Whew. All this talk about Democrats and drugs has me eager for a break.
Breaks are a good thing. I truly don’t think I would have made it to thirty-six-plus years in talk radio if I didn’t allow myself, every so often, to take a serious show and turn it into a good time. Sure, everything these power-hungry wombats inside the Beltway are trying to do to us and to our country deserves constant attention. But if we don’t have fun once in a while, we’re just going to go nuts.
So here it comes.
Remember when I promised I’d never intentionally lie to you?
You didn’t really believe that, did you?
The truth is, from time to time, I do lie on the air—usually for a good reason. Like, say, to keep people listening to the show.
Hey, at least I’m honest about the fact that I lie. But I usually do it just for the entertainment value.
A couple of times a week, I tell my listeners, in almost these exact words, “Do not believe everything you hear on this radio program. In fact, do not believe anything you hear on this radio program, either from the callers or me, unless it is consistent with what you already know to be true, or you have taken the time to research that issue for yourself. Because I’ll flat-out lie to you to make the show interesting.”
You see, people often make the mistake of assuming that just because I’m a talk-show host, I have a firm position on every issue of public or political importance—and that’s just not the case. Issues come up all the time that I haven’t yet investigated enough to form a strong opinion one way or the other.
When that happens, I start dancing on both sides of the issue—pushing the callers and listening to the responses.
First of all, I know that my listeners may well help shape my opinion, or lead me to a conclusion I might not have come up with on my own.
Second, and more important, it enhances my show’s entertainment value.
Does that mean I play a little devil’s advocate just to make people mad enough to pick up the phone and call? You bet!1
After all, conflict is at the heart of what I do. The entertainment value in hearing a bunch of listeners agree with a talk show host is minimal. Listeners want confrontation. So, yes, sometimes, I push the envelope: adjust the knobs, tweak the little whisker on the crystal—whatever it takes to create a sense of confrontation.
In other words, I lie to get a rise out of the audience. And sure, it’s fun.
So much fun, in fact, that sometimes I lie about matters of no importance whatsoever, just to see what happens.
Once, on the air, I encouraged female listeners to turn their television sets upside down. “Ladies, try this,” I said. “I’ve just discovered that any TV set with a screen under nineteen inches, by federal law, has a little switch inside, and if you turn it upside down, in a couple of minutes, the picture will flip over and right itself.”
Did anyone actually do it? Oh, yeah.
Before long, bewildered husbands were calling the show. “I got home and my wife was sitting there watching the TV upside down, and she said you told her that the picture would right itself. What are you thinking?”
I’m thinking those women would make great Democrat campaign volunteers.
I’ve also had a great deal of fun toying with listeners about an incident I witnessed on a Delta Airlines flight from Denver, Colorado, to Atlanta.
We were experiencing extremely strong tailwinds on that trip, somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 knots. The Delta 757 was flying so close to the speed of sound that the extra 100 knots brought the speed up to something like 99.9 percent of the speed of sound.
Well, wouldn’t you know it? There was a bratty little kid on that flight; back around row 25. After kicking the seat in front of him for fifty minutes, the little demon thought it would be fun to do some wind sprints up and down the aisle. As luck would have it, the aircraft was getting perilously close to the speed of sound, thanks to the tailwind, when the kid initiated a sprint into first class.
Passenger interviews suggest that the brat broke the sound barrier somewhere around row 11 in coach. The ensuing sonic boom broke all the wineglasses in first class and burned most of the hair off the brat’s head.
I haven’t followed the lawsuit, so I can’t tell you how it turned out.
Trust me. You can get people to believe anything. That’s why we’re so dangerous.
You’d expect some people to know better, though. Like, say, newspaper reporters. That’s why it’s so hard to believe that, back in 1989, the venerable2 Los Angeles Times published an article in its Sunday magazine under the headline “Even for a Nation of Sports Nuts, Competition is Getting Nuttier and Nuttier.” The first-person piece by a semifamous humorist named Margo Kaufman was apparently based on one of her conversations with a colleague:
“Trash sports,” exclaims John Cherwa, associate sports editor at The Times. “That’s our official name for them. Because they’re not traditional and, in many cases, they’re not real. Supposedly, in Atlanta they have a thing called cat chasing.”
