This report on the State of Conservatism comes at the end of an annus mirabilis for conservatives. In 2013, they learned that they may have been wasting much time and effort.
Hitherto, they have thought that the most efficient way to evangelize the unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism’s most light-shedding texts. Now they know that a quicker, surer method is to have progressives wield power for a few years. This will validate the core conservative insight about the mischiefs that ensue when governments demonstrate their incapacity for supplanting with fiats the spontaneous order of a market society. …
Franklin Roosevelt, emboldened by winning a second term in 1936, attempted to pack, by expanding, the Supreme Court, to make it even more compliant toward his statism. He failed to win congressional compliance, and in 1938 he failed to purge Democrats who had opposed him. The voters’ backlash against him was so powerful that there was no liberal legislating majority in Congress until after the 1964 election.
That year’s landslide win by President Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater, less than 12 months after a presidential assassination, left Democrats with 295 House and 68 Senate seats. Convinced that a merely sensible society would be a paltry aspiration, they vowed to build a Great Society by expanding legislation and regulation into every crevice of Americans’ lives. They lost five of the next six and seven of the next 10 presidential elections. In three years we shall see if progressive overreaching earns such a rebuke.
In 2013, the face of progressivism became Pajama Boy, the supercilious, semi-smirking, hot-chocolate-sipping faux-adult who embodies progressives’ belief that life should be all politics all the time — come on, everybody, spend your holidays talking about health care. He is who progressives are.
They are tone-deaf in expressing bottomless condescension toward the public and limitless faith in their own cleverness. Both attributes convinced them that Pajama Boy would be a potent persuader, getting young people to sign up for the hash that progressives are making of health care. As millions find themselves ending the year without insurance protection and/or experiencing sticker shock about the cost of policies the president tells them they ought to want, a question occurs: Have events ever so thoroughly and swiftly refuted a law’s title? Remember, it is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
From Detroit’s debris has come a judicial ruling that the pensions that government employees’ unions, in collaboration with the political class, extort from taxpayers are not beyond the reach of what they bring about — bankruptcy proceedings. In Wisconsin, as a result of Gov. Scott Walker’s emancipation legislation requiring annual recertification votes for government workers’ unions and ending government collection of union dues, more than 70 of 408 school district unions were rejected.
This year’s debate about the National Security Agency demonstrated the impossibility of hermetically sealing distrust of government to one compartment of it. Worries about the NSA’s collection of metadata occurred in a context of deepened suspicions about government because of this year’s revelations that the administration has corrupted the Internal Revenue Service, the most intrusive and potentially the most punitive domestic institution. Conservatism is usually served by weariness of government.
Sports on Earth does something NFL players have to endure each week, and NFL players probably would love to see:
Intolerable NFL commentators are legion. Of course, some of this is not their fault. We binge-watch the sport once a week, leaving us exhausted, annoyed, tipsy and in need of much needed physical exertion. We take it out on the people talking at us, who are conveniently not in the room to defend themselves.
That said, there has been no shortage of documentation regarding the awfulness of announcers — there’s an entire site titled Awful Announcing. During games, Twitter transforms into a firing squad aimed at conservative playcalling and the commentators who ineptly defend it.
Still, I couldn’t find any hard data on just how bad announcers actually are.
So I listened to 32 NFL games — two per crew — charting every foolish, false, annoying, ridiculous and downright dumb thing each of them said. I did this not because I enjoy it (it was, indeed, awful) but to determine which NFL crew is the worst of the lot.
In general, there are three types of announcer comments: good, neutral and bad. Good statements offer some type of insight into the game. This is inherently subjective, since different people know different things. Neutral statements constitute the bulk of their utterances: neither offensive nor insightful. As a result, I decided to measure the bad statements.
“Bad statements” are divided thusly — clichés (see the headline), factual errors, “nonsense,” self-references, taking plays off (which is a cliche itself, I suppose), and going off-topic. Examples of each:
Jim Nantz of CBS: “We go to the combine every March, and they have a way of measuring how fast you run, how high you jump, but they don’t have a way of measuring someone’s heart.”
Solomon Wilcots of CBS: “Nobody can catch the ball when it comes out of a Howzerwitz.”
Dan Dierdorf, who is retiring from CBS after this season: “Possession is nine-tenths of all that’s good about recovering a fumble.”
Tim Ryan of Fox: “Nobody can point fingers; everyone needs to look themselves in the mirror and self-reflect.”
Fox’s Tony Siragusa, who belongs in more than one category: “Talked to coach Marc Trestman a … about, you know, about he said to me I said you know this first half was pretty crazy, outrageous, he said as crazy and outrageous as it was, we’re only down seven points.”
First, the foulups by network:
Next, the bad work of play-by-play announcers …
… followed by their partners the color commentators:
The first problem, of course, is that evaluating an announcer on one game’s performance may not be an accurate reflection of his body of work. (Oops, another cliché.) To measure someone by errors instead of, for instance, a clever turn of phrase (see Scully, Vin) or a well-described (and not overdescribed on TV) play seems incomplete.
My quarter-century of broadcast experience on the side (most of the announcers on this list are not full-time employees of their network) emphasizes to me the basic responsibilities that some announcers miss — score and time (including periods or innings), to name the two most important. After that, you set the stage (down and distance in football, ball–strike count in baseball) and describe what’s happening (where’s the ball on the basketball floor, who has the ball in football, where was the ball hit in baseball, etc.).
