Post by bossradio93 on Dec 13, 2003 7:55:48 GMT -5
The Angry Optimist
Spend an afternoon (and evening) with Republitarian talk show host Larry Elder
by Hillary Johnson, VCReporter.com, 12.12
8:00 pm at Borders’ Bookstore in Thousand Oaks. Late for a book signing to start, but Larry Elder’s radio show, which airs to three million listeners around the country, tapes from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. in Los Angeles, leaving him scant time to limo across town in traffic. Well over a hundred people had assembled when Larry, otherwise known as “The Sage from South Central,” strode in looking natty and cheerful, accompanied by two bodyguards, the use for which soon became apparent.
“Let me tell you a story about how I got started in talk radio,” Elder began. “I was living in Cincinnati, where I was a private businessman”—An attorney himself, Elder had operated a successful executive search firm that specialized in legal staff—“and I’d written an editorial that ran in the paper. One of the local talk radio hosts had read it, and he invited me on to talk about it on his show. So I did, and we talked, and took calls from listeners.”
Here Elder smiled and referred to a piece of paper. “Let me read you a list of the names the people calling into the show threw at me: Tom. Uncle Tom. Boot licking Uncle Tom. Straight-up Uncle Tom. Judas. Boy. Bug-eyed, foot-shuffling, sugarcane Negro. Coconut—that’s white on the inside, black on the outside, like Oreo. Oreo. Anti-black. Pro-white. Remus. Sambo. Sambo-Tom. The Antichrist.” Elder smiled. “And that was in the first hour.”
“They invited me back as a fill-in host,” he continued. “I went home to talk it over with my wife at the time, and I said, ‘I don’t know, I always thought of talk radio as glib, shallow and bombastic.’ She said, ‘It is. You’d be perfect.’” Elder paused. “You can imagine what happened to that marriage.”
The audience whooped with laughter. But Elder had them at hello.
These were hardcore fans, or “Elderados,” who had come to see Elder speak, but mostly to get their copies of his books signed. His book appearances are legendary, for he talks to each and every person who shows up, and not just cursorily. By the time the night ran its course, Elder would have had a deep, fully engaged conversation of several minutes’ duration with each and every person there. Looking at the audience as things got rolling and doing the math, it seemed highly unlikely that the event would finish before midnight.
Numbers were given out, and groups of ten were called to line up, clutching their copies of Elder’s current paperback release, Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests that Divide America. The demographics of the audience were pretty standard TO/Calabasas—all ages, mostly white, mostly affluent, but not as uniformly white or affluent as you might expect in a community people just over the hill in the San Fernando Valley refer to as “Calablackless.”
Elder has an unconventional audience due to his knack for turning conventional wisdom on its ear. He has no reverence for left or right, and plenty of extremely vocal detractors from both sides. Every weekday afternoon at three, a comically alarmist KABC announcer’s voice intones the show’s opener, which says, in part: “Warning: communists, socialists, statists, victicrats and weekend golfers might want to lower the volume and move three steps from the radio speaker to avoid discomforting enlightenment.”
Elder has long described himself as a libertarian in the small “l” sense of the word, meaning that he parts company with the big “L” Libertarian Party on many issues, particularly foreign policy (he supports the war in Iraq, while the Libertarians are strict hands-off isolationists). But he believes in a small federal government having nothing to do with issues like abortion or gay marriage (all marriage, he says, whether gay or straight, should be a private matter); an end to subsidies to individuals and corporations; and the massive privatization of most government services and holdings. On the environment, he says that “the Federal Government is the country’s worst polluter,” and agrees that the way to preserve parklands like Ahmanson Ranch is private conservancy—he doesn’t agree, however, that such efforts should be funded with public money. Rob Reiner and friends, he says, should have ponied up.
Fiscally conservative and socially laissez-faire, Elder has fans among the non-religious far-right (an extremely neglected group), but he has also eased the transition for a fair number of middle-aged left-wingers in crisis—this according to the old saw that holds that if you’re a conservative in your youth you have no heart, and if you’re a liberal in your old age you have no brain. Elder takes the dryness out of that equation, adding a touch of soul. He proves that it’s possible to be passionate, and radical, while being essentially a centrist.
Elder rails against big government and takes calls from some very, very angry people, but he’s also, in his own way, a consensus-builder. People tune in to hear him lock horns with assorted gadflies and wackos, but also because it’s impossible not to agree with him at least some of the time, whoever you are. In a his first book, The Ten Things You Can’t Say in America, he writes, “Optimism. It’s not just a mind-set, it is behavior.”
So what are the ten things you can’t say in America? Roughly drawn: 1) Blacks are more racist than whites, and 2) White condescension is more damaging than racism. 3) There is no health-care crisis. 4) The War on Drugs is the new Vietnam… a losing battle. 5) Republicans and Democrats are indistinguishable. 6) Gun control causes violence. 7) America’s greatest problem is illegitimacy. 8) The welfare state is our narcotic. 9) There is no glass ceiling. 10) The media’s left-leaning bias is real, it’s widespread and it’s destructive.
