It’s tough enough being a delivery driver. Imagine doing time behind the wheel of a Chevy Suburban with only an AM radio to keep you company.
And in a small city way out west, striking of landscape, perhaps, but culturally backward, God help you. Or me. This was the mid-1990s, when right-wing talk radio was really making hay, and for programming there was Rush Limbaugh midday and then G. Gordon Liddy in the afternoon.
“We are vigorous, virile, and potent,” the former Dutchess County D.A., F.B.I. man, and Nixon dirty trickster would inform his listeners, tongue only partly in cheek. Further in a comedic vein, he enjoyed mocking the dreariness of the broadcast studio, outfitted as it was with “the ubiquitous fax machine.” Well, there was time to fill.
A regular feature of the show was Liddy’s reading of a sampling of political comment, and given The Washington Post’s role in bringing down Nixon, it was always from “the only newspaper in our nation’s capital worth reading,” or words to that effect, “The Washington Times,” unfailingly intoned with exaggerated announcer’s voice.
One memorable column from that conservative outlet lamented the new language regime of political correctness, under which “vile bums” had been reclassified as “the homeless,” the latter term sneeringly delivered.
That actually makes it sound more entertaining than it was. Because he inevitably veered off the rails. “Go for the head,” he’d tell some potential shooter still riled up over the 1992 standoff at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, between federal agents and a white separatist. Take into account body armor, Liddy meant.
I happened to be making deliveries around town with the radio on as a truck bomb went off in Oklahoma City, killing 149 adults, most of them federal employees, and 19 children. Later you could hear the tension, nervousness, and finally defiance in Liddy’s voice as call after call came in accusing him of having essentially lit the fuse by way of his exhortations over Attorney General Janet Reno, the siege at Waco, Tex., which was bomber Timothy McVeigh’s primary grievance, and the rest of it.
Bill Clinton, for all his many flaws, at least had the brains and decency to say he’d never again use the dehumanizing word “bureaucrat.” Of course today it’s all the rage.
It used to be that society progressed. Thirty years on, who would’ve predicted that the dumb rhetoric and paranoia of 1990s talk radio would be so front and center in our politics?