Oct 3, 2009

Mr. Sussman,

I am 61. I served in the Air Force for four years during the Vietnam war. I support an allied war against the Taliban. I am wary of both government, and corporate, intrusion into private lives. I have occasionally voted for conservatives.

Having said that I often ask my 15-year-old son, on his way back from football practice, to listen to your show. We listened the night you offered Orwell’s 1984 as a portrait of what you think America is becoming. Perhaps, you had only time for the Cliff Notes version and clearly you don’t know much about Orwell, who although difficult to categorize was committed to much that you repudiate. About 1984, he wrote:

"My recent novel is NOT intended as an attack on Socialism or on the British Labour Party (of which I am a supporter) but as a show-up of the perversions to which a centralized economy is liable and which have already been partly realized in communism and Fascism. I do not believe that the kind of society I describe necessarily will arrive, but I believe (allowing of course for the fact that the book is a satire) that something resembling it could arrive. I believe also that totalitarian ideas have taken root in the minds of intellectuals everywhere, and I have tried to draw these ideas out to their logical consequences." [CEJL vol. 4 p. 564]

But what was really stunning was that this was all the result of your time with a couple of Russian Arms dealers who are advertisers. And so a lengthy advertorial. Which without a disclaimer become the view of KSFO…. As an aside, one wonders who finances City Arms and where the arms come from. That you in effect endorse these people makes me all the more determined to fight for a fairness doctrine, which I never thought I would say, much less support.

Incidentally, City Arms urges customers to resist state legislation, AB962, which among other things would demand….

1. Registration and finger printing of handgun Ammo Purchasers
2. Mandatory storage / Display requirements for Ammo Dealers
3. Ban on the Sale of Handgun Ammo through the Internet or mail Order

This has nothing to do with hunting… animals. Or target shooting. Or the Second Amendment. By not supporting this legislation you are endorsing neighborhood gangs and the likes of the Zeta drug cartel. How on earth could one justify handgun ammunition through the mail?

That’s stupidity and that’s dangerous. And it’s dangerous that you endorse violence among your listeners, as you did the night a man called to say that in a post-abortion age women who get abortions should be executed. ‘Good call,’ was the essence of your response. And it’s dangerous — not the way you encourage opposition to Barack Obama, I have no argument — but the way you give credibility and intellectual succor to people who would do him harm.

I think the president will be harmed. I think it’s come to that. And if that happens you personally need to be held responsible, among others. And KSFO, which endoreses your behavior. You are the local Fr. Coughlin, and a man who makes a good living by trashing others for no good reason, by encouraging ignorance and hatred, who has no ideas of his own, who builds nothing, who has only false humility, and is becoming part of the undoing of this country. It’s nothing to do with Left or Right, it has to do with the need for simple human decency. Ironically, you are now the enemy of a free society. You are the one saying there’s a fire in the theater when you know perfectly well there is no fire…. The fire is your ignorance.

At the least my son now understands it. He gets it. Knowledge and moral will are everything. You are the best argument for an elite education I’ve heard.

2 comments:

Anjuli said...

Good letter- I do hope you sent it.

Anil P said...

On the airwaves one would expect o be far removed from the reality of the street, but that does not by any means condone one's inability to understand the import of what one espouses on the airwaves, and the damage it could cause to the society in the long run.

Society cannot afford apologists to violence whatever their station in life!