New Yorker doesn’t savage Savage and Michael is a man in love

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Michael Savage is deeply in love with Kelefeh Sanneh’s profile of him in the current New Yorker.

It’s not hard to understand why. At no time does the piece call Savage a raving, fascist, racist, hatemongering, shockjock nutcake.

That’s the way Savage expects the liberal media to treat him when it isn’t relentlessly carrying out its sinister conspiracy to pretend that he doesn’t exist.

Just when you figure you’ve got those far-left media hacks pegged, they go all fair on you. Well, they always have been clever bastards, haven’t they?

At the beginning of Tuesday’s Savage Nation, the host sounded muted, indeed almost stunned, as though Sanneh had made the earth move but Savage couldn’t quite trust the tender feelings welling up inside him.

“So The New Yorker wrote a profile of me and I’m actually–It’s changing something inside of me,” he trembled. “I don’t know exactly how yet. I feel something changing in me in some ways and I have to take time to absorb what this actually means. Neverthlesss it’s a milestone in my life and my career, let’s put it to you that way. It’s a big deal for me because I grew up reading The New Yorker and [blahblahblah].”

Is that the sound of budding amour or what?

Anyone familiar with the Savage sensibility knows that he’ll be talking about his feelings about this profile for a very long time.

For years, I’ve listened to Savage on and off, alternately fascinated by his eccentric ramblings, appalled by his nastiness, bemused by his paranoia, self-pity, egomania and pessimism, entertained by his wacky philosophizing on food, pop culture, health issues, his youth, pretty much everything. Savage can also be funny, mainly when he’s not trying to be. When he is trying, though he considers himself a great political satirist, he isn’t.

What’s also amusing is that Savage is so far to the right he hates not only liberals but most conservatives, too. When he’s savaging Bush or McCain or Hannity or Glenn Beck, you can actually find yourself cheering him on. Until you remember he hates you more.

It’s the quirky monologist side of Savage, hitherto unexplored in the MSM, that Sanneh captures well. The sheer weirdness of the man. Unlike, say Beck or Hannity, Savage is multi-faceted. When you read about Savage, on lefty blogs or newspaper stories, all you ever get are snippets of him that out of context sound horribly violent or hateful.

Unfortunately, when you put them back in context, they don’t always sound much better.

Anyway, my favorite thing in the story is when Sanneh just quotes Savage, off on one of his patented free-associated rambles, starting on the subject of frog’s legs and somehow ending with his dog, Teddy:

My dog is only eleven pounds. What’s shocking to me is that my dog’s, like, hindquarter—I looked at it the other day, when he got wet…I looked at his leg. It looked like a large chicken leg. I got frightened. So I said, How could you ever eat a chicken and savor it, and the dog’s—I can’t do it.

And I say, then your mind starts running, if you have a kaleidoscopic mind like I do. Like, what if you were starving. Would you eat Teddy?

Don’t even think about it!

I mean, you think about those—would you roast him, how would you eat—

Stop it!

Your mind starts working on you: No, you’re starving. It’s you and Teddy. One of you is gonna die anyway. Would you roast him, would you cook him, would you eat him raw?

Aw, stop it, man!

But your mind starts going there. Am I the only one who thinks this way?

Probably not but you’re a very strange man, nonetheless.