I look at these charts, and I think to myself that I’m fortunate I call games on radio now, where listeners know only what the announcers tell them.
But the play-by-play responsibility doesn’t end there. There are commercials to read, and woe be unto you if you mispronounce advertisers’ names or can’t read the spots. You also need to promote future broadcasts or future programming.
The other thing, which you can read in the comments, is that viewers have personal preferences, positive and negative, and their minds will not be changed by documentation otherwise.
Writer Aaron Gordon has interesting things to say about the Fox announcers Packer fans love to hate (who are bringing you Super Bowl XLVIII for Fox, by the way):
It came as no shock that [Joe] Buck is one of the best in the business, with a paltry three infractions over two games. But only 26 infractions for [Troy] Aikman?! The fact that Aikman had a below-average number of infractions was the biggest surprise of the entire experiment.
My theory is that what makes Aikman such an insufferable voice is two-fold: He’s assigned to the very best games Fox carries despite providing no actual insight, and he has a bad tendency to simply re-state what the entire country has just witnessed. While maddening, it didn’t fall into any of the categories of this experiment. He’s rarely wrong and rarely says something totally ridiculous.
Still, Aikman can be prone to gaffes. He forgets players’ names (“I’m thinking of the punishment of … uh, who am I thinking about here …? Dez Bryant.”) and has a legendary capacity for unnecessarily doubling sentence lengths (“Hard to complain about getting the ball and those types of things when you don’t make those types of plays;” “If the defense can hold here on third down and not give up any points, I mean that would be a great possession for them in keeping this short of the Cowboys having to get a touchdown.”) or offering circular explanations (“Eventually, he’s going to break one like he just did.”; “The way that they’ve been able to run the football the way they have.”). The most exemplary instance of the Aikman vernacular was when he began a sentence with the phrase “Yeah no I mean hey.” Five words of complete and total uselessness.
Similar things are said by fans about half of the top-rated prime time announcers, NBC’s Al Michaels and Cris Collinsworth:
They’re generally regarded as one of the best in the business, and I agree. Collinsworth is articulate and gives more useful insight than any other commentator, and it’s not even close. But this metric isn’t measuring that. We only want the dirt.
When this crew screws up, it’s because they’re bending over backwards to compliment a superstar or head coach. There’s something about authority and superstardom that makes these two more excited than a creepy old man at a Pilates class. It takes away from what is otherwise a well-called game.
Then there’s the ESPN crew of Mike Tirico and former Packer assistant coach Jon Gruden:
ESPN crews have a historically tough time balancing a vague mandate for general entertainment with calling an actual football game. Gruden, with his 29 infractions, can’t find the sweet spot between impersonating a caricature of a football coach and being a real person. Surprisingly, I counted only one “this guy” over two games. He still leans a bit heavy on “this kid,” though, with seven such utterances.
Some other Gruden quirks: He refers to third-down stops as “get-offs,” which sounds vaguely sexual. Here’s a deranged thing Gruden said:
“People forget Luck didn’t come into a great situation. He had to succeed a guy named Picket Manning. His coach had leukemia. But he went 11-5 and threw for 4,500 yards anyways. How do you top that?”
Yes, he actually called Peyton Manning “Picket” (I’ll ignore the bit about on-field accomplishments somehow mitigating his coach’s cancer). Another real thing Gruden said:
“The one thing I like about Toler and these Indianapolis corners, they are going to come right back the next down. They have no conscience.”
I don’t think Gruden knows what a conscience is, which has troubling implications. He also makes up Olympic events:
“I think this guy can be an Olympian acrobat.”
I like watching Tirico and Gruden, in part because you’re never quite sure what Gruden is going to say. I also enjoy Michaels and Collinsworth, and, yes, Buck and Aikman. (I may be one of the few people who gets Buck’s sense of humor, because we’re contemporaries.) Nantz and Simms are too vanilla, particularly Nantz. (Simms was better on NBC when he had co-analyst Paul Maguire to play off of, and Nantz is on too much CBS stuff.) Other than his game-ending cliches, you always get a solid broadcast from Nantz, but not necessarily something where you think what a witty guy Nantz is.
On the other hand, how Siragusa maintains Fox employment is beyond my ability to comprehend.
Pajama Boy’s place in Internet infamy was secured as soon as the insufferable man-child was tweeted out by Organizing for America.
He is the face of a Web ad that is the latest effort by the Obama team to leverage the holidays for conversation about Obamacare. “Wear pajamas,” the ad reads. “Drink hot chocolate. Talk about getting health insurance. #GetTalking.”
And, sure enough, Pajama Boy is wearing pajamas — a zip-up onesie in classic Lamar Alexander plaid — and drinking hot chocolate. He is in his 20s, sporting hipster glasses he could have bought at Warby Parker and an expression of self-satisfied ironic amusement.
Pajama Boy is about as threatening as Michael Cera and so nerdy he could guest-host on an unwatched MSNBC show. He is probably reading The Bell Jar and looking forward to a hearty Christmas meal of stuffed tofurkey. If he has anything to say about it, Obamacare enrollments will spike in the next few weeks in Williamsburg and Ann Arbor. …
But it’s hard not to see Pajama Boy as an expression of the Obama vision, just like his forebear Julia, the Internet cartoon from the 2012 campaign. Pajama Boy is Julia’s little brother. She progressed through life without any significant family or community connections. He is the picture of perpetual adolescence. Neither is a symbol of self-reliant, responsible adulthood.
