Alan WienerAt first glance, Michael Alan Weiner seems like an improbable candidate to be America's angriest, most vicious conservative radio host. Born 60 years ago in the Bronx, Weiner has lived in Northern California for most of his adult life, making a living as an herbalist and nutritionist. He communed with Fijian traditional healers, got married in a rain forest and studied ethno-medicine at the University of California at Berkeley. He swam naked with Allen Ginsberg, dreamed of being the next Lenny Bruce and wrote a rambling novel about a half-mad alter ego. His son's middle name is Goldencloud. For years, he made a name cranking out a pile of books on alternative medicine, recommending bizarre remedies such as using vitamin C to stop AIDS and kicking cocaine with coffee enemas.

These days, Weiner's more interested in purging the body politic. Using the pseudonym Michael Savage, he's launched a one-man mission to save America from its enemies at home and abroad, which on any given day includes liberals, gays, academics, the homeless, the Clintons, immigrants, feminists, CNN, the American Civil Liberties Union, Muslims and other minorities. Broadcasting three hours a day, five afternoons a week, from a rented studio in downtown San Francisco, he gives voice to the right wing's darkest fantasies. He muses about launching preemptive nuclear strikes on the Middle East ("I wish to God the hatches were open and the missiles were flying!"), suggests gunning down illegal immigrants ("If we had a government, we'd blow them out of the desert with airplanes!"), dreams of dispatching with "commies, pinkos and perverts" and other undesirables ("I say round them up and hang 'em high!") and even paraphrases a remark attributed to Nazi leader Hermann Goering ("When I hear someone's in the civil rights business, I oil up my AR-15!")

Woe be unto those who label him racist, sexist or homophobic -- or even worse, threaten his livelihood. When an Oregon group started a boycott of his advertisers last summer, he became downright apoplectic. "I'm more powerful than you are, you little hateful nothings!" he screeched, before intoning darkly in his trademark New-Yawk accent: "I'm gonna warn you again: If you harm me -- and I pray that no harm comes to you -- but I can't guarantee that it won't."

Michael Weiner's long and circuitous road has taken him from being a scientist and entrepreneur, through stints as a hipster, novelist and aspiring comedian, to becoming the personification of straight white male rage. Today he likes to play up his unconventional career path, to an extent. He's the kind of guy who never lets anyone forget he has a Ph.D. His Web site reminds visitors that he is a "World Famous Herbal Expert" and the author of 18 books. But just as his gap-toothed grin has been replaced by a row of airbrushed pearly whites on the front cover of his new book, he gives his audience a whitewashed version of his past. The real story is far more interesting, not just for its ironies and contradictions, but for the often disturbing clues it provides about the man now so well known as Michael Savage. He's gone through at least one political makeover. He's turned on old friends, or they've turned on him. If his semi-autobiographical novel is any guide to his own life, he's keeping a few skeletons in his closet.

In the end, the picture that emerges from his books, from interviews with past and current associates, and from his radio show is that "The Savage Nation" is just the latest undertaking of a man who's spent his life trying to get the world to notice him.

TO BE CONTINUED

quote:

Broadcasting three hours a day, five afternoons a week, from a rented studio in downtown San Francisco

Well, Dragon, tomorrow's demonstration in San Francisco should be interesting, to say the least!