Everybody Hates Bill O’Reilly

They do. Just ask him. Of course it is only because they fear his power as king-maker and are jealous of his position at the top of the heap of American television (right up there with American Idol and Dancing with the Stars). Actually, I’ve never hated him and, in fact, I kind of miss listening to him in the afternoons on 96.9. Not as much as I miss Mike Barnicle but that’s a different story.

When 96.9 chose to screw up their daytime programming I tried it for awhile but then was forced to change to WUMB-FM which is an NPR program. It’s actually excellent. There was a great interview with Norman Mailer yesterday. So I won’t complain that their new schedule ruined my day. Mike Barnicle is now on for an hour in the morning but it is at the time I am usually writing this blog so I miss him. Then we get two hours of Michael Graham laughing at his own jokes, whining about Massachusetts, the only state that would give him job, and telling us how full the lines are while he babbles on endlessly trying to fill those two hours. Enough already.

Jim Braude and Margery Eagen have three hours now and I like them even though that girl desperately needs elocution lessons. I like the way Jim doesn’t take himself seriously and the fact that he’s smarter than all the rest of the talk jocks put together (except Barnicle). After them we get the aging ladies-man Jay Severin but since he is only interested in talking to fit, attractive, very young women I disqualify myself and listen to Terry Gross instead.

O’Reilly now comes on in the evening so I rarely get to hear him but the other night I happened to be in the car and I tuned him in. He was talking about all the people who hate him — again. “Boy do they hate me,” he says,”ha, ha, ha, they sure hate me.” He talks about that a lot. I often feel like calling him and using one of my father’s lines, “Don’t paint a target on your chest if you don’t want to get shot at.” But he’d probably think I was picking on him.

I have to give O’Reilly credit, he often picks causes that I think are admirable — particularly in the area of childhood abuse. And he’s a total genius at marketing. In fact I’m thinking about following his example from his latest book Culture Warrior. Here’s the way I see it, you think up a bad guy, someone America needs to be protected from. Then you write a sort of field guide to identifying those bad guys and you set yourself up as the first line of defense against them. O’Reilly’s bad guys are the so-called Secular Progressives, a term that he admits he “coined” (sort of like olbert‘s “truthiness”). He then spends his whole book proving that his invented bad guys, the S.P.s, are bent on the destruction of America. It’s a good thing to add in the elements of paranoia and patriotism which are sort of the nitro and the glycerin of hysteria.

So this is what I’ve decided: there are people in this country who hate the color white. Let’s call them the W.H.s. I can prove that they exist and intend to do that by exposing the trend of people moving to warmer climates to get away from snow (white) and not doing anything about greenhouse gases which would eliminate snow (white). Plus look at the booming diet industry and how anti-carb it has become — no potatoes (white), no pasta (white), no rice (white). And look at how old people now color their hair (white). I’ll demonstrate how the interior decorating industry has convinced Americans to paint their walls bright colors instead of the respectable white we once favored, and then there is the War On Virtue (white). Well, I am definitely onto something here.

The only problem is when my book comes out there will be people who hate me for exposing the W.H.s. That will put me in competition with O’Reilly for being hated. He’d hate that.

Thanks for reading.