It’s true what they say — if you want to appreciate your own country, travel around someone else’s. Or, in the case of the radio fan, listen to someone else’s stations.
Take America, for example. We happened to be over there last week. In fact, we flew home the day after all the latest terrorist kerfuffle. Naturally keen to follow events, I tuned to the local talk radio station, KIT 1280 AM, comin’ atcha from Yakima, Washington. And encountered The Savage Nation, a syndicated phone-in presented by a man named Michael Savage, who was apparently born Weiner, a name that is intrinsically hilarious in American.
His show is very popular across the United States, although its claim of eight million listeners is impressive only until you consider that Terry Wogan pulls down as many in a country a fifth the size.
I came in during a bizarre conversation in which a woman, who had written a book about being on an aircraft that wasn’t actually attacked but could have been, was describing her fear. She had known who the “terrorist” was by the hatred in his eyes.
“His body language?” Savage asked, and I expected him to laugh derisively, because
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I would have, but no. Indeed he was all for the identification of evilitude according to how squinty and close together the accused’s eyes are.
She and Savage agreed that it had been an unnerving experience, worth at least a book and, possibly, a mini-series on a fantasy channel (no, OK, that was me), before Savage took calls from people who agreed with him that it was about time that “Islamofascists” (he apparently coined the word President Bush had used that very day) were weeded out at airports by racial profiling. Savage is big on wordplay — he referred to “Hitlery” Clinton and is apparently famous for renaming Brokeback Mountain “Bareback Mounting”. Oh, my aching sides.
To be honest, a little Savage went a long way. When he told a Muslim who had rung in believing this to be a forum for considered debate that it was about time he supported the ideals of America’s Founding Fathers rather than the founders of al-Qaeda, I decided that The Savage Nation had entertained us for long enough.
We flew back on aircraft thankfully uninfested by people with Demon Eyes and last Sunday night, quite by chance, I caught George Galloway on talkSPORT. Yes, I didn’t know he had a weekend phone-in from 8pm to 10pm either. He, too, was talking about terrorism. He too has a habit of giving his callers only half a sentence to make their point before he leaps in and makes it for them. But that’s where similarities between him and the savage Weiner stopped.
Scrupulously fair and even-handed (surprisingly so, one might have thought, given his reputation), he even upbraided callers for
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a) spreading anti-Tony Blair conspiracy theories, and
b) being apologists for militant Islam.
But then Galloway revels in informed debate. Talking about the politics of world-shaping events is, for him, an intellectual as well as an emotional exercise. Not an opportunity for uncaring and divisive propaganda.