profiles
PARTY OF ONE
O n January 20th, at around 12:04 p.m.,
the nation’s conservative talk-show
hosts once again became the voice of the
resistance. Many of them had spent eight
years grappling with the vexing Presi-
dency of George W. Bush, so when Ba-
rack Obama was sworn in they suddenly
found themselves freed from the inhibit-
ing effects of ambivalence. A liberal new
President had joined the familiar array of
villains in the House and the Senate, and
although none of the big-name talk-show
hosts celebrated this development, all of
them seemed energized by it. Sean Han-
nity, who had generally been supportive of
Bush, coined a spiffy new slogan to reflect
the changed political climate: “The Con-
servative Underground, the Home of
Conservatism in Exile.” Rush Limbaugh,
who sometimes criticized Bush during his
second term, quickly realized that the de-
feat of the Republican Party would only
enhance his stature as a rousing speech-
maker, unconstrained by electoral poli-
tics. (After Limbaugh said, of President
Obama, “I hope he fails,” the Obama Ad-
ministration and its allies found it useful
to declare Limbaugh the unofficial leader
of the Republican Party; in May, Lim-
baugh announced his resignation with
mock solemnity, saying, “I was appointed
without my acquiescence.”) And on Jan-
uary 19th, the day before the Inaugura-
tion, the radio and television host Glenn
Beck launched a nightly show on Fox
News, deftly channelling the defiance and
bewilderment of dissident America.
Even in this world of born-again re-
fuseniks, Michael Savage is an anomaly: a
heretic among heretics, nearly as con-
temptuous of his fellow radio stars (he re-
fers to Limbaugh as “the golfer,” and calls
Beck “the hemorrhoid with eyes”) as he is
of President Obama. He calls himself a
“gen-yoo-wine independent conserva-
tive,” which is a kind of sales pitch—and,
apparently, an effective one. His daily
broadcast, “The Savage Nation,” is one of
the most popular talk shows in the coun-
50 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 3, 2009
Michael Savage, unexpurgated.
by kelefa sanneh
try. The magazine Talkers ranks Savage
third on its “Heavy Hundred” list, behind
only Limbaugh and Hannity, and esti-
mates that he reaches more than eight
million listeners weekly.
What he gives those listeners is one
of the most addictive programs on radio,
and one of the least predictable. San
Francisco is his adopted home town (he
calls it “San Fransicko,” a nickname that
may or may not be affectionate, depend-
ing on the context and his mood), but he
delivers his analysis and his anecdotes in
a vinegary New York accent, occasionally
seasoned with Yiddish, and this voice
alone conveys something of the nostalgia
he feels for his boyhood in the Bronx and
Queens, in the forties and fifties. He is
quick to anger, and often provides evi-
dence of his firm belief that political un-
derstatement is overrated, as when he
mentioned, in passing, that President
Obama was “dragging us by the neck
into the neo-Marxist nation of the new
Venezuela.” He yields to no one in his
disdain for liberals (he once wrote a book
called “Liberalism Is a Mental Disor-
der”), not to mention illegal immigrants,
fraudulent food-stamp recipients, Judge
Sotomayor (“a stone-hearted racist and
a narcissist”), gay-rights activists, the
Congres­sional Black Caucus, and, for
that matter, our national pastime. (“I still
can’t believe that in this day and age an
adult would go to a baseball game,” he
says, adding, suggestively, that baseball is
very popular in Communist Cuba.)
Just about any news story leads him
back to his central thesis: that lefties are
ruining the world, or trying to. After a So-
mali pirate was captured and brought to
New York for trial, he told listeners to
expect a backlash: “Some terrorist front
from Milwaukee’s Somali community, in
my opinion, is already saying, ‘He’s a
child! He shouldn’t be judged, already, as
a man.’ I haven’t seen Al Sharpton, yet,
calling him an environmental warrior. I
haven’t seen Jesse Jackson saying, ‘We’ve
linked arms; we shall overcome.’ But don’t
be shocked.” Television viewers may still
remember Savage’s brief, unhappy tenure
on MSNBC, which ended after he re-
sponded to a prank caller by saying, “Oh,
you’re one of the sodomites. You should
only get AIDS and die, you pig.” And ear-
lier this year he found himself at the cen-
ter of a strange international incident,
after the British government announced—
seemingly out of the blue—that he was on
a list of twenty-two “hate promoters” who
had recently been banned from entering
the country. On his show that day, he
played “God Save the Queen,” by the Sex
Pistols, and said, “The punks had it
right—there is no future in England.”