And so both are ideal consumers of government. Julia needed the help of Obama-supported programs at every juncture of her life, and Pajama Boy is going to get his health insurance through Obamacare (another image shows him looking very pleased in a Christmas sweater, together with the words “And a happy New Year with health insurance”).
The breakdown of marriage and its drift into the 30s mean there are more Julias and Pajama Boys than ever. The growth of government feeds off this trend and, at the margins, augments it. The vision of the Obama Democrats, distilled to its essence, is of a direct relationship between the state and the individual without the mediating institutions of family, church, and community that are an inherent check on government power. …
Never has the difference between what Chris Matthews memorably dubbed the Mommy Party and the Daddy Party been so stark. Pajama Boy’s mom probably still tucks him in at night, and when she isn’t there for him, Obamacare will be. A less nurturing reaction is, as New Jersey governor Chris Christie put it in a counter tweet, “Get out of your pajamas.” There’s a reason President Barack Obama is underwater by a 2-to-1 margin among men in the latest Quinnipiac poll.
For all the ridicule directed at Julia during last year’s campaign, she got at something important: Single women do look to government as a cushion against their economic insecurities. Pajama Boy isn’t so apt. He might be glad to pay more for his health insurance to include maternity benefits he doesn’t need as a blow against gender stereotyping, but most young people will presumably consider Obamacare more rationally and realize it’s a scheme to get them to subsidize insurance costs for older people.
… and Jonah Goldberg …
By the time this “news” letter reaches your e-mail box, pretty much every joke imaginable about “Pajama Boy” will have been made. But I reject such a dour Malthusian view of Pajama Boy humor! …
Pajama Boy doesn’t exude homosexuality; he gives off the anodyne scent of emasculation. Seriously, the construction worker from the Village People would kick his ass. Besides, this is the gay enrollment ad for Obamacare (there’s also this). All of these dudes are manlier than Pajama Boy.
If you try to play out the life of Pajama Boy in your mind, he probably has a girlfriend. It’s just that she’s wearing the pants in the relationship, as they used to say. I picture her like Sarah Silverman in School of Rock or the girlfriend at the beginning of Office Space who everyone knows is cheating on Peter.
Pajama Boy is a Low-T liberal who wears a “this is what a feminist looks like” T-shirt and flinches whenever his girlfriend makes a sudden movement. He’s the sort of guy who thinks the “Consensual Sex Contract” given to him by his liberal-arts college R.A. is a good place to start, but ultimately doesn’t go far enough. Charlie Cooke compares him to Leonard from Big Bang Theory, but I think he’s more like Raj, who “manscapes” (and moisturizes!) and is ecstatic when he’s invited to girls’ night. I imagine he was terribly conflicted when his girlfriend finally made him watch The Silence of the Lambs (he wanted to rent Pitch Perfect again), because while he was horrified by all of the violence and he was dutifully empowered by the Clarice Starling character, he was secretly thrilled by the idea of having his own human-flesh girl suit.
First, it’s worth stating this isn’t about Ethan Krupp, the Obamacare activist who plays Pajama Boy. For all I know he bow-hunts alligators and rides a Harley. Though, come on, it’s doubtful. The point is that the Obama social-media folks, for whom Krupp works, are going for an image, so what Krupp is like in real life is irrelevant and people should probably leave the guy alone.
There’s a debate over why on earth the promoters of Obamacare would pick this image to hawk their wares. One side says that it was a brilliantly cynical move because it got people talking just like those “Brosurance” ads with the keg-stands got people talking. (The motto of the campaign is, after all, “Get Talking.”) If you can make young people chatter about Obamacare, goes the theory, more will eventually sign up. The other side of the argument is that this offers a real peak into the collective mind of liberalism (and the collective incompetence of the Obamacare team). Pajama Boy represents an actual constituency. There are males (if not necessarily “men”) who fit this profile.
Like most people who’ve thought it through, I’m more inclined to the latter. The Pajama Boy image is an extension of the original Thanksgiving enrollment video, which featured parents saying, “We love you no matter what, but it’s time to get covered.” Which isn’t quite as weird as saying “We are admirals of the pantless armada, give us your ball-bearing vestibules,” but still strange. The “we love you no matter what” line — like the “get talking” line — is an attempt to make getting insurance both edgy and mature at the same time. Edgy because there’s a vague hint that talking about this stuff violates a taboo or is difficult. Mature because it’s something grown-ups do.
But there are problems. For starters, Obamacare actually delays adulthood. You get to stay on your parents’ plan until you’re 26! Which means the young people we’re talking about are 27-year-olds! Twenty-seven used to be the age of seriously grown men. John Wayne was 27 in the Lucky Texan. You can go to college, enlist in the army, do a couple tours, and come home again before the age of 27. The average age of marriage for men is 28. (Though the women I’ve talked to think dudes who have difficult talks in their jammie onesies while drinking hot cocoa might have to wait a good deal longer. Seriously if women had Terminator-like vision that saw the world by sexual attraction instead of infrared, Pajama Boy would be an almost invisible boy-shaped vapor.)
Moreover, isn’t it interesting to see the contempt Gen-X and Baby Boomer liberals have for Millennials, or at least Millennial men? (By the way, where are the ads targeting young women?) Twenty-something males are either testosterone-addled idiots doing keg-stands or they’re suffering from estrogen poisoning.
