SENSE OF THE CITY Hard Right on Your Radio Dial

So whaddaya think about these right-wing squawk shows and the yahoos who call them?

Excuse me. I’ve been listening to David Gold’s talk radio show too long, and it’s starting to rub off. From 3 to 6 weekdays, KLIF is hard right on the radio dial. Insult and oversimplification are in; logic arid friendly persuasion are out. Preferred colors: blackest blacks, whitest whites, no grays. There is no middle ground and no such thing as an honorable dissenter from the Gold standard. His enemies are not just wrung; they are stupid, conniving, evil, subversive-starting with the president of the United States and his wife, whom Gold recently labeled “an avowed socialist.”

Talk radio’s boosters claim to run an open marketplace of ideas where all can hawk their wares. That’s a grand ideal, but in practice Gold and his loyal listeners-the “5 percenters,” as he calls them-exhibit a locker-room clannishness that’s surprising in a huge metropolitan area. Few dissenters phone the show, so it’s usually the choir preaching to the choir. The faithful are almost never challenged to cite sources for alleged facts and figures, or share the reasoning that led them to a conclusion. The point is high-octane emoting, sounding off. beefing, bashing.

Gold’s hit-and-run rhetoric leans heavily on the logical fallacy known as the straw man. First, create a mythical character called The Liberal, a composite creature who just loves to discourage productivity, aid America’s enemies, waste taxpayers’ money and kill the unborn. Next, find the zaniest ideas professed by P.C. zealots, and hang those ideas around The Liberal’s neck. Does some Ivy League professor believe that TV sitcoms amount to the electronic rape of women? Perfect! Just say all liberals believe that. Remember, never grant the enemy an inch. Anyone who thinks that government might do even the teensiest thing to make life better is a closet socialist in “New Democrat” clothing.

If the Gold gang isn”t too good at reasoning, it’s probably because they don’t get much practice on his clubby program. At 3:25 you can hear Clinton denounced as a wily Machiavellian cleverly foisting his socialist agenda on the people. By 4:15 he is a bungling backwoods clod. At 5:20 he’s a henpecked dupe, a bloated dunce, and so on. He’s a menacing ideologue and a blank. Clinton’s real flaws are not enough; he must be dehumanized and demonized in every way, contradictions be damned. Any stigma to beat the dogma of liberalism.

Gold and his listeners congratulate each other on their keen, skeptical intelligence, but the synapses don’t get much of a workout on his show. Take abortion, for example. I’ve heard Gold denounce abortionists a dozen or more times. He once spent several minutes in heartless ridicule of a woman who, as she testified before Congress, broke into tears while recounting her decision to abort. It’s certainly Gold’s right to oppose abortion. But what’s the reason for his opposition? If it’s based on religious faith, he should say so and make the case for forcing nonbelievers to live under that rule. If it’s secular, let him argue it that way. As it is, he too often seems to hate abortion because fas all 5 percenters know) “feminoids” love it. Hating Hillary and Jane, of course, is no basis for public policy.

My friends tell me I spend too much time listening to Gold. They say I should gawk at car wrecks instead. But he’s part of an intriguing pop cultural force that deserves attention. Talk radio is instantaneous, a daily Rush to judgment that doesn’t wait for commissions and juries. Get it off your chest before it’s been through your mind. By contrast, print travels at a glacial pace; letters to the editor seem distant and formal, and monthly lead time turns magazines into time capsules.

Do talk shows like Gold’s pack much clout? Consider the outcry when Hillary Rodham Clinton chose herself to head the president’s health care task force. To hear Gold and KLIF’s morning man, Kevin McCarthy, the government had been seized in a bloodless coup. It was time for all good men to storm the White House, inject the panty-whipped president with a quart of testosterone and pack First Lady Macbeth off to mandatory topless dancing classes. Meanwhile, out there in America, the opinion polls show that average folks like Hillary (though not Rodham) and don’t much care whether Clinton’s bride or the Bride of Frankenstein fixes the health care system, as long as it gets fixed.

Much the same thing happened with the president’s State of the Union speech last month. For days prior to the speech, Gold howled his warnings. But most Americans seem willing to swallow new taxes rather than endure four more years of gripe and gridlock.

Since I regard Gold as more an entertainer than a political analyst, 1 don’t get too upset by his rantings. And I actually felt sorry for him during the Waco cult standoff when so many far-out 5 percenters called to denounce the ATF agents-long die bogeymen of the gun-loving right-and wax paranoiac about Big Brother crushing our freedoms. Out-Golded, Gold called for tolerance and moderation, sounding like some squishy liberal, for heaven’s sake. Dave, let’s hope that those listeners are the .005 percenters instead.