This punk-rock interlude would not
have surprised Savage’s regular listeners,
who know him to be, more days than not,
a marvellous storyteller, a quirky thinker,
and an incorrigible free-associater. He
sometimes sounds less like a political
commentator than like the star of a rivet-
ing and unusually vivid one-man play (he
frequently dumps callers, even sympa-
thetic ones, after about a sentence and a
half ), or a fugitive character out of a Philip
Roth novel. Savage seems resigned to the
fact that the majority of Americans, in-
cluding many of his own listeners, just
don’t get it—just don’t get him—and
never will. He is a permanent resident of
the political wilderness, sending daily dis-
patches back to the diseased civilization
that the rest of us call home.
When President Obama went to Brit-
ain for the G-20 summit, Savage devoted
a good portion of his show to the dinner
menu. He scoffed at the vegetarian op-
tions (“That must be the Obama people”),
wondered aloud whether a Bakewell tart
was “a lady from one of the side streets,”
and expounded upon his hatred for Irish
soda bread, saying, “I don’t know what the
big deal is—it’s full of butter and cream,
yuck. Very high rate of heart attack in Ire-
PHILIP BURKE
land.” All this talk about food made him
think about dinner, so he read the menu
As a radio host, Michael Savage is a heretic among heretics, as contemptuous of fellow right-wing stars as he is of liberal politics.
from a local seafood restaurant. He took
exception to the tilapia (“That’s, like,
pond-grown—that’s the worst”) and to
the oyster shooter (“It sounds like a dirty
thing to order”), and then turned his at-
tention to the frogs’ legs. He wondered,
“How could you not feel bad for the frog
when you eat that?” He compared eating
frogs’ legs to eating chicken, and soon he
was immersed in a philosophical soliloquy
about his beloved gray poodle, Teddy:
My dog is only eleven pounds. What’s
shocking to me is that my dog’s, like, hind-
quarter—I looked at it the other day, when
he got wet. . . . I looked at his leg. It looked
like a large chicken leg. I got frightened. So I
said, How could you eat a chicken, and savor
it, and the dog’s—I can’t do it.
And I say, then your mind starts running,
if you have a kaleidoscopic mind like I do.
Like, what if you were starving. Would you
eat Teddy?
Don’t even think about it!
I mean, you think about these—would
you roast him, how would you eat—
Stop it!
Your mind starts working on you: No,
you’re starving. It’s you and Teddy. One of
you is gonna die anyway. Would you roast
him, would you cook him, would you eat
him raw?
Aw, stop it, man!
But your mind starts going there. Am I
the only one who thinks this way?
Savage abhors animal cruelty (though
not as much as he abhors the animal-
rights movement), and, as many listeners
know, his interest in the natural world
predates his identity as a firebrand: he is a
scientist by training, and before he be-
came a talk-show host he was the author
of more than a dozen books on alternative
medicine. Somehow, the years of research
made him not a chipper health nut but a
melancholy fatalist, all too aware that
“There’s more to being a Crip than just being anti-Blood, right?”
every day brings with it a new dose of poi-
son for his beleaguered body. “Theoreti-
cally, when I get off the air I should go
run, I should walk, I should bicycle, I
should do a treadmill,” he told his listen-
ers, while lamenting that he never fol-
lowed his own advice. He offered a syn-
opsis of the night before: “The worst
thing you could do is go to dinner. I went
to dinner. The second-worst thing you
could do is have two drinks. I had two
beers. The third-worst thing you could do
is come right home and watch television.
I came right home and watched televi-
sion. I didn’t sleep a minute last night.
One nightmare after another.” He sighed.
“I’ll do the same thing again tonight.”
T o an observer who lacks Savage’s ex-
quisite irritability, his daily routine
might not seem so bad. He records two
or three hours of live radio every week-
day, starting at 3 p.m., Pacific Time.
(The third hour often includes pretaped
commentary, as well as dispatches from
politically consonant correspondents.)
Savage customarily works from a home
studio, or a few of them; he likes to re-
mind listeners that he lives and works in
three or four “hidden locations.” His
main collaborator is his executive pro-
ducer, Beowulf Rochlen, who is based in
Oregon—also the home of Talk Radio
Network, which syndicates Savage’s
show. Because he worries about hearing
loss, Savage refuses to use headphones, so
he communicates with Rochlen only
during breaks, or by means of brusque in-
structions and admonitions, delivered on
the air. At the syndicator’s insistence, the
show is broadcast with a thirty-second
delay, so that particularly inflammatory
comments can be expunged. Savage likes
to talk about his love of jazz, Cuban
music, and early rock and roll, but he be-
gins each hour with a rhythmic crunch of
distorted guitars: a collage of riffs from
Metallica and Mötley Crüe.