Last, I love the rearguard effort from liberals trying to turn the mockery of Pajama Boy into proof of right-wing sexual insecurity. It seems to me this is a pretty desperate attempt by the MSNBC fanboy set to compensate for the fact that so many people find Pajama Boy pathetic. That cuts too close to home. So it must be more proof of racism or gender confusion. But if you just take a step back, you can see the problem. If you find yourself in the position of arguing that real men get snuggly in their jammies and drink cocoa, you need to push the keyboard away and walk around the block a bit.
The president’s low standing among the Y-chromosome set, dramatic though it is, is not entirely surprising. He couldn’t close the deal with them the first time around, he presided over an ugly recession in which men were particularly hard hit, and then he presided over a sickly recovery in which unemployment remains elevated and is significantly higher for men than for women. And the labor-force participation rate, in many ways a better measure of employment, has plunged during the Obama years. Forgot the bicycle helmet, the mom jeans, the wife scolding us about eating our veggies, the fact that he throws a baseball like he should be relaxing with a mug of cocoa in his footie pajamas — President Obama loses points for style, to be sure, but he has a substance problem too. …
The experience of joblessness is, I think, particularly despair-inducing for men. It isn’t that unemployment is not stressful for women as well — it surely is, especially for women who bear the burden of economic responsibility for their households. But there is entangled in that issue something more than simple financial well-being for men. To be a provider, for oneself and one’s family, to do something useful and to earn, is deeply connected to many men’s sense of self-respect, to their identity as men. A second strong correlating factor in men’s suicide rates is being single, which is itself linked to the question of employment. With weak economic conditions persisting, suicide rates have been rising.
For those men who have experienced extended unemployment, the memory is often a vivid and painful one. And even those who haven’t can detect the scent of economic fear in the air. Suicide is an extreme reaction, of course, but you don’t have to be an economic weatherman to know which way the financial winds are blowing. Women experiencing economic vulnerability tend toward welfare-statism, with SNAP and Medicaid and all of the rest of it acting in loco mariti. Men experiencing economic vulnerability, or who have reason to think they may experience it in the future, seem to move in the opposite direction: President Obama lost white men without college degrees by 31 points last time around.
It may be the case that men see Barack Obama as a kind of romantic competitor — not the man himself, but the vision of government he stands for. The more the state steps into the role of provider, the less men have to offer in that capacity. This is especially true of men with modest earnings potential. I doubt that very many of those non-college-educated, working-class white men follow the careers of Hanna Rosin or Maureen Dowd, but the message — “men are obsolete” — infiltrates the culture at large. President Obama is the messenger, and an agent of the Rosin-Dowd worldview: His vision of the good life is universal kindergarten and universal graduate school, a coddling welfare state, etc., and a gimlet eye cast upon much of what used to be thought of as man’s work: drilling for gas, timbering, mining. President Obama is first and foremost the public face of his own agenda and his own economic record, which is a poor one. But he is also the face of something else, an unbrave new world with little use for men whose Christmas plans do not involve buttonholing family members for precious and grim-mouthed homilies about Obamacare.
American men have been losing ground since 1973, the year their real wages peaked. Strong economic growth from the Reagan years to the turn of the century, along with strong economic mobility and a general national sense of optimism, helped soften that blow, as did rising household incomes as more women entered the work force. But our once-dynamic economy has grown sclerotic, and economic mobility has declined — and that wasn’t supposed to happen. President Obama represents what admirers such as Michael Grunwald have called a “New New Deal.” American men don’t seem to think it is a very good deal at all.
The aftermath of Sunday’s improbable 37–36 Packer comeback win over Allas (because the Cowboys have no D — get it?) includes, of course, social media, according to UW journalism classmate Rob Hernandez:
Meanwhile, this ESPN.com development is cool — the NFL Playoff Machine, in which the previous 15 weeks’ results are added to your picks for weeks 16 and 17 to create a playoff scenario. All you need to know about the Packers is that two wins get them the NFC North title and third or fourth seed. That’s the good news. The bad potential news is that their first playoff opponent is likely to be a team with a better record, though as a divisional non-champion that opponent would be a fifth or sixth seed. (Possibly New Orleans or San Francisco.)
About this time throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s, Larry Lujack went on the air to start his morning show on WLS radio in Chicago. Like nearly every one of my middle and high school classmates, I woke up to a clock-radio, but it wasn’t set to WISM, or Z104, or WIBA-FM; it was set to WLS.
Lujack died of cancer Wednesday. The fact he died wasn’t that surprising, though at 73. There were many unusual facets to Lujack, as Robert Feder shows:
“Larry didn’t want an obituary filled with people saying what a great guy he was and how talented he was,” his wife, Judith, told me after confirming his passing at age 73. “He was more than that. He was more than a jock. He was more than an employee of WLS. He was a truly amazing, caring, wonderful human being. He didn’t want to be known by the awards he won. He just wanted to be remembered as a person who cared about people — about children — and really tried to do things to help them.”
Though pretty much out of the limelight for more than 25 years and enjoying retirement in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Lujack left an impression on Chicago that endures to this day. Mere mention of “Ol’ Uncle Lar” from the “Animal Stories” bit he played to perfection with Tommy Edwards still conjures fond memories for hundreds of thousands of loyal fans.
