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Back when we did the @HoldMyOrderWKRP episode about The New WKRP, we had occasion to discuss a certain very famous conservative radio host who is currently facing a death sentence from cancer
And when we talked about this Mr. L., I had occasion to remember his very special predecessors as ambassadors of American paleoconservatism: "talk show hosts" like Morton Downey, Jr. and Wally George.
We watched both of them—"ironically," we told our earnest liberal junior high/early high school selves—religiously at the age of 13 and 14, but now I think about that ironic watching as a possible way to *authentically* get young men into fascism.
I mean, shit, I managed to avoid it because I realized on some level, even at age 14, that it was on some level a grift and a show
(possibly because I also watched a lot of wrestling growing up and had the vaguest idea of what "kayfabe" was, and this was at 10 or 11 years old when the WWF was at its pop culture peak)
But those threads—shock jocks, professional wrestling, tilting at mainstream conservative windmills, the TV cult of celebrity—look at where all those threads of late '80s American culture converged. Look at WHO they converged IN.
Maybe I should've taken those "funny" conservative talk show hosts more seriously at 14. Sorry. Gen-X sucks.
And the really shitty thing is both Wally George and Morton Downey, Jr. are fascinating personalities in that classic "everything about me is bullshit" American political cult grifter kind of way.
Like goddamn televangelists, another thing that seemed bigger and funnier and more ironic in the '80s but now just seems downright sordid and evil
Righteous Gemstones really managed to thread that needle between '80s bombast and '10s naked megachurch greed
Righteous Gemstones really managed to thread that needle between '80s bombast and '10s naked megachurch greed
These are the men who paved the road for Trumpian conservatism. Jesus Christ!
Showbiz, all the way down