On a Monday afternoon this past
spring, less than an hour after the live por-
tion of his show had ended, Savage wel-
comed a guest into one of his hideouts: a
beautiful, clutter-free little house over-
looking San Francisco Bay. He was wear-
ing wide-legged linen trousers, sandals,
and a short-sleeved shirt printed with
palm trees. As part of his training in herbal
medicine, Savage did botanical research in
Fiji, in the nineteen-seventies, and he still
looks a bit like the field researcher he used
to be. An oil painting in the living room
showed the radio host as a young botanist,
with a full beard, holding in his left hand
the dark, kidney-shaped fruit of the De-
generia vitiensis plant. It was a bright, un-
seasonably hot day, and he was installed
on the back deck, with Teddy, who
seemed to be enjoying the heat more than
Savage was. An assistant brought out a
cold bottle of Beck’s beer, two glasses, and
a bowl of salted peanuts.
On his radio show that afternoon,
Savage had played tracks by Cannonball
Adderley and John Coltrane, and he
sought to draw a line connecting the
music he loved as a boy, the herbal medi-
cine he practiced as a young man, and the
political philosophy he advocates now: in
each case, he said, he was after a kind of
freedom, and he said that it was the big-
government liberals who had abandoned
freedom and, in a broader sense, aban-
doned him. But successful rabble-rousing
requires a certain kind of optimism—a
belief that, sooner or later, your compatri-
ots will come to their senses. And part of
what makes his radio show so engrossing
is its undercurrent of pessimism: Savage
never quite seems able to convince him-
self that the forces of righteousness will
prevail; indeed, he often gives voice to a
sneaking suspicion that it doesn’t much
matter. Sitting on his deck, he cheerfully
admitted as much. “I watch shows where
they’re digging up a mummy from four
thousand years ago, bothering a tomb,” he
said. “That person shaved, brushed his
teeth with a stick, took a shit, got laid,
whatever. And now what? Who the fuck
knows what his politics were?” Across the
Bay was the Chevron Richmond Refinery,
half hidden between the hills and the
coast. “If a terrorist blew it up, it’d be the
equivalent of ten nuclear bombs,” he said.
“I sometimes sit here and think about
the fireball.”
Because of his antipathy for liberals
and his incendiary style, Savage is some-
times seen as an heir to iconic radio pro-
vocateurs of an earlier era, like Father
Coughlin, who emerged during the Great
Depression as an outspoken critic of both
capitalist excess and the Communist
menace (he later became a more marginal
figure, railing against “Jewish bankers”),
and Bob Grant, whose caustic broadcasts
made him a star in the nineteen-seven-
ties. But when Savage talks about his
chief influences he is most likely to men-
tion the old-timers he listened to as a kid
in New York: Symphony Sid, the beloved
jazz d.j.; Mel Allen, the old Yankees play-
by-play man; Jean Shepherd, the pioneer-
ing monologuist. From that perspective,
Savage might be merely the latest—and
probably one of the last—in a long line of
garrulous old-school New York radio
personalities. (His sensibility isn’t so far
removed from that of Howard Stern, an-
other Jewish kid from New York with a
radio show that thrives on provocation
and neurosis. But Savage dismisses Stern
as both a “sophomoric sensationalist”
and—maybe more damaging—a Long
Islander.) The form of Savage’s show—
the quick cuts from one topic to another,
the way familiar political observations
give rise to baffling digressions, the
fluctuating tension between his blue-state
life and his red-state message—is at least
as important as its content, which means
that it’s hard to understand him, and his
appeal, at second hand. The immoderate
quotes meticulously catalogued by the
liberal media-watchdog site mediamat-
ters.org are accurate but misleading, inso-
far as they reduce a willfully erratic broad-
cast to a series of political brickbats. You
could say something similar about the
four books that Savage has placed on the
Times best-seller list, including “The Sav-
age Nation,” which reached No. 1; all are
political polemics, and none capture the
freewheeling sensibility of the show or
the complicated personality of the man.
Last year, while talk radio (and, for
that matter, talk TV) was obsessed with
campaign minutiae, Savage couldn’t quite
decide how much he cared. Despite his
fears about Obama, he was lukewarm in
his support of Senator John McCain, and
frustrated by McCain’s faltering cam-
paign. (Savage calls him John McShame,
and often suggests, conspiratorially, that
he didn’t really want to beat Obama.
“McCain may as well be a fall guy for the
new world order,” he said.) He told listen-
ers, “You’ll have to go to one of the other
talk-show hosts to get ‘Obama’s a Ma-a-
arxist’ and ‘McCain is a wa-a-ar hero,’ ”
adding, with a trace of self-pity, “I really
don’t care about it anymore.” What he re-
ally did care to talk about, more days than
not, was his new book, “Psychological
Nudity: Savage Radio Stories.” He pub-
lished it himself, and since last October he
has been selling it online, through his
Web site. “Psychological Nudity” is es-
sentially a series of transcripts of his broad-
casts, but this book is more scattershot
than its predecessors, more anarchic.
