The King of All He Perceives

When Howard Stern’s voice was first heard on radio in L.A. four years ago, he called himself the king of all media and I called him the king of excrement. Nothing has changed much.

His drawing power as both a radio personality and an author, plus deals in the works for a television talk show and movies, edges him awfully close to what he claims to be.

But 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.

That is not to say I am unaware of his strange popularity. Anyone who can lure 20,000 people to a book-signing has got to be acknowledged as something of a social phenomenon.

Stern has emerged from shock-jockery to become a cultural statement of where we are in the waning years of the 20th Century, God help us all.

He’s disgusting, insulting, scatological and juvenile, but there are those who cling to him like drool to a baby and insist that what he’s peddling is satire.

These are the same people, usually male, who wear their Dodger hats backward, appear shirtless at football games and manifest their appreciation at rock concerts by barking like dogs.

To say they they’re the ones who ought to define satire is like saying we should turn to Mother Teresa to explain Hootie and the Blowfish.

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But wait. This is not an age of either enlightenment or subtlety. This is an age of Kato Kaelin and Joey Buttafuoco and Roseanne Barr and Newt Gingrich. It’s an age of “Dumb and Dumber” and “Married . . . With Children,” of body-bowling and bungee-jumping.

Dagwood and Blondie are in the White House and Ace Ventura represents the loyal opposition.

Stern’s mindless, testicular humor somehow fits right in with all that and so it is not surprising that his fans lined up for a day and a half, caused three city blocks to be shut down, and drooled their appreciation as he signed copies of his book at Borders in Westwood.

If you sense in me a strain of jealousy, well, all right, I admit it, but it isn’t mine alone and it isn’t just jealousy, it’s also disbelief. Many of my friends are writers and have composed books so compelling that they will be read far into the next century.

Their prose is flawless, their stories engaging and their themes of cosmic significance. But I’ve been to their book-signings, and if they can draw 100 people interested in the kind of quality they offer, they’re delighted.

On the other hand, an assistant manager at Borders tells me that while the store carries 150,000 titles and has seen dozens of authors sign them, nothing has ever compared to the Howard Stern signing and it is likely, he added, that probably nothing ever will.

Howard Stern, as someone remarked, is bigger than either Shakespeare or the Spanish flu.

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How has this happened? How has a disc jockey of only modest talent and intelligence managed to imprint himself so firmly on the American ethos? Are we so bereft of heroes that any cultural freak who comes along can grab our love and attention?

I know that some are already saying he is a creation of the media, that we trail along behind him like dogs at a slaughterhouse, howling for whatever bloody tidbit he tosses our way.

I grant you that we do seem intrigued by Stern and in fact have mentioned him in this newspaper 642 times in the past 10 years. We’ve only mentioned Vincent Van Gogh 475 times, but then Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime and Stern, at age 41, has already sold tens of thousands of his books.

Stern invented himself and continues to reinvent himself, rushing to the opposite end of the spectrum in an era of rampant political correctitude that is often as dumb (and dumber) than what the king of excrement offers.

In that sense, I suppose, he is not only necessary but important in helping to equalize the excessive nature of our sincere but evangelistic efforts to, well, make everything nice in America at the cost of free expression.

While Stern’s may be a voice from the sewer, it has an audience of amazing size and fidelity which, if nothing else, ought to tell us something about ourselves in an age that fawns over what it loves and blows up what it hates.