* RADIO RANT: VA Tech/Savaged Again

Last night [4/17/07], Michael Savage—or, as I think I'll start calling him, Sergeant Slaughter—was excoriating the memorial convocation at Virginia Tech, especially the performance of a certain Nikki Giovanni. It turns out that Dr. Savage, self-proclaimed man of letters, didn't even know who Giovanni was, until one of his callers told him. (Indeed, this male college student helpfully informed him that "we had to read her" in one of those "feminist/womanist" courses!) Now aware that she might be a writer of some reputation, Savage still went on to call her a "clownish creature," an "idiot so-called poet," and "an intellectual dwarf." But Savage never did understand that her "speech," as he called it, was actually a poem. And what most dismayed him (and his ditto-head callers) was Giovanni's audacity to apparently speak of the plight of elephants as somehow on par with human life. (This in spite of the fact that Savage, in other moods, calls himself an "animal lover.")

As for "intellectual dwarfs," it seems that Savage, like some of the commentators on cable news, hasn't been on a university campus since his own salad days, when the campus was apparently the size of a bullhorn-manageable youth camp or a one-building high school with an intercom system. Thus our good Doctor also calls the President of Virginia Tech a "felonious moron" who should be behind bars for not alerting the entire student body sooner. How? Via "loudspeakers," or the like, Savage smugly assures his listeners.

Several of Savage's diatribes regarding the VA Tech massacre last night revealed a similar ignorance of facts that had been circulating on the news all day—facts that his callers often better knew than he (e.g., Savage's assumption that Cho would have had to drive to the post office). But the facts were hardly the point here: at bottom, the incident provided him fodder for yet another knee-jerk attack on a woman of color, and against the "liberal" academia that so deeply wronged him years ago (as he ceaselessly reminds his listeners) for being the superior white male that he is.