There are seventy-five short chapters full
of true (or truish) stories; one is only two
paragraphs long, and it is called “Savage
Liked Art in Grade School and Hubris in
Adults.” It is by far the best book of his ca-
reer, partly because it’s the least booklike,
and partly because it underscores the per-
verse streak that is among his most ap-
pealing qualities. What other political
firebrand would self-publish a book of au-
tobiographical anecdotes at the peak of
election season?
Now that the Obama era has begun,
Savage has been stirred to action by a se-
ries of outrages: the Department of
Homeland Security report on “right-wing
extremism”; the threats to states’ rights;
the spectre of creeping socialism. But
some of his best broadcasts have little to
do with the news. One day, he reminisced
about working as a caddie in the Catskills,
when he was a teen-ager, and offered a
brief and rather capricious history of golf.
(“It’s, like, a British thing,” he said. “Peo-
ple had nothing to do with themselves
after they pillaged the colonies.”) He
wondered if it was going to rain in San
Francisco, then stopped himself, saying,
“I’m not supposed to talk about weather.
It’s one of the rules of a national show, is
you can’t talk about anything fun.” That
made him think about global warming
(“global bull,” he called it), and the fate of
the local salmon, and of salmon in gen-
eral. “It’s gotta swim all the way back,
three years later, so it can shoot its sperm
on the egg and die,” he said. “What a way
to live! I guess that’s why the French call
it the petite mort.” That, in turn, reminded
him of a “crazy” woman he knew as a
child, who was seized by a kind of existen-
tial panic: “She took people’s hands, even
children, and she’d say, ‘ Tell me, why are
we born if we have to die? Why did God
give me children if they’re gonna die one
day?’ ” Like most of his stories, this one
didn’t really have an ending. “There’s no
answer to it,” he said. “That’s why we’re
focussed on politics—to make believe that
we don’t care about the eternal questions.
This way, we can get mad at the Repub-
licans, or Nixon—you can say Nixon did
it. Or you can hate the Democrats, that
they did it. You don’t have to face your
own problems.” He chuckled, as if he had
just remembered that millions of people
were listening. “You understand this?”
S avage was born Michael Alan Weiner,
in 1942, the son of Jewish immi-
grants, and, like many successful men
who started off poor, he loves to talk
about the bad old days. His father ran an
antique shop on Ludlow Street, on Man-
hattan’s Lower East Side, and he put his
son to work in the basement, cleaning
bronze statues with a toothbrush dipped
in a cyanide solution. Apparently, Sav-
age’s father believed in the sort of tough
love that resembles love only in retrospect.
“It was like an Abraham and Isaac rela-
tionship,” he writes, in “Psychological
Nudity,” adding, “I think if he had the
rock and knife I wouldn’t be here today.”
(Later in the book, he compares Abraham
to an “Islamo-fascist.”) His mother took
care of Michael and, for a time, his
younger brother, Jerome, who was “born
blind and deaf and unable to hold himself
up,” in Savage’s words. On the advice of a
doctor, Jerome was institutionalized—
“packed off like an animal to live and
suffer and die in silence, alone in one New
York snake pit after another.”
Although his father tolerated no dis-
cussion of religious faith, Savage was
raised in a thoroughly Jewish world, and
he still winces when he recalls the time he
made his sports car backfire in front of the
synagogue during Yom Kippur services.
(“I mocked my own people and my own
religion,” he says now.) Because he is a po-
litical ally of evangelical Christians, and
because he has changed his name, he is
sometimes accused of covering up his
THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 3, 2009 53

• •
Jewish roots, or implicitly renouncing
them. In fact, his delivery is so steeped in
American Jewish culture that non-Jewish
listeners might sometimes wonder what
he’s talking about. After the election of
2000, he wrote a scathing ode to southern
Florida and its inhabitants. He called it
“the land of suntanned Trotskys in delis,”
and he lampooned the residents for their
loyalty to “Bill, their shameless shaygitz,”
and “Al, their Shabbos goy.” Savage was
brought up in a family of Democrats, and
it’s hard not to read the poem as a compli-
cated homage to his mother, who died in
Boca Raton in 2003.
