"If he keeps being sloppy about security (sorry folks, it is what it is), he is going to end up getting assassinated, and I don’t make that prediction lightly, because it has happened before (a radio personality whose last name was Berg, in Colorado, gunned down by a Nazi)."
This comment was posted in a diary last night by G2geek. The "he" referred to above is Newsweek reporter Kurt Eichenwald, victim of a recent troll attack which triggered an epileptic seizure by Eichenwald. I read the comment and almost dropped my laptop on the floor because Alan Berg was a friend and co-worker of mine. He was gunned down by Nazis; and therein lies a tale.
It was 1979. I fell into an entry level job as "Assistant Music Research Director" at Denver radio station KHOW when I went down there to search their music library for a soundtrack for one of my student films. I was finishing up a B.A. in journalism/media at the University of Colorado. The man who currently held the position at the station was leaving and he liked me and I ended up getting a foot in the door. In my new dignity as "Assistant Music Research Director" I was given the same salary as an entry level receptionist in corporate America; plus free concert tickets, t-shirts, and the ability to sign the bar bill at public relations functions; and business cards. I thought that I had died and gone to heaven.
I remained there for nine months. My campaign to get on the air at KHOW was not going well. The News Director was an overt woman hater, a short baby-faced man with an incongruous deep baritone voice. He wanted to be in television news but the incongruity between his appearance and his voice was a local legend. A comical one. So he stayed behind the microphone in radio, chain-smoked, and glared at the world through a glass darkly. He had particular enmity for me, with my (then) Barbra Streisand Jewish Afro hair style and my wide lapel, padded shoulder, blue jean pants suits. I was anaethema on wheels to this particular chauvinist pig. "Who the f*ck does she think she is? Joan F*cking Crawford?" he was heard to declaim. Well, yeah.
I wasn't going to let this guy stop me because I knew that I was more intelligent than any of the women that had gotten hired at the station in that era of affirmative action. So I was going to get on the air somewhere. While reading the Highlights section of the Rocky Mountain News one Sunday I saw a feature article on the rising star of the Denver radio market, one Alan Berg of talk radio station KWBZ. Bingo. I would go to that station, produce that man's show, and read the news. So I did that; and the payoff was greater than I ever could have hoped for. Alan Berg was a total original. I've never met anyone like him, nor do I expect to. We became fast friends.
Alan Berg was unique. He was not only unique in the Denver market but subsequently nationally when he appeared with three other radio talk show hosts across the nation on a segment of CBS "60 Minutes," hosted by Morley Safer when "60 Minutes" was new and still being hosted by the original reporters, Safer, Mike Wallace, Dan Rather and Ed Bradley. Even Morley Safer, who was not easily impressed, said that of the four talk show personalities in his segment that night that Alan was the brightest.
Alan was indeed the brightest. Radio was a second career or even third career for him. He started out as a first-tier criminal defense attorney in Chicago. He defended Lenny Bruce successfully against obscenity charges. He was flamboyant to say the least; six foot, four, skinny as a post, with a shock of red hair, and long bangs, combed forward to cover a scar that he had from brain surgery. His manner matched his appearance in flamboyancy and the State Bar of Illinois asked to have a chat with him after he drove his Porsche into Lake Michigan on his way to court one morning after a three day bender.
Alan gave up both booze and the practice of law and decided to move to Denver and become a haberdasher, because he was a very natty dresser and wanted to share his sartorial tastes with others. He also fell into radio despite having a nasal raspy voice that was completely antithetical to not only broadcasting but peoples' speech patterns in general. But none of that mattered because when this man spoke it was with such brilliance and passion that his words transported his listeners. He quickly became a star, attracting glowing feature articles from The Denver Post, Rocky Mountain News, and all the smaller, community papers which existed in the pre-internet world.
What made the man a star was a number of things. Depth and breadth of knowledge was first and foremost. Any topic could be introduced, as is common with talk radio, and he could rise to the occasion. Along with his range of knowledge he had a quick incisive wit. Last but not least was his trademark; a liberal political viewpoint. As a Jew he had first hand experience with anti-Semitism. He hated intolerance of any kind. His message was tolerance, inclusivity, and a progressive liberal agenda. And he didn't suggest these things, he screamed them. He had no patience with a world filled with idiots who could not rise above the primordial ooze, as he deemed it. So, he ranted and raved for two hours every morning. He tore callers to shreds if they were spewing racist or anti-gay doctrine. And he freaked a lot of people out in the late '70's early '80's. Some listeners literally began to walk off the street and into the station. Locking glass security doors were installed, and that wasn't enough.
I remember one rant Alan was in the middle of one morning and it was getting pretty intense, even for him. He had a self proclaimed neo-Nazi on the air with him and he kept savaging the guy, who was a holocaust denier. "You hydro encephaletic pinhead moron. No, I didn't just make that up. That's a quote from another Jew, a writer named Harlan Ellison. He deals with morons like you all the time as well, and he knows how to call you by your true names. Abuse? I'm abusing you? Oh, that's rich, caller, that's really rich. You call me this morning to tell me that six million of my brothers and sisters were not in fact murdered by Adolph Hitler and his thugs, of which you are one, different bat-generation. different bat-channel, but you're all the same kind of scum, and I am abusing you?" Denver, Colorado, circa 1980 had never heard anything like this. It must be borne in mind that the era of the "shock jock," Howard Stern and them had not yet dawned. Alan Berg was the original shock jock but he wasn't doing it to shock -- he was telling the truth as he perceived it and if you found it shocking, which many did — “hey, that’s why radios have dials, turn yours, why don't you, you stupid...."
