Back in the 80's, there was a local station that ran Wally George's TV show, Hot Seat.
The show ran at night, and the phrase, "Know your enemy" came to mind every time I watched it. (Note: all links in this diary are videos)
You can spend quite a bit of time on YouTube watching old episodes and popular scenes from the show. During those days, the show was considered sort of a joke among my peers. Watching the show, you'd think it was like other types of entertainment at the time, and the audience was just a bunch of frat-boy types who were having a good time and not taking any of it seriously. But it always freaked me out that the predominantly white, male audience members from Orange County were truly fans of Wally George and his lunatic ideals. Now that I think about it, the audience was mostly the College Republican type.
I remember thinking at the time, "This guy is radical, but he has such a rabid following that some day, this type of show might make it big in the US." I believed way back then that there was a remote possibility that people like Wally George would find a voice among conservatives, even though it was laughable back then, I always had a nagging feeling that this guy was getting through to people, which was utterly frightening.
Wally never made it very big...not like Jim and Tammy Faye Baker or Dr. Gene Scott (well, maybe a little like him)...but he set the stage for what we see today on our TV. Hot on his heels was Morton Downey, Jr., but every time I see Rush or O'Reilly, I think of Wally. How these guys got such a high place in our culture still amazes me.
So, back in the 80's, when it was cool in some circles to watch Wally, be conservative, etc. - the stage was being set. Now we have the FOX network...an upscale version of the older shows. I think that the predecessors to FOX acted as market research or maybe even viral marketing...and even then I feared that this would happen. Now that it has, it is interesting to look back on those days when, "Laughable" was truly that. The format is now mainstream.