Elder’s second book, Showdown, could easily have been called Ten More Things You Can’t Say in America. Both books are as off-the cuff as the radio show, containing the same wealth of radical assertions backed up by exotic and compelling factoids: “Medical spending in 1960 was 5 percent of our gross domestic product, and by 1997 it was 14 percent.” “According to a recent USA Today article, between 1992 and 1997, 70 percent of all new jobs came from female-headed start-up companies.” “Kennedy objected to quotas.”
Not everyone standing in line at the signing agreed with him on all points (and according to Larry, if you agree with anyone all the time you’re an idiot). Theresa, a letter carrier from Ventura and self-described conservative, said that Elder had never changed her mind about anything, but that she listens to him on her headphones while she delivers the mail. “For a long time I didn’t realize he was a black man. I find him very humorous. He’s not vitriolic.” She mainly approves of Elder’s views because, “I don’t want to live in a socialist country.”
Robb Daniels, a Moorpark architect and builder who showed up wearing work boots and a straw hat and looking like a gentleman farmer said, “It’s so enjoyable to know you’re not alone. That you’re not crazy.” He then waited over three hours to get his book signed.
By 10:00 p.m., at least half of the audience had yet to hear their numbers called. Some read, some chatted, some even slept. Astonishingly, not one, single person gave up and left.
Lucy Deukmejian managed to take a nap with her legs stretched out over some folding chairs. “I like a lot of what he says, though probably all my colleagues wouldn’t,” she said with a wry smile upon waking. “I’m in the social services industry.”
Elder is merciless when it comes to the public sector, and he doesn’t just oppose the welfare state—he’d do away with public education, too, or at the very least call for a private school voucher program, saying that “a state of emergency exists in inner-city public education in America.” He also gets in his digs, pointing out that Spike Lee and Jesse Jackson, both ardently anti-voucher, sent their kids to private schools.
Many of the callers to Elder’s show are people like Deukmejian, who work in the public sector as social workers, teachers and law enforcement personnel; or like the high school caller, an A student, whose teacher had given him a punishingly low grade for writing a paper that expressed non-liberal political views: people who claim that they will suffer professionally for disagreeing with the prevailing party line within their fields, and who only feel free to express their non-liberal opinions in their cars, talking on their cell phones under the anonymity of radio.
Even, apparently, in conservative Thousand Oaks.
End of Part 1. Source: Los Angeles Radio People-Dec. 12, 2003
Spend an afternoon (and evening) with Republitarian talk show host Larry Elder
by Hillary Johnson, VCReporter.com, 12.12
8:00 pm at Borders’ Bookstore in Thousand Oaks. Late for a book signing to start, but Larry Elder’s radio show, which airs to three million listeners around the country, tapes from 3:00 to 6:00 p.m. in Los Angeles, leaving him scant time to limo across town in traffic. Well over a hundred people had assembled when Larry, otherwise known as “The Sage from South Central,” strode in looking natty and cheerful, accompanied by two bodyguards, the use for which soon became apparent.
“Let me tell you a story about how I got started in talk radio,” Elder began. “I was living in Cincinnati, where I was a private businessman”—An attorney himself, Elder had operated a successful executive search firm that specialized in legal staff—“and I’d written an editorial that ran in the paper. One of the local talk radio hosts had read it, and he invited me on to talk about it on his show. So I did, and we talked, and took calls from listeners.”
Here Elder smiled and referred to a piece of paper. “Let me read you a list of the names the people calling into the show threw at me: Tom. Uncle Tom. Boot licking Uncle Tom. Straight-up Uncle Tom. Judas. Boy. Bug-eyed, foot-shuffling, sugarcane Negro. Coconut—that’s white on the inside, black on the outside, like Oreo. Oreo. Anti-black. Pro-white. Remus. Sambo. Sambo-Tom. The Antichrist.” Elder smiled. “And that was in the first hour.”
“They invited me back as a fill-in host,” he continued. “I went home to talk it over with my wife at the time, and I said, ‘I don’t know, I always thought of talk radio as glib, shallow and bombastic.’ She said, ‘It is. You’d be perfect.’” Elder paused. “You can imagine what happened to that marriage.”
The audience whooped with laughter. But Elder had them at hello.
These were hardcore fans, or “Elderados,” who had come to see Elder speak, but mostly to get their copies of his books signed. His book appearances are legendary, for he talks to each and every person who shows up, and not just cursorily. By the time the night ran its course, Elder would have had a deep, fully engaged conversation of several minutes’ duration with each and every person there. Looking at the audience as things got rolling and doing the math, it seemed highly unlikely that the event would finish before midnight.
Numbers were given out, and groups of ten were called to line up, clutching their copies of Elder’s current paperback release, Showdown: Confronting Bias, Lies, and the Special Interests that Divide America. The demographics of the audience were pretty standard TO/Calabasas—all ages, mostly white, mostly affluent, but not as uniformly white or affluent as you might expect in a community people just over the hill in the San Fernando Valley refer to as “Calablackless.”