His legacy also lives on among the countless broadcasters he influenced and inspired. The next time you hear Rush Limbaugh rustle a paper on the air or puff himself up with mock grandiosity, remember who did it first — and did it better. …
A genuine original, Lujack perfected a world-weary, sarcastic style that was in stark contrast to the cheery and effervescent DJs of the era. If he was in a foul mood — which seemed to be the case most of the time — he didn’t try to hide it. Audiences found his dark, edgy humor real, relatable and unlike anything they’d ever heard on the radio before. …
In moving up to mornings on WLS, he became a radio superstar of the first magnitude, dominating listenership among 18-to-49-year-olds and making millions for parent company ABC. In 1984 he was rewarded with an unprecedented 12-year, $6 million contract in order to keep him from jumping to WGN.
“It ain’t no big deal,” a typically nonchalant Lujack told me at the time. “I can honestly say — and my wife even finds this astounding — that I am not the least bit excited. Trite as it may sound, you can’t take it with you.”
Ratings declined with his ill-timed move to afternoons in 1986, and Lujack signed off from WLS a year later when ABC bought out the remainder of his contract and sent him into much-too-early retirement at age 47. He made a couple of Chicago radio comebacks on WUBT and WRLL by remote from his home in Santa Fe, but he never commanded center stage as he had in his heyday.
Practically every industry honor imaginable followed, including induction in the National Radio Hall of Fame, the National Association of Broadcasters Hall of Fame and the Illinois Broadcasters Association’s Hall of Fame. He took them all in stride. …
In a Sun-Times interview published 30 years ago this week, a 43-year-old Lujack told me he had two main goals in life. Neither one had anything to do with radio.
“First and foremost is to make it to heaven when I die,” he said. “If I do that, then my life was a ragingsuccess, no matter what the Arbitron ratings say. My only other goal — and this is a far, far, far, far, far, far distant second — is to one day shoot 72 on the golf course.
“On the first one, I try to be a good person, an honest person and, in the crude vernacular of the rock ’n’ roll world, I don’t fuck over people. On the other thing, I hit zillions of practice balls. But if I achieve the first one, I’ll be quite satisfied even if I don’t come close to the other one.”
I heard Lujack on his second WLS iteration. He started at WLS doing its afternoon show and then its morning show …
… after and before stints at WLS’ main rock and roll competitor, WCFL in Chicago.
Lujack’s on-air personality was unusual for the day. His sarcasm and irony was sort of a preview of the ’80s, but he also would go entire seconds saying nothing, for the dead-air effect. That’s commonplace now, but it wasn’t in those days.
Feder compared Lujack to Limbaugh, and Lujack did occasionally channel his inner Floyd Turbo, though it was probably for entertainment value more than for the political statement. Limbaugh, remember, started as a rock DJ before he became a right-wing talker.
One of Lujack’s former bosses, John Rook, inherited Lujack:
Larry Lujack and Art Roberts were common folks, with distinctive voices and an abundance of imagination. I instinctively knew they figured into my plans. …
Larry’s rebellious image and appearance gave need for me to think he must have some James Dean or Marlon Brando in him. As time would tell, both Art and Larry were radio originals and LuJack would become a radio franchise. He never ventured from radio but I feel certain he could have made major contributions as an actor.
Larry inspired and left his imprint on a young David Letterman. …
Rush would borrow heavily from the Lujack style and become a talk radio star….but he never forgave me for not hiring him at WLS, where today his “talk” show is featured.
Everyone who listened to WLS during its top 40 heyday agrees that WLS didn’t stand out for its music. WLS stood out because of its personalities, including Fred Winston, who replaced Lujack on the morning show and whose deeeeeep voice can be heard from Ferris Bueller’s clock-radio at the beginning of “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off”; and John Records Landecker, who has been written about on this blog. (WLS’ first renowned rock DJ, Dick Biondi, is still on the air, five decades after he started at WLS, which wasn’t his first radio job.)
Radio guy Ted Ehlen explains why Lujack and his WLS colleagues were as so great at what they did:
In the time that I’ve been involved in radio, mornings on the medium have changed for music stations. The yuck-it-up, wink-wink-naughty and often noisy nature of “morning zoo” radio has been in vogue for decades now. The listener has become the eavesdropper rather than the recipient of the message in this venue, which is why I seldom listen to morning music radio (or music radio as a whole these days) and stick to a one-host talk show in the morning, because that’s the way that morning hit radio used to be with personalities like Larry Lujack. He groused, he voiced his opinions, and poked fun of the world around him while he gave you the time and temp and cranked out the hits on WLS and WCFL. Larry Lujack was made for morning radio, because he sounded an awful lot like you felt as you rolled out of the sack, got on your feet, and negotiated your way to getting ready to get out the door and head to work. And he talked to YOU. Yes, you’ll hear an awful lot about “Animal Stories” with Lil’ Snotnose Tommy, but, for the most part, Larry Lujack was sharing his world with YOU. …
When I was first learning about radio at WBSD, the 10-watt FM station at Burlington High School as “Top 40 Ted”, my on-air style was molded by those I heard primarily on WLS Musicradio…Bob Sirott, Fred Winston, even the likes of Clark Weber from the ‘60’s (John Records Landecker, as I told him on my Racine program last April, was a level of disc jockey talent that I looked up at, and, realizing my personal personality limitations, appreciated without attempting to duplicate). I listened to Larry Lujack, but he really didn’t influence me directly during this formative period, but I appreciated him much more the further down the road I went in broadcasting when it was putting bread on my table. However, the indirect influence of Lujack at the time is tangible, because his on-air delivery allowed me and every disc jockey who cracked a mic to have the ability to truly be themselves on the air and not have to fit the stereotypical deejay mold of smiley, pukey platter patter guy. And when I hosted WLKG’s “Saturday At The ‘70’s” show for about five-and-a-half years, I tried my best to synthesize what a good hit radio personality sounded like then, and bring it to the present day. My models for that were the jocks from the WLS Musicradio years, especially ol’ Superjock, Larry Lujack…
For a legion of air personalities around the country like me, he will be remembered for his contribution to our own on-air presentation formation.
