My Tuesday column for fellow pabulum-puking liberals:
When I was in high school, I was an insufferable young Republican. I’ve talked about this on my podcast and on the blog, so it’s not any sort of revelation. Like a lot of kids who self-identify as conservative, as soon as I left home and began to learn about the real world, among other things via higher education in the field of political science, my personal values and politics rapidly shifted leftward simply because, as Stephen Colbert famously said, “Reality has a well-known liberal bias.”
But in the late 1980s, like many confused, awkward conservative kids, I also was totally addicted to the Morton Downey Jr. Show. Downey was the television Patient Zero who spawned both the Jerry Springer talk show circus format and the Bill O’Reilly Fox News pundit format. He was a far-right, cigarette-smoking screamer who hosted a syndicated telecast that was set up like a daytime talk show, complete with an audience and a panel of on-stage guests, and the topics, at least initially, were all wafer-thin political issues. Needless to say, 17-year-old political junky me in 1988 and 1989 absorbed it like a really shouty drug.
So when I watched a new documentary about Downey titled ÉVOCATEUR: The Morton Downey Jr. Movie, released to coincide with the 25th anniversary of Downey’s show, I was both surprised and not surprised at all to learn that it was essentially a political broadcast specifically designed for 17-year-olds boys with every topic simplified into digestible good-or-evil, right-or-wrong, with-us-or-against-us ultimatums. [continue reading here]