I Still Don’t Get It

I got a telephone message on my answering machine the other day from a guy who called me names not repeatable here because I said Howard Stern was the king of excrement.

He further articulated his displeasure by saying I sucked, a form of expression often utilized by the intellectually deprived to indicate their total and absolute disdain of an adversary.

Then he closed his conversation by saying that, due to my status as wimp, I lacked the courage to call Stern the king of excrement in public.

I’m not sure what he considered a newspaper column to be, but it obviously didn’t fit his limited concept of a public medium.

I mention his call only to isolate at least one segment of Stern’s following, the hulking party guys who populate singles bars and paint their faces at football games to express support of a favorite team.

The caller was distressed in the first place because I didn’t share his passion for Howard’s brand of outhouse humor, a point I stressed last Tuesday in a slightly more elevated syntax than he was able to manage.

I also heard from many other Stern fans after that column, including a mother whose husband and young son stood in line all day to have Howard sign their copies of his book.

She was quite proud that they did things together, the way a father and son should, and I can understand her elation. No doubt they also sit side by side at pornographic movie houses and share jokes based on flatulence and sexual perversion, both of which are among Howard’s favorites.

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But the most baffling group of Stern’s disciples were those who thought it somehow really hip to, you know, dig Stern’s less-than-subtle efforts to amuse. They dismissed me by saying my problem was that I just didn’t get it.

Well, gosh.

I’ve really tried over the years to be a part of what’s going on-- to get it-- but sometimes, I guess, I’m too thick to let the subtleties slip in.

For instance, looking back, I didn’t get the mind-expanding qualities of acid-tripping or humming along with the harmonic convergence or sharing a mescaline hit with God.

The practices were all considered quite intellectual at one time, although many of the practitioners, thinking they could fly, ended up stepping out of seven-story windows with predictable results, splat .

I also missed the whole point of karma clearing, colon hydrotherapy, nude Rolfing, psycho structural balancing and the Neo-Reichian application of aqua energetics.

My inability to understand either the meaning or popularity of a given person or technique was never clearer than at a “communications session” I attended once in the 1960ish era of media-thinker Marshall McLuhan.

A bunch of us free-thinkers drank white wine, ate Alice B. Toklas cookies and listened to tapes of, well, sounds put together by McLuhan. They were blends of everything from mating sperm whales and passing trucks to screaming children, barking dogs and clucking chickens.

The idea was to put us in touch with the universe, and there were those dreamy-eyed thinkers among us who obviously achieved that level. I was not one of them.

“I don’t get it,” I said, and they threw me out.

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So here I am all these years later still not getting it. I even bought Stern’s book, “Miss America,” to see if I could better understand the nature of his humor.

I read the first chapter, “Cybersurfing for Vagina,” and then skipped around to other equally twisted areas of his wild libidinal imagination, seeking the “honesty” his fans say he represents.

The book is like a journey through the mind of a 14-year-old sexual psychopath still undergoing primary classes in toilet training. He’s never quite made it out of the bathroom.

A third person to leave a message on my answering machine was someone who said she was 15 and absolutely adored Howard Stern. My problem, she said, was that I WAS TOO DAMNED OLD to appreciate genius. She ended her tirade by saying “YOU STINK!” and calling me a name which, though it appeared hundreds of times in Stern’s book, I am not allowed to use here.

I can understand those segments of Howard’s army that include young girls dying to love something and guys like Budweiser Bud who are willing to follow anyone who swears and spits.

But to hear people of reasonable intelligence tell me that Howard Stern represents what’s happenin’, man, is beyond my ability to accept. I just don’t get it.