The Letterman parallel is perfect because in each of those cases, there was one and only one DJ on at a time. Everyone else — the news and sports people, and “Animal Stories” sidekick Little Tommy — they came on when needed, and then left. It wasn’t the “Lujack and _______,” show, it was Larry Lujack, first and foremost.
I’ve known John Landecker for more than twenty years now, and everywhere he goes someone tells him how important he was to their lives because of his stint on WLS. People really look up to him. But one of the people that John always looked up to was Larry Lujack. He keeps an autographed picture of Larry in his home office, inscribed with classic Lujack wit: “This is to certify that John Landecker knows me personally.”
And Landecker adds in his book Records Truly Is My Middle Name (because it is):
WLS already had an all-star lineup when I came aboard in 1972. Superjock Larry Lujack was the morning man, Fred Winston was doing middays, and J.J. Jeffrey was the afternoon man. I was hired to fill the evening slot.
I met Larry before I was on the air a single time. The program director Mike McCormack called me into his office because he wanted me to sit in on a Larry Lujack aircheck. In the radio business we call them “airchecks,” but they’re really just critique sessions with the program director. The disc jockey brings in a tape of his or her show, and if the program director likes it, he praises it. I suppose this has happened once or twice in radio history. Usually it goes the other way. Usually the program director picks it apart.
McCormack started Larry’s tape, and we listened to a bit Lujack had done that morning. It was reality radio. Larry was pointing out that you could hear the garbage trucks in the alley through the air conditioner in WLS’s main air studio, and he held the microphone right up to it, so the listeners could hear it too. After the bit ended, the program director turned to me.
“What do you think of that?” he asked.
“I thought that was pretty funny,” I said.
I didn’t know what I had done, but after the meeting I was walking back to the jock lounge with Larry and he turned toward me.
“Thanks, kid,” he said.
Apparently before I came in, the program director had been telling Larry he hated it, and Larry was defending it. When I backed him up by saying I thought it was funny, it defused the criticism, and Larry thought the new guy was alright.
On the other hand, not too long after that, I may have turned the tide in the other direction at least for a day. We were in a jock meeting, shooting the shit, and someone asked the seemingly innocuous question: “Who was more important to music — Elvis or the Beatles?”
“I don’t think Elvis was that great,” I said.
Well, I had no idea that Larry Lujack was a huge Elvis fan, but I found out pretty fast. Larry glared at me. And then he nearly spit the words at me, in his patented Lujack delivery.
Years later I was at the station when the news came across the wire that Elvis had died (August 16, 1977). The first thing that crossed my mind was that nobody in the world would want to know this information more than Larry Lujack. (When someone calls you a Philadelphia fuck for not loving Elvis, you have a tendency to remember that sort of thing.)
So, I called him at home, and his wife answered.
“Judy,” I said, “It’s John Landecker. I’ve got something very important to tell Larry. Trust me; he’s going to want to know about this.”
“OK, hang on,” she said.
A few seconds later Larry growled on the phone. “Yeah?”
“Larry, it’s me, John Landecker. Elvis is dead.”
“Who cares?” he growled again. “I’m taking a nap.”
About Lujack’s golf game: He told the story one day about having a “golf thought” while driving (a car), and so he stopped at a driving range in Kankakee, Ill. Armed with a cup of coffee, Lujack began to swing away, until it started to rain. This was some time after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster when fallout supposedly was drifting over the U.S. And as he watched the raindrops dripping into his coffee, Lujack said, he wondered if he was being irradiated by Chernobyl’s fallout. It doesn’t look funny in print, but it was funny enough on air to remember three decades later.
WLS History has a tribute to Lujack on its home page. The site also tells a story about a DJ meeting, where Landecker would argue about the playlist, Winston would suggest at 10-minute intervals that everybody be fired, and Lujack staring at the ceiling before interrupting the program director to tell him there was a fly on the ceiling.
Lujack’s funniest regular segment was Animal Stories, which (in its “early morning rerun of the previous day’s edition”) woke me up each weekday morning at 6:45 to hear …
One of the Animal Stories that got repeated airplay was of a woman at a party who saw the host’s dog’s eating one of the hors d’oeuvres handed to her by someone, after which the person finished the food. When the woman telling the story commented about that, the food-sharer said she did that all the time with her own dog. To that, the narrator said she wouldn’t have had done that had she noticed that the dog had been previously licking his … followed by a series of tones to blot out the words every listener could fill in, followed by laughter and expressions of revulsion by Uncle Lar and Little Tommy.
Lujack and I had one interaction. (Besides my possession of a WLS Fantastic Plastic card, which was worthless in southern Wisconsin.) I helped plan a Boy Scouts trip to Chicago, and as part of it I tried to arrange a tour of the WLS studios, then at 360 N. Michigan Ave. (or, as Lujack’s colleague John Records Landecker called it, the fifth floor of the downtown Burger King). I got my letter back a few days later with a note from Lujack saying that he was sorry, but building security didn’t allow tours on weekends, signed “Lar.”)
