08.11.10

Nugent subject of rebuke in Iowa newspaper

Posted in Ted Nugent at 10:17 am by George Smith

Today the Dubuque newspaper’s editorial board took the unusual step of rebuking Ted Nugent over his show at a local casino.

It reads:

It was bad enough that rock musician Ted Nugent made racially insensitive remarks on stage last week in Dubuque. What made it worse was that audience members cheered.

Anybody who thinks racism is in Dubuque’s past had better think again.

Nugent commented approvingly that he saw so many white people in the audience. He commended Dubuque for being a “white town.” The crowd — not just a few fans here and there — cheered. (That is not to say that everyone in the audience was a Dubuque resident and that everyone cheered. But no expression of disapproval was heard, either; hopefully, some were too shocked to respond.)

People who attend performances, whether they are stand-up comics or musicians or the like, might expect some political comments to be interjected during a show. But Nugent’s remarks crossed the line.

The rest is here.

It’s impossible to defame Ted Nugent. The man’s image — in his columns and even more so when the voltage is high onstage — shows him to be a public face of crazy white rancor in a turbulent social climate.

Figuratively speaking, Nugent’s the old guy with the smirk on his face, shouting fire in a crowded room of anxious white people.

Nugent identifies with the Tea Party — which skews racist in every carefully conducted survey — because he is just like it.

Paradoxically, Nugent and the Tea Party continually insist Martin Luther King , Jr., is an inspiration. More bizarrely, Nugent now regularly maintains from the stages of his summer tour, and in interview, that he has always been a soul man and, for instance, that he is “black enough,” unlike the President. His enemies, Nugent says, are soulless.

It’s not just a weird joke or WTF peculiar, it’s insane.

Why Nugent is the way he is now is virtually beyond explanation.

Is it his dwindling audience of bottom-out-of-sighters and a need to cater to the worst among them?

Is it because he believes his future is with the race-baiting demagogues on Fox News?

Is it because he bitterly hates unions and US auto companies in Michigan, and a black president saved them? (While Nugent chose to move to Waco, Texas.)

Cases can be made for all three but none tell us why he’s such a corrosive extremist, one who hypocritically laments the same stuff in newspaper interviews.

Observers can only tell that Nugent’s irreversible decline in music popularity has only been slightly offset by semi-literate success as a spewer of insults and hatred from the extreme right. And that his political views and beliefs are poison for killing what’s left of the middle class, the people who used to be his big audience in 1978. Even while he maintains otherwise.

If there’s a Dickensian coal company to defend, you can bet Nugent is in its corner. A terrible oil spill? Nugent stands up for BP.

If the US auto industry and some jobs have been saved, you can easily find a Nugent column prescribing failure for auto-makers.

If the most middle class jobs in the US this summer were the work of the US Census, you can read Nugent hating on that, too.

Is there a column in which Nugent paranoically hates on a retired little old lady, someone who probably doesn’t even know who he is?

Unbelievable as it may seem, yes.

Are there any bets among readers how long it will take Nugent to direct the same black bile against the new GOP enemy: Middle class “special interests,” like teachers?

Nugent has shown he can’t be underestimated or outguessed. Just when you think he can’t raise the bar on a wealthy white man’s resentment, that he’s gone as far round the bend as possible, he surprises you with something even more unpleasantly nuts and insulting.

However, Nugent is a good fit for the summer of 2010. He’s a perfectly nasty fellow for a perfectly nasty time.

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