Savage’s childhood instilled in him a
fondness for hardworking immigrants,
paired with (and sometimes overwhelmed
by) a disgust for more recent arrivals who
seem to be shirking the responsibilities of
citizenship. “Borders, language, and cul-
ture” is one of his rallying cries: he believes
that, in America, all three are under siege,
and he points to “illegals” as one of the
prime causes. When news broke of the
H1N1 flu outbreak, he played mariachi
music while gleefully chronicling the vi-
rus’s progress, and mocking the Obama
Administration’s refusal to close the bor-
ders. But he is also a deeply sentimental
man. And so when he noticed that the
staff at a local Italian restaurant was
“ninety-nine per cent Hispanic people” he
was inspired to suggest (on the air, not in
the restaurant) the kind of political com-
promise he usually abhors: “You clean out
the thirty per cent of illegal aliens who
54 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 3, 2009
constitute our prison population, you get
rid of the bums on welfare, you cut off free
medical care, and I’ll tell you what, then
you can give everyone else citizenship, as
far as I’m concerned.”
In 1963, Savage graduated from
Queens College with a degree in biology
and no particular fondness for conserva-
tism. (“Took me a lifetime to figure out I
was brainwashed in school,” he says.) He
worked briefly as a social worker, and he
now says that the job taught him to loathe
the welfare state; he became something of
a wanderer, and a connoisseur of the
counterculture. In New York, he visited
Timothy Leary’s Millbrook estate; after
he moved to Hawaii, he persuaded Allen
Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti to
come and give a reading. With his wife,
Janet Weiner, he settled in the Bay Area
in 1974, and he spent years communing
with the local beats and hipsters, members
of a radical fringe that he now considers a
symptom of America’s sickness—and,
maybe, the sickness that almost claimed
him. He has called Ferlinghetti a “jealous
little man,” and he has said that Ginsberg
was “the fucking devil.” In “The Savage
Nation,” he celebrates the death of an un-
named “beatnik” poet—in fact, it’s Greg-
ory Corso—whom he calls “one of the
blights of the human race.”
Even as he was rejecting one counter-
culture, he was immersing himself in an-
other. In Hawaii, he began his transfor-
mation into one of the nation’s foremost
herbalists, earning master’s degrees in an-
thropology and ethnobotany. He brought
his wife along on his expeditions to Fiji,
where he collected and analyzed local me-
dicinal plants, and in 1978 he earned a de-
gree that sounds like something from a
conservative parody of liberal university
culture: a Ph.D. in nutritional ethnomed-
icine from the University of California at
Berkeley. As Michael A. Weiner, he built
a small empire as a consultant and the au-
thor of a string of crunchy advice books:
“Plant a Tree”; “Earth Medicine, Earth
Food”; “The Art of Feeding Children
Well”; “Maximum Immunity.” The books
were the fruit of a personal quest: his fa-
ther had died young (of a heart attack), as
had his father’s father and, he later learned,
his father’s father’s father; Savage was
searching for a way to defy heredity.
Despite the success of the books, he
says, he found himself unable to ascend
the academic ladder, and he concluded
that he was being discriminated against
because of his race and his gender. In
1977, he wrote a poem called “The Death
of the White Male,” which he distributed
as a pamphlet fourteen years later. The
poem, which was originally conceived as
a plea for help to President Carter, is part
manifesto and part job application:
I am the smallest
minority
in America, an individ-
ual man,
who aligns himself
with no group,
calls himself
by no race,
but strives always for excellence.
S avage says that over the years his po-
 litical orientation never really changed,
but he hasn’t always identified with con-
servatism. He says that his difficulties in
academia left him feeling “alienated from
society,” and helped nudge him out of the
liberal orbit. Sather Tower, the main
landmark of U.C. Berkeley, is visible from
his house, and he is amused by the idea
that one lousy tenure-track job might
have been enough to prevent him from
becoming a radio star. “Had I been given
a teaching position, would I have voted
for Obama in the last election? I don’t
know,” he said. He thought about it.
“That’s an interesting question.” He
thought some more. “The answer is no,”
he said, finally. “Because I detested doc-
trinaire liberals even then.”
In frustration, he considered moving
to Israel. (He visited the Hebrew Univer-
sity of Jerusalem with his wife and chil-
dren, but couldn’t bring himself to stay
there. After a few days, he thought he
heard the voice of his father, reproaching
him from beyond the grave: “You want
to turn your son into an immigrant?”) In
the early nineteen-eighties, Savage found
work as a nutritionist at a San Francisco
clinic that served mainly gay men, and
soon he began seeing early signs of an ep-
idemic that didn’t yet have a name: “One
of the other doctors, the nicest guy in the
world, gets an infection all over his face;
he almost goes blind. Then people are
starting to get sick. And I’m afraid to wash
my hands in the bathroom—I don’t know
what the hell it is.” Savage became con-
vinced that gay bathhouses were helping
to spread the virus, and he became an ad-
vocate of closing them. “That ’s when the
whole community that I knew turned on
me,” he says, still sounding shell-shocked.