Lujack reminds us WLS Musicradio listeners of the days when radio stations were not automated or voice-tracked, and DJs were allowed to have personalities.
The Thought Leader is sort of a highflying, good-doing yacht-to-yacht concept peddler. Each year, he gets to speak at the Clinton Global Initiative, where successful people gather to express compassion for those not invited. Month after month, he gets to be a discussion facilitator at think tank dinners where guests talk about what it’s like to live in poverty while the wait staff glides through the room thinking bitter thoughts.
He doesn’t have students, but he does have clients. He doesn’t have dark nights of the soul, but his eyes blaze at the echo of the words “breakout session.”
Many people wonder how they too can become Thought Leaders and what the life cycle of one looks like.
In fact, the calling usually starts young. As a college student, the future Thought Leader is bathed in attention. His college application essay, “I Went to Panama to Teach the Natives About Math but They Ended Up Teaching Me About Life,” is widely praised by guidance counselors. On campus he finds himself enmeshed in a new social contract: Young people provide their middle-aged professors with optimism and flattery, and the professors provide them with grade inflation. He is widely recognized for his concern for humanity. (He spends spring break unicycling across Thailand while reading to lepers.)
Not armed with fascinating ideas but with the desire to have some, he launches off into the great struggle for attention. At first his prose is upbeat and smarmy, with a peppy faux sincerity associated with professional cheerleading.
Within a few years, though, his mood has shifted from smarm to snark. There is no writer so obscure as a 26-year-old writer. So he is suddenly consumed by ambition anxiety — the desperate need to prove that he is superior in sensibility to people who are superior to him in status. Soon he will be writing blog posts marked by coruscating contempt for extremely anodyne people: “Kelly Clarkson: Satan or Merely His Spawn?”
Of course the writer in this unjustly obscure phase will develop the rabid art of being condescending from below. Of course he will confuse his verbal dexterity for moral superiority. Of course he will seek to establish his edgy in-group identity by trying to prove that he was never really that into Macklemore.
Fortunately, this snarky phase doesn’t last. By his late 20s, he has taken a job he detests in a consulting firm, offering his colleagues strategy memos and sexual tension. By his early 30s, his soul has been so thoroughly crushed he’s incapable of thinking outside of consultantese. It’s not clear our Thought Leader started out believing he would write a book on the productivity gains made possible by improved electronic medical records, but having written such a book he can now travel from medical conference to medical conference making presentations and enjoying the rewards of being T.S.A. Pre. …
The middle-aged Thought Leader’s life has hit equilibrium, composed of work, children and Bikram yoga. The desire to be snarky mysteriously vanishes with the birth of the first child. His prose has never been so lacking in irony and affect, just the clean translucence of selling out.
He’s succeeding. Unfortunately, the happy moment when you are getting just the right amount of attention passes, and you don’t realize you were in this moment until after it is gone.
The tragedy of middle-aged fame is that the fullest glare of attention comes just when a person is most acutely aware of his own mediocrity. By his late 50s, the Thought Leader is a lion of his industry, but he is bruised by snarky comments from new versions of his formerly jerkish self. Of course, this is when he utters his cries for civility and good manners, which are really just pleas for mercy to spare his tender spots.
OK, I’ve changed my mind about the headline. (Meanwhile, read the comments, which are literally all over the place.)
For 25 years (if you count my seven years in institutional public relations), I’ve worked in journalism.
The Newscastic GIF factory created two lists that, well, total 25 — first, the 15 things we journalists have to do before we can consider ourselves real journalists, including:
Write a 15-inch story in 30 minutes
Have a meltdown in the restroom at least once
Replace two of the major food groups with coffee and liquor
Own your own police scanner
Eat in your car more often than you do at a table
Get fired for no good reason
Forget what it’s like to have a weekend off
Being told to “fuck off “ and “go to hell” by a source (or an editor)
Wake up in a cold sweat thinking about tomorrow’s edition
Can no longer read a story without scanning for typos and errors
Conduct an interview while in a towel
Rip into a spokesperson over the phone
I admit that most of these have happened to me, though I’d replace “car” with “desk” in the eating item and “bathroom” with “office” in the meltdown item. I may have been told to go to hell, and I may have told someone(s) to go to hell, but, you know, the F-word is kind of inappropriate in the workplace. (At least at a volume others can hear.) As for being fired for no good reason, in business, there’s always a good reason, and possibly one or more documented reasons.
I don’t believe I’ve ever awakened in a cold sweat about the next issue, though the work needed on the next issue has kept me awake at times, though really not recently. By this point, I’m familiar with the amount of work that needs to get done, and I’m also familiar with the feeling it’ll never get done. And yet, at its appointed day (unless the Postal Service screws up delivery), there it is.
The 15th item on this list was “Couldn’t imagine doing anything else.” I’m not including it because (1) the young woman pictured looks like no journalist who has ever lived on this planet, (2) you should never love your job, because your job doesn’t love you, and neither does your employer, and (3) the more correct sentence is “I can’t do anything else well,” because you should work at what you do best, not what you’re most passionate about, or whatever term a two-bit motivational speaker or writer uses.
The remaining 10 items would have been usable 25 years ago — 10 ways to not look stupid in this line of work, including:
1. NEVER, EVER ASSUME
When we say never assume, we mean never, never, never, never, ever. Sure, 99 percent of the time you’re right when you assume but it’s that one time when you are wrong that assuming will bite you in the ass.
