08.20.10

Droolin’, Pukin’ & Dyin’

Posted in Extremism, Ted Nugent at 7:10 am by George Smith

Given his twice weekly WaTimes column, the Nuge still takes no time to explain his deer-baiting fiasco, one that’s generated more news in a week than his tour the entire summer.

Instead, there is work to be done — like Muslim baiting:

There are no words to express the outrage Americans would have expressed if the Japanese government had proposed to build a memorial to their fallen soldiers at Pearl Harbor immediately following World War II. We can only hope President Truman would have ordered our military to carpet-bomb and firebomb the Japanese again for being so rude and stupid.

Slice it any way you want, but the Muslim community is being tremendously rude and stupid for wanting to build a mosque so close to Ground Zero in New York City. Instead of using the $100 million for their proposed mosque, I recommend that the Muslims donate the cash to the U.S. military so we can build more smart bombs to kill more radical, voodoo Muslims.

“Not all Muslims are religious whacks who deserve a bullet,” though, the Nuge adds.

By now, it’s obvious Ted Nugent simply cannot write a column that isn’t reprehensible. It’s why the WaTimes opinion page loves him. It gives the newspaper’s editorial art department an opportunity to monster someone in cartoon form twice a week.

So the cant is always standard crazy and depressing Ted. And a machine could have predicted he would recommend we carpet bomb Islam for having such bad manners as to start this mosque affair.

Remarkably, Nugent has spent the entire summer race-baiting and spreading intolerance from the stage and in his columns. And only one journalist — a woman at the Dubuque newspaper — called him on it. In every other interview — he does them all by e-mail — and concert review, Nugent has been passed off as mostly a colorful wacky fellow, an amusing guy, with controversial right-wing views. He has been part of the mainstreaming of ignorance and extremism as the new normals.

Here’s another example of the stenography Nugent gets. Asking him about hunting, the reporter doesn’t bring up Nugent’s latest travail. And Nugent does not take the opportunity to enlighten:

“Hunting, fishing and trapping are the last perfect natural environmental positives available to mankind, and my ultra-intense soulful American music is the soundtrack of defiance against the brain-dead denial of political correctness against my hunting lifestyle.”

The rest is here. But there’s no point in going to it.

While Nugent’s deer-baiting news generated quite a few short stories, not a single sportswriter on the hunting beat in American newspapers chose to call him up mid-tour and quiz him on it.

All the more remarkable because it had been on television as part of his cable show, Spirit of the Wild, in February.

It illuminates another part of Nugent’s career and audience.

I’ve referred to them regularly as bottom-out-of-sighters, a term pulled from Paul Fussell. In the book Class, Fussell described bottom-out-of-sighters as uneducated white people of such shallow pocket, no advertisers were interested in them. They were, he said, those who watched roller derby and old pro-wrestling on Saturday morning. Or people who traded videotaped highlights of the best hockey brawls.

Nugent’s cable TV audience is the same. Hunters knew about Nugent’s screw up in February. It’s how he was caught and prosecuted. But Nugent’s audience is so small and isolated from the rest of the mainstream, an audience so undesirable — the likes of power-drinkers and fans of ultimate fighting or crush video — by the money-makers in mass media, the news didn’t leak out. (Paradoxically, Nugent knew all this was coming down for months. He had time to get ahead of it, to prepare some statement.)

The news didn’t even carry in the outsdoorsman community, which gave Nugent some award for being the most admired celebrity hunter about a month ago. In the real world, this would be like Sports Illustrated honoring Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens for clean lifestyle.

As Nugent has traveled the country and given his e-mail interviews this summer, it’s become obvious that has a standard set of answers — a script for recitation. In interview, he uses the cut-and-paste function of his e-mailer.

He relies on stock phrases and stories, repeating them without variation. He is the soul man. He plays soul music, all his heroes are black. And another of his favored riffs has been on the ‘drooling, puking and dying hippies’ of those olden days.

A form of this appeared in a number of newspapers this summer:

“I give enormous credit to my hunting and outdoor lifestyle for fortifying me to make smart choices in life. Not only was I forbidden to indulge in any substance abuse growing up, but once I witnessed the pathetic, stinky, drooling, puking, dying hippies.”

He was on George Lopez last night.

Watch him, if you can, repeat the same shtick.

Droolin’, pukin’ and dyin’ — X 3.

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