This Christmas vacation was all about hate radio for me. It was really astonishingly easy to find racist radio while driving around the back roads of the country. In upstate NY, around Syracuse, I spent an hour listening to a man rant in sentences that only once or twice made sense in terms of the English language. When he did manage to string together a sequence of words, they were pretty amazing. He spent a good deal of time talking about "mud races." Apparently he was very self satisfied with the idea that pure European racial stock was on the verge of being wiped out by the prodigious reproductive capabilities of the inferior races.
To me, this sounds like titillation, the fetish of the exotic and enhancement (note: this is a pun) of sexual prowess. I could be wrong, but these guys always get caught up trying to give us as much juicy gossip about the loose sexual mores of foreigners while supposedly denouncing them. The Onion does it well when they have Jesse Helms saying "give us more of those hot, hot cocks" in response to Mapplethorpe photos.
The Syracuse guy went on to announce that Planned Parenthood was waging a campaign to bring "homosexual perverts" to the pure, unblemished Syracuse region. We were laughing pretty hard by the time we got out of the car.
In Indiana, I spent a while listening to someone spout about the Jewish conspiracy to fund world communism. He had a wonderful fictional history that he used to prove his point. Apparently it was the Jews that pushed for Lenin's return to Russia, not German agents who allowed his safe passage in a canny (and successful) move to destabilize their wartime foe to the East. Also, Russia was apparently flooded with Jewish money around the time of the Russian revolution, not completely destitute and ripe for reform after years of war.
I have been worrying a lot about the complete lies that are passed off as history, especially after reading an excellent book called "Lies My Teacher Told Me" about US history textbooks in high school. People still quote "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion" as if it wasn't a racist hit piece made to look like a massive Jewish conspiracy, exactly the same as the FBI's fake coloring books made to look as if the Black Panthers were out to kill all white people.
In the Chronicle today, there was an article on the prison siege at Attica in 1971. It ended with saying that Attica was the bloodiest conflict between Americans since right after the civil war. Immediately I thought of the Tulsa, OK race riots of 1921. After a white woman accused a black man of grabbing her arm, the Tulsa newspaper urged whites to lynch blacks, and an uncontrolled riot ensued in which whites burned houses and murdered blacks, even using airplanes to drop dynamite on black neighborhoods. Historians think that at least 300 people died, although the official report is only 36 - still more than Attica, and 800 were wounded and thousands left homeless. The reporter should have known this, it should be a major event taught in every American History class, but it isn't. This sort of omission is someways more insidiously evil than things like Holocaust revisionism. We think that no news is good news, when in fact, no news is often a grotesque manipulation of the real world that leaves us feeling good about ourselves, while people suffer at our hands.
The last of the radio show ended with some outrage about the restrictions placed on the sale of .50 caliber rifles. We giggled and giggled after the ranter suggested that people liked to keep these rifles for "plinking." Plinking is the sort of onomatopoeia that suggests a bb gun hitting a tin can, not a rifle designed to cripple airplane engines or kill a human target at ranges of up to a mile. Plinking. Ha ha ha. Such is the power of words.