2. WHEN YOU DON’T KNOW WHAT THE HELL IS HAPPENING, ASK YOUR SOURCE
This goes back to the first rule – don’t assume. Ask a source to explain what the judge said, what the vote meant, or just what the hell is going on. Being clueless is not as bad as being wrong. Most sources will be happy to explain what’s happening rather than have it reported wrong.
3. DO YOUR HOMEWORK
Journalists can’t read a press release or court briefing three minutes before and expect to be prepared. Journalists are expected to know the basics of any story (the who, what, when, where, and how). Being unprepared wastes time – your time and your sources’ time.
4. HAVE DIRECTIONS
With the advent of Google Maps and GPS, there’s no excuse not to know where you’re going. Sometimes even being five minutes late could mean the difference between a great story and a mediocre story. Even if you think you know the address, before heading out of the newsroom, double check your directions.
5. KNOW WHO YOU’RE TALKING TO
Nothing is more insulting to an elected official or a big-shot business executive than some journalist asking, “And what’s your name?” These people are walking egos and if journalists want to have just five minutes of their time, they must stroke those egos. Learning who’s who is critical for journalists.
6. KNOW YOUR HISTORY
A news story without context is almost useless to readers. Editors don’t have time to sit down and explain the 20-year history of the monument that is about to be torn down. They say journalists are the writers of the first draft of history but journalists need to know a little history in order to do their job. So before heading off to an assignment, do a Google news search, talk to the reporter who wrote the last article on the issue, or troll through the newspaper’s morgue.
7. HAVE STYLE
Nothing pisses off an editor more than reading the copy of a journalist who obviously hasn’t fallen asleep while reading the AP Stylebook. The AP Stylebook should be a journalist’s Bible.
8. GET EVERYTHING YOU NEED THE FIRST TIME
Journalists usually have one shot to get all the information they need. Believe it or not, sources don’t sit at their desks just waiting for a journalist to call. When meeting with a source or attending an event, get all the information you’re going to need. Sure, there might be a follow-up question or two but there’s no guarantee you’ll get those answered before deadline. Get all the information you can while you have them on the phone or in person.
9. HAVE A BACKUP PLAN
Harddrives crash, voice recorders fail, batteries die. Too many journalists have been burned by having something go out on them. Don’t just record the interview, take notes as well because one day that recorder will fail. Back up your copy after every drink of coffee, make copies of your files, and keep a back-up battery for your cell phone in the car. Trust us, you’ll need it some day.
The last item is actually something I’ve learned in sports announcing, particularly when your equipment never seems to work 100 percent right. Even if (as has happened to me) you have to borrow someone else’s cellphone to broadcast a game, you have to get it done.
A lot of people are turned off by mawkish attempts to sentimentalize Christmas, and as such attempts multiply, so does the legion of people suffering from the “Noel nasties.” …
It all started when I heard “The Christmas Shoes” on the radio and posted on Facebook that I feared my abhorrence of the song might signal that I’m dead inside. Turns out many of us have hearts two sizes too small.
“You’re not dead inside,” wrote my friend Bridget. “You just don’t like maudlin attempts at emotional manipulation.”
I felt better immediately, and wondered whether my impulse to smash all Precious Moments figurines is OK, too.
“That song is way too schmaltzy,” Jessica added, “and I’d be worried if you DID like it.”
Some expressed support for the song, saying it tugs at their heart strings. In it, the narrator recounts an experience in a checkout aisle Christmas Eve, where he finds a boy wishing to buy an expensive pair of shoes for his terminally ill mother. The boy explains he wants his mother to appear presentable before Jesus, but can’t afford the shoes. The narrator picks up the tab and wells up with Christmas spirit.
“A little kid who wants to help his dying mom look pretty when she passes away: How does that NOT make you a little sad?” Marianne asked.
I’d like to think Jesus is more interested in our souls than our soles. And I can’t help but wonder whether the song — and the movie it spawned — are a marketing ploy by the nation’s shoe makers. Unless my friends represent an unusually angry subset of the population, I’m guessing many around the country find the song’s storyline abominable.
Bridget pointed out that the narrator makes the situation all about himself: “Oh, I was having a lousy day but then I helped this sad little urchin and I feel better now. Go me.” …
The skeptical Aimee agrees with me that the song is a ploy, but not for the shoe companies. “The song becomes a lot more tolerable when you realize that clearly the kid is a con artist scamming this guy into supporting his cross-dressing habit,” she wrote. “I mean really, what kind of people let their kid run around the mall alone and unsupervised while his mother is in the hospital dying? Clearly this kid has his own agenda and the narrator has just been duped.”
Now THAT’s the kind of holiday storyline those of us who love “Bad Santa” could get behind. Let us watch in amazement as our hero takes the holiday’s power to turn everyone into gullible saps and uses it for nefarious purposes.
One of the Facebook comment Scrooge — I mean, Ben — didn’t include, probably because it wasn’t very funny, was my observation that journalists are supposed to be dead inside. The old saw from an editor is that if your mother says she loves you, check it out.
One reason why I’m not a fan of Christmas media is that there isn’t very much quality Christmas entertainment anymore. Off such classics as the original “The Grinch Who Stole Christmas” (written by Dr. Seuss, animated by Chuck Jones, narrated by Boris Karloff) and the more recent “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “A Christmas Story,” and this playlist of Christmas music, I could do without any other Christmas entertainment, particularly Christmas songs sung by contemporary artists of dubious talent recording solely to make money because consumers of dubious taste will buy anything they record.