What?
“They throw a cat out of an airplane and then different parachutists try to chase and catch the cat. I don’t know if it’s true, but I’ve heard it.”
For the life of me, I can’t figure out why anyone in his right mind would do such a thing. Of course, I also can’t fathom what draws a person to competitive cheerleading, curling or the granddaddy of dubious sports—synchronized swimming. Some sports are glamorous. Some sports are exciting. Some sports are good for your heart. Some sports are good for making money. But some sports are good for nothing.3
Woodward and Bernstein would have been so proud of Margo.4 I can say with confidence that there’s no such thing as cat chasing. Never was. How do I know? I made the whole thing up.
Well, technically, that’s a lie, too. I didn’t come up with the original idea. Some skydivers in Arizona made the whole thing up—didn’t do it, you understand, just made up the idea. Those wiseasses printed a very short item about cat chasing in their newsletter, and somehow their little joke made its way to my desk. It was just a single paragraph, as I recall.
Of course, I’d never heard of cat chasing—and neither had anyone else, for that matter, although the concept is fairly simple in concept (if rather difficult in execution). As Margo explained to her L.A. readers, all you need to do is take a cat up in a plane, toss it out, wait a few seconds, and then signal half a dozen skydivers to jump out and give chase. The one who lands with the cat is declared the winner.
It was a spoof, obviously. At least I think it was. Honestly, I don’t know. Nor do I really care, since I’m not exactly what you would call a cat person. They really do suck the breath out of sleeping babies, you know. And they defecate in houseplants.
No matter. All I knew was that this was a chance to have a little fun—not fun with cats, which are notoriously arrogant and unfriendly, but fun with stupid people.
So one day on my show I revealed to the audience that I had some inside information about a rather bizarre competition that was going to take place right here in our own back yard. The Georgia Cat Chasing Championships, I declared, would be under way in just a few weeks. The most talented and daring skydivers in the area would be competing for the title of state cat chasing champion; the winner would represent Georgia in the National Cat Chasing Championship, to be held in Phoenix later in the year.
What’s more, we were going to be covering this exciting event live.
“You know, I’ve jumped, ladies and gentlemen,” I told listeners, “and I think this is going to be a lot of fun.”
I promoted this happy fraud relentlessly—not in every single broadcast, mind you, but fairly often. “We here at The Neal Boortz Show have arranged to do a remote broadcast from the airport to bring this amazing event to you as it happens!”
I’d let it go. Then, a couple of days later, I’d mention it again.
Needless to say, a few callers started to get agitated.
“Where’s it gonna be?” one asked.
“Well, I’ve been asked not to say,” I answered, “but it’s an airport somewhere in South Georgia.”
As the date of the 1988 Georgia Cat Chasing Championships approached, I started inviting guests into the studio to discuss the skills involved in cat chasing—actual skydivers, by the way, who were in on the joke.
“Well, do you have to hold onto the cat all the way to the ground?” I asked one.
“Oh, no,” he said, “No, no. You just take that cat and stick it to your chest. Those claws are going to dig in, and that cat will hold on right up until the point you land.”
“What happens if you don’t catch the cat?”
“Well, I mean, that’s very rare, but they do land on their feet.”
“What about skydivers? Ever lost one of them?”
“Just one.”
“What happened?”
“Well, it happened in Australia. Some poor bloke caught the cat and somehow the cat latched on and dug into his parachute pack. When he pulled the rip cord, the cat kept the ’chute from deploying. He was too close to the ground to deploy his reserve. The cat walked away.”
“Sad.”
“Yeah. Bloody cat.”
In the meantime, with help from our production crew, we were building a rather sizeable library of sound effects—everything from airplane noises and the murmur of a large crowd to (please don’t ask why) chain saws and trees falling. Naturally, we also collected every kind of cat sound imaginable—purring, meows expressing every emotion from mystification to distress, hisses, and the inevitable screech.
“We’re probably going to lose three or four cats,” I told my listeners. “I’m told that’s the average. We don’t really know what happens to them. Hopefully they’ve found good homes.”