Elder has an unconventional audience due to his knack for turning conventional wisdom on its ear. He has no reverence for left or right, and plenty of extremely vocal detractors from both sides. Every weekday afternoon at three, a comically alarmist KABC announcer’s voice intones the show’s opener, which says, in part: “Warning: communists, socialists, statists, victicrats and weekend golfers might want to lower the volume and move three steps from the radio speaker to avoid discomforting enlightenment.”
Elder has long described himself as a libertarian in the small “l” sense of the word, meaning that he parts company with the big “L” Libertarian Party on many issues, particularly foreign policy (he supports the war in Iraq, while the Libertarians are strict hands-off isolationists). But he believes in a small federal government having nothing to do with issues like abortion or gay marriage (all marriage, he says, whether gay or straight, should be a private matter); an end to subsidies to individuals and corporations; and the massive privatization of most government services and holdings. On the environment, he says that “the Federal Government is the country’s worst polluter,” and agrees that the way to preserve parklands like Ahmanson Ranch is private conservancy—he doesn’t agree, however, that such efforts should be funded with public money. Rob Reiner and friends, he says, should have ponied up.
Fiscally conservative and socially laissez-faire, Elder has fans among the non-religious far-right (an extremely neglected group), but he has also eased the transition for a fair number of middle-aged left-wingers in crisis—this according to the old saw that holds that if you’re a conservative in your youth you have no heart, and if you’re a liberal in your old age you have no brain. Elder takes the dryness out of that equation, adding a touch of soul. He proves that it’s possible to be passionate, and radical, while being essentially a centrist.
Elder rails against big government and takes calls from some very, very angry people, but he’s also, in his own way, a consensus-builder. People tune in to hear him lock horns with assorted gadflies and wackos, but also because it’s impossible not to agree with him at least some of the time, whoever you are. In a his first book, The Ten Things You Can’t Say in America, he writes, “Optimism. It’s not just a mind-set, it is behavior.”
So what are the ten things you can’t say in America? Roughly drawn: 1) Blacks are more racist than whites, and 2) White condescension is more damaging than racism. 3) There is no health-care crisis. 4) The War on Drugs is the new Vietnam… a losing battle. 5) Republicans and Democrats are indistinguishable. 6) Gun control causes violence. 7) America’s greatest problem is illegitimacy. 8) The welfare state is our narcotic. 9) There is no glass ceiling. 10) The media’s left-leaning bias is real, it’s widespread and it’s destructive.
Elder’s second book, Showdown, could easily have been called Ten More Things You Can’t Say in America. Both books are as off-the cuff as the radio show, containing the same wealth of radical assertions backed up by exotic and compelling factoids: “Medical spending in 1960 was 5 percent of our gross domestic product, and by 1997 it was 14 percent.” “According to a recent USA Today article, between 1992 and 1997, 70 percent of all new jobs came from female-headed start-up companies.” “Kennedy objected to quotas.”
Not everyone standing in line at the signing agreed with him on all points (and according to Larry, if you agree with anyone all the time you’re an idiot). Theresa, a letter carrier from Ventura and self-described conservative, said that Elder had never changed her mind about anything, but that she listens to him on her headphones while she delivers the mail. “For a long time I didn’t realize he was a black man. I find him very humorous. He’s not vitriolic.” She mainly approves of Elder’s views because, “I don’t want to live in a socialist country.”
Robb Daniels, a Moorpark architect and builder who showed up wearing work boots and a straw hat and looking like a gentleman farmer said, “It’s so enjoyable to know you’re not alone. That you’re not crazy.” He then waited over three hours to get his book signed.
By 10:00 p.m., at least half of the audience had yet to hear their numbers called. Some read, some chatted, some even slept. Astonishingly, not one, single person gave up and left.
Lucy Deukmejian managed to take a nap with her legs stretched out over some folding chairs. “I like a lot of what he says, though probably all my colleagues wouldn’t,” she said with a wry smile upon waking. “I’m in the social services industry.”
Elder is merciless when it comes to the public sector, and he doesn’t just oppose the welfare state—he’d do away with public education, too, or at the very least call for a private school voucher program, saying that “a state of emergency exists in inner-city public education in America.” He also gets in his digs, pointing out that Spike Lee and Jesse Jackson, both ardently anti-voucher, sent their kids to private schools.
Many of the callers to Elder’s show are people like Deukmejian, who work in the public sector as social workers, teachers and law enforcement personnel; or like the high school caller, an A student, whose teacher had given him a punishingly low grade for writing a paper that expressed non-liberal political views: people who claim that they will suffer professionally for disagreeing with the prevailing party line within their fields, and who only feel free to express their non-liberal opinions in their cars, talking on their cell phones under the anonymity of radio.
Even, apparently, in conservative Thousand Oaks.
End of Part 1. Source: Los Angeles Radio People-Dec. 12, 2003