“They called me ‘Nazi,’ ‘fascist.’ ”
In 1986, Savage published “Maximum
Immunity,” a well-received book on ho-
listic medicine. (In a blurb, Andrew Weil
called it a “survival manual for our times.”)
The chapter on AIDS begins with a sharp
note of criticism: an accusation that the
medical establishment is acting “in passive
connivance with the homosexual lobby.”
This is something Michael A. Weiner
wrote, but it also sounds like something
Michael Savage might say.
The double trauma of the AIDS epi-
demic—the disease itself and the political
fight over it—turned Savage into a life-
long critic of the gay-rights movement. It
also seems to have confirmed his instinc-
tive suspicion of pleasure (“To my father,
nothing was fun,” he once said, by way of
asking what’s wrong with today’s genera-
tion) and his fear of decadence. When he
argues against gay marriage, he often ex-
presses a disgust with homosexuality it-
self—decrying “abominable behavior be-
tween men,” for example. This disgust
may extend to heterosexuality, too, and
his digressions regularly lead him back to
the mysterious link between lust and mor-
tality, two different expressions of the
same human flaw. “With Viagra and hair
transplants, it’s like one continuum from
age fifteen till death,” he says. “Everyone
has dark hair, false teeth, and can be sex-
ually aroused until they go into the coffin.”
Unlike many men, he doesn’t seem to find
that an appealing prospect.
By the time he published “The Death
of the White Male,” Savage was already
starting to turn his discontent into a polit-
ical program that resembled an amped-up
version of modern conservatism. The sec-
ond printing of the pamphlet includes an
invitation for readers to join Savage’s po-
litical organization, the Paul Revere Soci-
ety, which demanded an end to affirmative
action and the abolition of the Equal Em-
ployment Opportunity Commission. Sav-
age’s son, Russell Goldencloud Weiner,
did some work for the Paul Revere Soci-
ety, and later ran an unsuccessful Repub-
lican campaign for the California State
Assembly. Russell Weiner had more luck
expanding upon his family’s other legacy:
with inspiration from his herbalist father,
he created Rockstar Energy Drink, a
hyper­caffeinated beverage that is now dis-
tributed by PepsiCo. The company, which
is based in Las Vegas, sponsors rock con-
certs and extreme-sports events, and it is
also a family business: Janet Weiner is the
chief financial officer. (Earlier this month,
in response to pressure from activists, Rus-
sell Weiner issued a statement distancing
the company from any “offen­sive” state-
ments made by his father, and pledging a
hundred thousand dollars to various gay
community organizations.)
O ver the years, Savage has noticed
that his disdain for the mainstream
media is widely reciprocated. He is still
annoyed about a 2003 London Times
article that suggested that he would go
down in history as “an apostle of ha-
“Whoa. Déjà vu.”
tred.” So when he received an e-mail
from a journalist asking for an interview
he was deeply suspicious. He read the
e-mail on the air—he kept the writer
anonymous, and he didn’t mention that
the request came from The New Yorker—
and then asked his listeners, “Should
I do the interview or not?” There were
four ayes and two nays, one of which
came from Jenny in Tucson, who said,
“He’s just going to mix a little bit of
truth with a little bit of lies and make
you look pretty bad. He’s going to try to
do a psychological assessment. Don’t do
it! Do not do it.”
About a week later, Savage revisited
the topic—“my continuing correspon-
dence with a big-shot magazine writer.”
He quoted the latest exchanges, along
with his tart response, in which he
asked, “Why must all of you in the ex-
treme media paint everyone you dis-
agree with as demonic? Why is the ho-
mosexual agenda so important to the
midstream media?” He confessed that
he had tentatively agreed to do the in-
terview, over the objections of his wife.
(“She doesn’t trust this guy from a mile
away.”) A caller urged him to heed her
warning. He laughed. “I won’t take her
advice,” he said, adding, “I always make
that mistake.”
Gruffness is his birthright, inherited
from a father whose tyrannical strictness
became less baffling to Savage as he grew
older. Unlike his father, though, Savage
is something of a softie: a political ideal-
ist, a sucker for a sob story, and a firm be-
liever in the power of friendship. When
he invited the journalist into one of his
undisclosed locations, he proved to be a
first-rate host, chatty and solicitous. A
steady supply of beer refills lubricated the
conversation (one of his earliest books
was “The Taster’s Guide to Beer,” which
was published in 1977), and as the tem-
perature dropped and the sky above
Berkeley started to turn orange he seemed
to be working hard to stay suspicious, de-
spite himself. On his show the next day,
a caller asked how the interview had
gone, and Savage described his interloc-
utor: “If I told you he looked like Obama,
I wouldn’t be far from the truth.” Com-
ing from him, this sounded like a deeply
twisted compliment.