So this act was a solid lock in the market and Alan went on from the little tea kettle station, KWBZ, to mega watt KOA, 50 thousand watts with a signal that reached into eleven western states. And he took on all the racist, loser, miscreants in those states, as well as the garden variety anti-social types in Colorado. After the "60 Minutes" appearance he was well on his way to becoming a Legend of the West, along with Doc Holliday and Jesse James. The capstone was put on Alan's pyramid of local (and subsequently inter-state) notoriety when in 1983 he was named both The Most Loved Media Personality in Denver and The Most Hated Media Personality in Denver. The night that he accepted both awards at the Denver Coliseum he was greeted by a mixture of wild cheering and heavy booing. The terms "bi-polar" or "diametrically opposed" come close but no cigar. You either loved Alan Berg or you hated his guts and there was no in between. Paradoxically, he lapped up being both the scion and the pariah of the Denver media market.
Alan kept enraging people five mornings a week and the occasional loony bird would come to perch in the KOA parking lot. Alan's car, a gull winged DeLorean, was stashed in a hidden and well guarded place and that place was rotated regularly. He wasn't worried. I remember asking him one morning back when we were both at KWBZ just what he would do if some lunatic actually came out of the shadows and confronted him. His answer was, "I'll depend upon my legal training to get me out of a jam." I just shook my head in disbelief. He was fearless, which on a certain level I admired -- but sometimes a little healthy fear is prudent.
While Alan was picking up his "twin Oscars" as he called them, for Most Loved and Most Hated, the ones who really hated, specifically the American Nazi Party, were busy robbing banks in Washington State to get money to carry out their project, which was the assassination of Alan Berg. All this activity is documented by the Southern Poverty Law Center and voluminous archives still exist at the Denver Post.
One moonlit night in July of 1984 Alan Berg went to 7-11 to buy a bag of dog food for his beloved Airedale, Fred. He pulled into his driveway and stepped out of his car and two shooters hidden in parked cars on the dark street opened fire on Alan in the parking lot of his condominium. Thirty some rounds of bullets riddled his body. When the cops arrived three minutes later, literally the ash on his dropped cigarette was still burning. The Denver L.A.P.D. began the biggest manhunt in the city's history and the two shooters were subsequently apprehended, charged and convicted.
Alan Berg literally became a Jewish martyr. If you go to Israel today you can step into a small patch of garden called The Alan Berg Memorial Forest. A book was written about his life and murder at the hands of the Nazis called "Talked to Death." A movie was made of the same name. Alec Baldwin is the only star that I remember in that movie.
Alan told me one time how he admired the Irish pastime of engraving humorous things on grave stones. He said that on his own grave stone, he wanted to have the words, "Run Bambi Run." I don't know if there is a gravestone that says that in the memorial forest in Israel or not. Maybe some day I'll go there to pay my respects.
Anti-Semitism is vicious and pervasive. If the Nazis even think that you're a Jew, you might as well be. Radio personality Art Bell, whose show was the precursor to the world wide night time show "Coast to Coast" was threatened by the Nazis. Bell, a total cat lover, posted a picture of one of his beloved pooties online, a striped kitten who had fallen asleep on top of a big ball of red yarn. A caller phoned in and told Bell, "I'd like to put an M-80 in that yarn and blow that f*cking cat up and you along with it, Jew-boy." Bell cut the maniac off, needless to say, and said to his listeners, "Well, that isn't the first time this has happened, I'm sorry to say. And I don't have a drop of Jewish blood. And I'm a Lutheran." Bell, being a man of intelligence and substance was deemed to be Jewish by default by the hate mongers who happened to tune in. [Art Bell, incidentally, was a successful political analyist. When he had his famous UFO sighting in the Nevada desert he changed the format of his show to reflect that interest and many of the paranormal topics which Bell broadcast on were written into scripts for "The X-Files" which ran concurrently with Bell's show in the '90's.]
Kurt Eichenwald is also not Jewish, and is an Episcopalian, but that is of no importance to the post-reality, non-reality haters.
Danie06 posted this comment last night about the Eichenwald incident:
“I actually saw it happen (well not the actual attack but the tweets) and I was on jew-goldstein's twitterpage (to report him).
They (the trumpsters) were having a ball.
One extra fact: after Eichenwald's wife told us on twitter that her husband had a seizure, they (the deplorables) went on Eichenwalds wikipedia page and changed it, to include that he had died due to a seizure.
I mean..I kid you not. They were laughing about it and they thought it was fantastic.
They typed stuff like: omfg that would be so cool, what if he really died.hahahaha.
Ive never felt so strongly what an incredible horror trump's victory really is as last night.”
This stunned me to the extent that I was temporarily rendered speechless. After a few minutes I gathered my wits and wrote this to Christian Dem In NC:
“You know what just occurred to me? This is as basic as it gets: this is a conflict between haters and lovers. Trump personifies hate to his bottom feeders. Lovers love America. Eichenwald is clearly a lover and that’s why they hate him and want to destroy him. They want to destroy everything good and have nothing left but themselves and their darkness.
Maybe not all the Trump supporters fit in this category, but the few I’ve had the misfortune to talk to do. They hate Obama, gays, Jews — name something.
When I was a child I had a recurring dream of being lost at twilight and knowing that I had to find my way home before it got really dark or I was going to be in trouble. I remember the fear and desperation in that dream. 2016 is the nightmare come true and I don’t know which direction to run now, either.”
The haters want to extinguish the light of our best and our brightest. We cannot allow that. This close call with Eichenwald Thursday night was a wake up call. The comments that were made by this community Friday night in the two companion diaries about Eichenwald collectively form a beacon of lucidity in this dark vale that we've been gathered in since November 9th. That light must continue to burn, because it is the light of reason and it is nothing less than the flame of our culture that we are nurturing. We must keep the warmth and the light going; no matter what the forces of darkness do. Our fire must blaze on. We have no choice.
