American Scream

Nick Gillespie from the March 1996 issue

Miss America , by Howard Stern, New York: HarperCollins, 482 pages, $27.50

For reasons that are clear--if not at all convincing--the media absolutely loathe Howard Stern, the New York-based radio and TV personality who just happens to be the country's greatest living satirist. Stern is, of course, hugely popular with wide segments of the American people: His daily drive-time radio show airs in about two dozen markets across the country; his nightly show on cable's E! network is among that channel's most popular features; his first book, Private Parts (1993), was a chart-topper and his latest, Miss America, is the fastest-selling title in its publisher's history. But critics--whose moralistic pronouncements are not burdened by familiarity with Stern's radio, television, or written work--take a quick peek at the man and his shtick and cluck their tongues, convinced that here is just one more example of vulgarity über alles.

"Because he continues to embrace the qualities of a child splashing in sewage, Stern still belongs among those icons of depravity who make their living pandering to humanity's basest instincts," proclaims Al Martinez of the Los Angeles Times, who dubs Stern the "king of excrement." Stern's popularity, Martinez cryptically warns, "ought to tell us something about ourselves in an age that fawns over what it loves and blows up what it hates."

For Alan Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing magazine and the author of The Lost City, Stern is symptomatic of an economic system that dares give people choice. Writing in TheNew York Times, Ehrenhalt invokes Stern as the horror child of laissez faire economics: "The tyranny of the market...has destroyed the loyalty of corporations to their communities; customers to their neighborhood merchants; athletes to their local teams; teams to their cities. The market has given us Howard Stern."

"Stern is no satirist, a latter-day Jonathan Swift making 'a modest proposal,'" contends Linda Chavez in USA Today. "He incites nastiness, crudity, and effrontery...Stern has made millions with this trash....[M]aybe [we] can shame the media executives who give Stern a platform." Echoing the Times's Martinez, Chavez asks, "What does it say about the state of our popular culture that radio shock-jock Howard Stern can replace Colin Powell as the best-selling author in America?"

Short answer: It means things are pretty damn swell.

Contrary to Chavez, Stern is indeed a latter-day Jonathan Swift--and not just because he is nasty, crude, and scatological (go read Gulliver's Travels some time). There is a quasi-political message to be gleaned from Stern's inspired rants and ramblings, one that is particularly relevant to a media-saturated, market-based society. In the tradition of folks such as Mark Twain and Lenny Bruce, Stern's search-and-destroy hijinks puncture the pretensions of all manner of fakes and phonies. He relentlessly and systematically debunks the fictions we tell about ourselves. He is particularly brilliant at deconstructing the pat, clichéd narratives that actors, politicians, and other public figures spin to their own advantage. In an age of overweening celebrity, that alone should make him a national treasure.

No wonder, then, that the media dislike him. They crave good "stories"--tight little tales that assume predictable, easily recognized shapes and reinforce already-held notions. But in this sense, Stern is resolutely anti-story, revelling in the mismatch between perception and reality, between what we say and what we do. He delights in pointing out just how large that gap often is. (That's also one of the reasons why he is such a great interviewer of celebrities--he gets them to step out of their well-rehearsed raps.) Stern's popularity is an indication that many people maintain a healthy skepticism toward the machinations of hucksters of all stripes.

And it's worth pointing out that despite his open obsession with strippers, lesbians, and sexual fantasies, such musings are a minor part of his act. Stern is, in fact, a moralist whose teachings could hardly be more traditional. Indeed, what drives him insane is the degree to which some people get let off the moral hook. The secret of life, he wrote in Private Parts, is simple: "You wake up in the morning. You eat a little breakfast, may-be read the newspaper. If you're lucky enough, you're married. You yell at your wife, you make up with your wife. If your testicles feel all right, you bang your wife. You watch a video you rented or maybe you go out to the movies....That's life. If you have kids, you live with the kids. You don't move out on your wife....That's the secret of life."

As his superb Miss America makes abundantly clear, Stern goes about his business with a child's sense of discovery, outrage, and insistence. Consider his comments on the Kennedy family: "The Kennedy men bother me enough," writes Stern, "but the idolization of the Kennedy women makes me berserk. People always get pissed off when I blast the Kennedy women, but they should thank me for the hypocrisies that I point out.

"Let's start with Rose Kennedy: What kind of role model is that? Here's a woman who buried her head in the sand and sat idly by while her husband fucked every Hollywood bimbo on two feet. The whoremeister General Joe Kennedy would even bring home Hollywood starlets to sit at the dining-room table with the whole family while Rose Kennedy kept her stupid mouth shut....[T]his woman should be ashamed of herself. No wonder her sons grew up and couldn't keep it in their pants. Just remember: The fruit doesn't fall far from the scumbag."

In "An Open Letter to All the Third Generation Kennedys (Except for my friend, Arnold Schwarzenegger)," Stern adds, "You don't know what it's like to grow up in the real world, to actually have to work for a living....My grandfather wasn't a criminal who passed down his money to a series of leeches who are so nonproductive that they've just about pissed away the family fortune....My uncle never drowned a poor young woman and got away with it. My aunt never married an old Greek just so she could raid his coffers. My uncles never gang banged Marilyn Monroe." This is powerful, outrageous, irreverent stuff--all the more so because it is essentially (if not quite literally) true.

While Stern might have the energy level of a child, however, it's wrong to think that he is an unsophisticated observer. The chapter of Miss America detailing Stern's clandestine meeting with Michael Jackson demonstrates that the "shock jock" possesses a pretty sharp mind. In 1994, after Jackson had settled a child-molestation charge out of court and married Lisa Marie Presley, his agent contacted Stern. In a meeting at Dolly Parton's Manhattan apartment, Jackson's agent spun out a scenario in which Stern, who had mercilessly lampooned Jackson for years, would champion the singer and lead a "spontaneous" demonstration in the "streets" supporting Jackson.

As the agent unveiled the absurd plan, Stern kept sneaking peeks at Jackson, who sat silently in the room, his face slathered with thick white makeup, his nose covered in dirty, unraveling surgical tape. Stern paints a portrait of a literally dissolving image: "It is getting hot and every few minutes Michael is wiping his face
...and now there are big black smudge marks running all over it....[His agent] keeps talking like Michael is normal....I want to stand up and call 911: Come quick, we've got a melting Michael Jackson on Dolly Parton's chair. Over!"

Stern, of course, turned down the of-fer to be part of Jackson's public relations rehab team. And his critique of Diane Sawyer, who later aired a puff piece interview with Jackson and Lisa Marie, is nothing short of devastating. Sawyer, he says, is "just Sally Jesse Raphael with better skin and hair." Her interview was "candy-cane journalism."