Savage started his radio career in 1994,
when, after years of flogging his books on
other people’s shows, he got himself a try-
out on a local station, KGO, filling in for
Ray Taliaferro, a liberal African-Ameri-
can commentator whose late-night show
is something of a Bay Area institution. He
spent a few hours talking about the dan-
gers of affirmative action and illegal im-
migration, and he says that listeners re-
sponded with phone calls that were so
vituperative they made him paranoid;
driving home in the early hours of the
morning, he was afraid someone was fol-
lowing him. He resolved that his radio ex-
periment was over, but the station lured
him back for a daytime tryout, which
went better, and in 1995 he got his own
show, which made him a kind of local
antihero, known (and, in certain quarters,
beloved) for assailing the liberal culture
that dominated the city. By 2000, radio
stations around the country were broad-
casting him. On the air, he used a new
name that made reference to his old life:
he called himself Michael Savage, after
Charles Savage, the nineteenth-century
explorer who introduced guns to Fiji.
His timing was perfect. Conservative
talk radio, in its third or fourth or fifth
generation, surged anew in the late eight-
ies, after the Federal Communications
Commission abolished the Fairness Doc-
trine, which had required radio stations to
provide balanced commentary on contro-
versial topics. (Many talk-radio hosts say
they fear that the Obama Administration
might revive the Fairness Doctrine, or
some variant of it.) During the Clinton
years, AM radio was home to principled
56 THE NEW YORKER, AUGUST 3, 2009
dissent and conspiracy theories, lively sat-
ire and dark premonition. In the nine-
teen-nineties, small-government conser-
vatism sometimes rubbed elbows with
more radical philosophies, and on the
radio (especially on G. Gordon Liddy’s
show, which had a peculiar hypnotic
power) the political debates of the day
sometimes took on a distinctly esoteric
flavor: dark mutterings about the death of
Vince Foster, commiseration for the
Branch Davidians who were killed by fed-
eral agents in Waco, sympathy for the mi-
litia movement. These days, you can hear
traces of this subterranean sensibility in
the voice of Glenn Beck, who conjured a
mystical fervor when he said, “They don’t
surround us at all. We surround them.”
Now, as in the nineties, the most res-
onant voice belongs to Limbaugh, who
still dominates the conservative talk mar-
ket that he helped create. His rise stoked
demand for more or less like-minded
hosts, because radio stations wanted
shows to program alongside his—or,
sometimes, against his. (Savage began
his career by declaring himself to be “to
the right of Rush and to the left of God.”)
And, despite his political prominence,
Limbaugh’s main legacy might be his
media criticism. From the start, it often
seemed that his primary target wasn’t so
much liberal politicians as it was the old-
media titans who, in his view, feigned
objectivity while working to further their
own agendas. His sustained critique
helped erode the traditional authority
of network news and big newspapers,
and also helped undermine the concept
of disinterested journalism. There was
something postmodern about his insis-
tence that journalists were just another
interest group, and that “the news” had
its own ideology. Fittingly, he delivered
his observations in an orotund voice that
was simultaneously an expression of big-
media arrogance and, subtly, a parody of
it. (Think of his mischievously anodyne
slogan “Excellence in Broadcasting.”)
This was Limbaugh’s clever way of ac-
knowledging the paradox of his position
as a media skeptic asking for listeners’
trust, and it was his way of addressing
the weighty questions that any radio per-
sonality must face: Who do you think
you are? And who do you think you’re
talking to?
While Limbaugh addresses the faith-
ful, sometimes with a wink, Savage’s show
is self-conscious in a different way. He
freely acknowledges the difference be-
tween his life on the radio and his life off
it. (“Twenty-one hours a day I live in mis-
ery,” he once said, when he was feeling
unusually cheerful, or unusually glum—it
can be hard to tell. “Three hours a day I’m
happy.”) And he keeps listeners apprised
of his rapidly shifting emotions and of his
various states of physical not-quite-well-
ness. During one memorable broadcast,
he opened his mail and found an envelope
from a relative containing a picture of his
father. “I’m older than he was when he
died,” Savage said, and then he held forth
on the inherent certainty and uncertainty
of death. He sounded rattled. “I ate nuts
during the break, I got this picture, now
I’m having palpitations,” he said. Trying
to recover, he briefly discussed Sunnis and
Shiites (“I don’t ever want to know the
difference”), but found himself distracted,
again, by the photograph. “He looked
good—look at him,” Savage said, as if he
were expecting his listeners to agree.
“Lotta good it did him.”
I n March, Savage turned sixty-seven.
