misleading me here. I remember that one issue of the paper where one of my pieces appeared had a picture of the old Penn railyards, where all that Trump cruft is now, and the keen critical eye of the a-a-Ss discovered a sly coded reference to the German death-camp trains. You get the idea: a very hothouse atmosphere. They were obsessed with Lyndon Larouche and saw his influence everywhere.
They had me on some late-night show to defend myself. The hosts were bad enough, but the callers-in were *really* bonkers. I recall one fella who was off to the races, yammering about Leon Trotsky for some reason, as soon as he got on the air. He never seemed to need to take a breath; some very special winding arrangements in his vocal organ, perhaps. He had a preposterous nom de guerre -- Ted Struggle or Joe Combat or some such. He was firmly against anti-Semitism and he didn't care who knew it, and he didn't like the cut of my jib at all -- 'effete Buckleyite' was one choice characterization (which I hope will amuse Doug) and then there were wonderful Yiddish epithets like 'schmendrick' and 'vontz', which I have treasured ever since and use on every possible occasion.
And there were a lot of old CP stagers (who either never sleep at all, or sleep like bats, during the day, no doubt hanging from their heels to do it). These types had a pretty well-rehearsed spiel, which fell into two main heads: 1) The imminent menace of a new Hitler, complete with death camps, and 2) what a wonderful fellow X was, where X was some liberal Democrat in elected office -- councilman, congressman, etc.
Of course this whole menagerie of whimsical beasts was pretty much swept away by the Noye's Fludde of the 80s, to be replaced by a rodentine obsession with PC diction-policing. I miss the weird old fauna, the baluchitheres and the giant sloths.
Sorta.
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Michael J. Smith mjs at smithbowen.net
http://stopmebeforeivoteagain.org http://www.cars-suck.org http://fakesprogress.blogspot.com
Any proposition that seems self-evident is almost certainly false.