Howard Stern, The No Spin Factor, and Garbage

Last night, on the Bill O'Reilly "No Spin" Factor (I guess - I have hype filters, you know, so I don't hear the "spin") television show (and I stress the "show" - that, after all, is what it's all about), Howard Stern (remember? - "The Shock Jock") said something fascinating (no, not scrofulous or scatological - just plain talk). Shocking, too (even without the filth). He said the reason he is the most popular (or well-paid; and maybe that equates - my "spin" and hype filters block that sort of thing) entertainer in the world is because he tells the truth.
Right on, Howard. I think you're right. Sad as it is, I know you're right. I know you're right because I know a starving child will eat out of a garbage can. He's that desperate, that hungry. And the people of this country are so starved for truth - the facts without "spin", hype, and the Schrödinger's Cat atmosphere of the rhetoric reality asylum they've been forced into, even an opportunist freak like Stern is preferable. That's what we've become.
It was quite an evening. During discussion, I was forced to admit that I invariably prove to be what someone called a "polarizing influence." Any time I'm part of a conversation having to do with politics, I wind up dead in the middle, with the two political extremes shouting at me. Like this morning’s paper: Two columnists declaiming in stentorian terms that George W. Bush is heroic, and his detractors traitorous scum, two pontificating just as loudly that he is a lying murderer. And I, my Spockian self, in the middle, trying to figure out what the hell the truth might be.
I have a feeling, witness the e-mails I get from some, that I'm not alone. We'd like to find somebody, somewhere, from whom we can get the truth. We're like the starving kid at the garbage can. It may be garbage, but it's real food, food that isn't poisonous; somebody ate it without dying instantly, after all - if he had, the Health Department wouldn't have them risk poisoning the cats here in the alley. That's more than you can say for the fare served up in restaurants and supermarkets like FoxNews, CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, and the print version of the Fourth Estate Fifth Column. The public listens to Howard Stern because he's the truth.
I suppose that may be what things like pornography are all about. More than thirty-five percent of the Internet's commerce is sale of pornography. It's the way the country really is, and we know it. We know it by ourselves. "I think, therefore I am." Yeah, and what you think is probably what you ARE.
Does anybody remember the old Marty Robbins song that went, "The story of your life is on your face? It's written there in little, subtle lines . . .?" I've known the truth about my country for a long time. I wrote about it in my books. "Everything's for sale," Johanna, the heroine in my novel said. What you are tells me what you think. Look around, and if you're a Spock like me, you know that Stern was right. Stern and I weren't surprised when surveys and studies revealed things like the fact that thirty-some percent of "American" women said they would have sex on film with a stranger for money. We weren't surprised when another survey said sixty-odd percent of married women admitted (I don't suppose today's feminist would agree with my choice of terms, matter of fact) having had sex with someone other than their husbands during their marriages - and that without remorse or guilt. It was "just casual," they said. Howard Stern and I weren't surprised when state records having to do with tracking down "dead-beat dads," revealed that as many as thirty-three percent of the children weren't fathered by the guy who thought he had fathered them.
We weren't even surprised when courts ruled the cuckold would have to pay for support of kids that weren't his. It's a feminist, effeminate, country, after all.
You don't see a connection between things like that and the kind of government we have? Really?
Whatever. At any rate - and if anyone had ever told me I'd say it, I'd have hit him - my hat's off to Howard Stern. I care that much for the truth.
It's just too bad that's where we have to go to get it.