“Never thought I’d live this long,” he
says. He has now lasted a full decade lon-
ger than his father did, and he seems to
feel that somehow this can’t be good
news. When he was a boy, his father gave
him some instructions that he never for-
got. “He said to me, ‘When I die, you can
throw me in a garbage can.’ I mean, it
shocked the hell out of me—it really
freaked me out. The idea of throwing my
poor father in a garbage can?” This unsen-
timental request was also, in a way, a
metaphysical brainteaser: Savage was
being asked to choose between honoring
his father’s wishes and honoring his fa-
ther’s body, between obeying him and cel-
ebrating him.
Although his father was a devout ma-
terialist, Savage seems to have spent
much of his life searching for the right
way to articulate his Jewish heritage. For
a time, in the eighties, he attended Fri-
day-night services at the Chabad House
in Berkeley. And he loves to talk about
his well-worn Hebrew Bible, which is
full of annotations and Post-it notes.
Despite his alliance with evangelical
Christians, he seems untempted by
Christianity itself. “You go to a grave-
yard, and someone’s dead, and they
give the mumbo-jumbo,” he told his lis-
teners one afternoon. “You want to be-
lieve the Resurrection. Do you actually
believe it? Many of you do.” But, on
another afternoon, he riffled through
the Book of Revelation in an attempt
to explain the latest perfidies of the
Obama Administration. “We now have
a prophecy emerging in front of our
eyes,” he said.
When Savage gets really apocalyptic, it
can be hard to separate his political obser-
vations from his medical complaints, and
maybe he’s not quite convinced that they
really are separate. Recently, he has had
vision problems, which have come to ac-
quire a symbolic significance. “I feel as “Human Resources wants to know if you still wish to identify
though, almost, I’m losing my sight from with the gender on your birth certificate.”
looking every day at such horror,” he says.
“I feel as though my eyes are closing on • •
me, because they don’t want to see it any-
more.” When he talks on the air about his
homes in “hidden locations,” he suggests lightenment and reincarnation, and dur- in an age when every broadcast is re-
that he’s worried about some crazed lib- ing one digression he staged his own af- corded and archived, all those thou-
eral assassinating him. “I have to watch terlife as an improvised two-character sands of hours of oration don’t have
out for them, because they’re all psycho- dramatic scene: much of an afterlife. Talk radio is meant
paths,” he says. Listen to Savage long to be consumed in real time, as a run-
God: There is no time. The whole thing is
enough and you may be persuaded to all a racket. There’s no time. Clocks have no ning commentary on the issues and
think that liberalism is code for all the stu- meaning, Dali was closer to the truth: they’re outrages of the day. It provides its stars
pid things we just can’t conquer: weakness all bent. Because the hands move but nothing with a funny sort of immortality: one
else moves. So here’s what it is, Mike, you’re
and decadence and human frailty and gonna be reborn again in Mt. Sinai Hospital, that lasts only as long as they keep
death itself. in the year you were born, to the exact same talking.
Near the end of “Psychological Nu- parents, and you’re gonna go through the This year, Savage is celebrating the
very same life again.
dity,” Savage writes, “I’m watching the Michael Savage (deceased): No! I don’t fifteenth anniversary of his radio career.
sands of time fall into the hourglass. want that! On the air one day, he marked the oc-
There’s more sand on the bottom now God: Why? It was so bad? You want me casion in typically perverse fashion: by
to make you a bug?
than there is on the top.” And he makes Savage: No, but do I have to do that all— thinking of all the listeners who stuck
reference to his own death with startling everything, again? The meatball on the wall, around, and all the ones who didn’t.
frequency: a few times an hour, week the whole thing, the fights in grade school, “Some were fifteen, they’re now thirty,”
all over again? Love by the sewer plant, the
after week. Just about anything can set nympho in Alley Pond Park, affirmative ac- he said. “Some were five, they’re now
him off. A beautiful pair of Shetland tion, the radio career? twenty. They grew up on me. Their
sheepdogs in the mall reminds him of the God: Why, that wasn’t good enough for fathers are dead; the guys who had it
you? Would you like something else?
dogs’ kindly owner, which in turn re- Savage: No, God. I’ll take it. playing in the car are gone. They’re still
minds him of unkind dog owners, which here, they can’t believe it. I’m their
makes him think about Michael Vick’s Savage is still preoccupied with the voice of freedom. I’m the last hope. I’m
dogfighting operation, which brings to death of the white male—only now he’s the beacon. I’m the Statue of Liberty.
mind dead dogs, which leads him, inex- worried about one in particular. Being I’m Michael Savage. I’ll be back.” 
orably, to a consideration of “the old box- on the radio makes him feel “immor-
eroo, waiting at the end of the road for all tal,” he says, but talk radio, an old for-
of us.” His thoughts on dying are often mat that has already outlived its era, is newyorker.com
informed by Buddhist theories of en- an impractical way to cheat death. Even Audio: Kelefa Sanneh on Michael Savage.