Contrary to popular belief among mainstream media, not everyone who listens to talk radio is a moron. So, yes, quite a few listeners suspected a hoax and called in to quiz me about it. I assured them that I’d been a little skeptical in the beginning, but that I’d done some investigating on my own, and had satisfied myself that this group of enthusiasts was indeed planning to toss little kitties out of airplanes. I was so convincing that even the skeptics had to wonder.
And the cat lovers? Lord help us. They wanted my head on a platter. They called for the FCC to yank the radio station’s license. And, of course, like poor Margot—who would later catch wind of the Georgia Cat Chasing Championships all the way out in L.A.—they believed every word.
All the while, we were working on our sound effects. The sound of a cat hitting the ground after being thrown out of an airplane is a little tricky, but we finally achieved a very satisfying splat by taking an entire roll of paper towels, soaking them in water, placing a microphone on the floor, then climbing a stepladder and dropping the wet glob right onto the microphone.
Yes, I do realize I’m probably squandering whatever touchy-feely goodwill I may have amassed with my sappy little Schenectady chapter at the beginning of this book. But let’s face it, I don’t get paid to do warm and fuzzy. Besides, cats are an arrogant breed of beast. And God knows we’ve got enough of them.
Cat lovers, it turns out, are another breed entirely. They’re crazy. I think some psychologist could make a name for himself by studying them.
As championship day approached, the vitriol of the cat lovers intensified. I must say, I was enjoying every minute of their anguish. I do confess, though, that I dramatically underestimated just how much controversy would be stirred up by my little fiction.
My eyes started to open, however, on the morning of the contest, when I arrived at the studio to find the sheriff of Fulton County waiting in the parking lot.
“Neal,” he implored, “you gotta help me.”
“What’s the matter?”
“I’ve got every sheriff in South Georgia calling me about this cat thing that you’re doing today. You’ve got to tell me where it is. We’ve got to stop this.”
I said, “Sheriff, I’m sorry. I cannot. I cannot reveal that.”
That wasn’t what he wanted to hear. “I’m going to arrest you,” he said.
“For what? Just what are you going to charge me with?”5
“Come on, Boortz. Some of these guys are up for reelection, and if this cat drop thing happens in their county they’re gonna lose!”
“Sorry, Sheriff,” I said, and walked into the studio. That was one unhappy Southern sheriff.
Inside, the entire cast of characters was assembled. We had a loose script, but most of our “coverage” was ad-libbed.
Cue the sound effects.
For the next hour, as promised, we provided exclusive live coverage of the Georgia Cat Championships. Wind roared, cats screamed, tree branches splintered, and crowds wildly cheered the winners. I even went up with one group of jumpers to try to corral a particularly nasty cat. Our Doppler effect got a great workout as the jumper with the howling cat roared by me as I peacefully floated to the ground.
Apparently, while the show was in progress, outraged listeners were calling the Home Depot and all our other advertisers en masse. (Incidentally, I have it on good authority that many of the people who swamped our switchboard with complaints have since been found dead in houses filled with the stench of urine and feces, houses with a hundred cats or more preening indifferently around the body.)
Only in the last thirty seconds of the broadcast, as I was signing off, did I finally give in. “Folks, I’m in the studios in Atlanta! This has all been a fake and you’ve been had!” By then, Home Depot and several other major advertisers had already called to cancel their advertising contracts with the station for the rest of the year. In retrospect, it’s amazing I survived.
Now don’t get me wrong—most listeners loved it. And I still had one more card to play.
We immediately took the entire show and placed it on cassette tapes. (CDs would have been nice indeed, but nobody had seen a CD yet, so the logistics would have been overwhelming.) We put those cassettes of the Great Georgia Cat Chasing Championship on sale—and raised thousands of dollars for Cleveland Amory’s Fund for Animals.
The detractors raised hell with the station. We raised money for helpless animals. Ain’t life grand?6
A few months later, Margot Kaufman heard about the stunt. But somehow she missed the word “fake,” and consequently a generation of Los Angeles Times readers no doubt believe that we Georgians are all albino, inbred, banjo-playing skydivers who throw cats out of airplanes between slugs of white lightning.
So much for believing everything you read in the newspaper.
At least with me, I tell you I’m going to lie.
Somebody’s gotta say it.