All through my life, I would do certain things and I would really feel my ancestors looking at me. I would dismiss it thinking, “Ah, they’re not real. It doesn’t matter what that old person thought.” And I would go on and be the ordinary guy that I was. But as I’ve gotten on in life I’ve come to realize that maybe it’s not so imaginary. After all, they did exist. And maybe we suppress these ideas because we’re not living in a world that respects the wisdom of the ages. Instead, we extol the wisdom of idiots in high school, the wisdom of morons who know nothing; they’re supposed to lead us now. I just love all the Leftists who say “look at the young people.” What the hell do they have to teach us? They learn from the old.
Now, my great grandfather would probably say, “Michael, you can’t fight what’s going on in the world endlessly. The time clock—listen to the metronome in your head, Michael. Is this how you want to spend the rest of your days, talking about the slime of the earth? Do you want to talk about them for the rest of your life? Is this what you were born for? Is this why God made you a man-child in the promised land? Is this how you’re supposed to spend the rest of your days?”
Do you have conversations with yourself? Whether you’re a Texan or an Oklahoman on a range, whether you’re a guy who herds cattle or drives a tank in battle, do you ever think about these things? Or am I the last person on earth who even thinks about this? But my great grandfather would say, “Michael, that’s not what you should be talking about.”
So I said, “What should I be talking about, writing about?”
“What do you write about?”
“Well, my last book was God, Faith, and Reason, Grandfather.”
He said, “Good. What do you know about God that others don’t? You know more about God than the thousand years or five thousand years of people who’ve studied this subject? You know more than them?” he said to me.
And I said, “No, I don’t know more. I only know what I know.”
“Well, why would anyone want to know what you know? You’re not a scholar of the subject.”
“Well, Grandfather, apparently an awful lot of them did because it became a huge bestseller.”
“What’s a bestseller? We never heard of such a thing in my world. We didn’t buy books because they were bestsellers. We didn’t read books because they were bestsellers.”
“What did you read, Grandfather?”
“We only read one book, the Torah. That’s all we read. We read it over and over and over and over again.”
I said, “Okay, fine. I’m not knocking it. But we have gone past that book.”
“Oh, you have? And what has it led to in the world, that you’ve gone past it?”
My answer to him was, “What has just reading that one book taken us to in this world when you consider that hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people have been killed in the name of that one book?”
“I don’t like hearing that.”
“Well, you don’t have to hear it, but it happens to be true. There are people right now killing their own coreligionists in the name of that one book.”
“That’s not a very good thing, Great Grandson,” he said.
My great grandfather looked at me and said, “What is this crazy music you’re playing. I never heard anything like this.”
“Well, I’m living in America now, the year 2019. We play music like this.”
“This is music? You call this music? This is a mishmash of the mind. What music? I never heard anything like this.”
“Look, Grandfather, knock it off. Leave me alone, would you, please? An engine on a plane blew last night.”
“What’s an engine? What’s a plane?”
“It’s a thing that flies in the sky.”
“What, it’s a bird? Like a chicken on a Friday night?”
“No, no, no, it flies in the air, carries people.”
“Have you gone crazy in the new world? What do you mean that it’s something that carries people? I never heard of such a thing in the world I was in.”
“Well, Grandfather, I’m trying to tell you something. The engine blew up on this plane and it sucked a woman almost out of the plane and a guy in a cowboy hat pulled her back in.”
“Cowboy hat? What’s a cowboy hat?”
“And the pilot, they say, has nerves of steel.”
“What’s a nerve of steel?”
“She’s a Navy pilot.”
“What’s a Navy pilot?”
Anyway, the fact is, if you play with this game for a while, it becomes fun to do it in several dimensions at once because it keeps you from going insane, talking about the news.
Forty-Six
The Knockout
HE WAS FLATTENED BEFORE HE WAS BORN. HE DIDN’T HAVE a chance. His cowardly, small father used to tell him a story when he was a little boy about a farmer who lifted up a calf, from the time it was born, over his head. He would look at his son as they walked in the ghetto and tell him about the farmer who lifted up the calf over his head. And as the calf grew, he was able to lift it up when it was a full-grown bull. The little boy didn’t know what the small father was telling him. He thought it was just a story about a farmer. Little did he know that his sadistic father was telling him that the boy was the young calf who he would lift over his head so when the boy became a bull, he would still be a malleable calf.
As years went on, the father continued to pick on him, ridicule him, bully him, everything he could do to make him small, to keep him under control. As the boy became a teenager, he found out he liked music and he picked up a flute that he would secretly practice in the basement of their little house. He grew his hair long. He wore black clothing. He would fly away on the flute’s notes. Then, one day, the father came down in the basement and saw his son doing the unimaginable: playing the flute. Well, he went crazy, screaming at him, calling him every name under the sun. The boy never picked up the flute again.
As boys will, he wanted to please his father. He knew his father was a boxing fan because every Friday night, they’d watch the Friday night fights on TV. So the boy, who was small of frame but strong of spirit, decided he would learn how to box. He secretly got a book on boxing and, for over a year, he would practice boxing moves in his tiny bedroom. It was an interesting art to him, all the different angles of the punches. And he practiced and practiced and practiced, shadowboxing in his little room.
Eventually, his uncle came into his life and was going to help him actually learn how to box. His father’s brother had a black friend who was a light-heavyweight contender training for a big fight at Yankee Stadium. The fighter’s name was Archie. One day, the boy’s uncle arranged for the thin, small kid to meet Archie in his father’s store. The boy was awed by him. He was tall and strong, but he was kind and gentle. He was friendly, not condescending. He said to the skinny boy, “Okay, you can come up to my gym in Harlem,” which was the most famous black boxing gym in his time, and still is—the Salem Crescent Athletic Club (SCAC). Archie wore a jacket that said SCAC. And the kid knew that one day he’d wear that jacket—at least, he thought so. So the big black man said to the small white boy, “You’ll come up by train. It will be a long train ride, but I’ll teach you how to fight. You’ll need to get some gym clothes. You’ll need to get a cup.” The boy turned red with embarrassment. Just the word “cup” embarrassed him, and the thought of him mentioning a jockstrap—that’s the kind of shyness the boy had at the time. And so the boy and his uncle made preparations for him to take his first boxing lesson up in Harlem. Well, when the mean father heard about it, he screamed at him in a tirade. “Are you crazy? You’re gonna get your head busted open.” That was the end of his boxing career.
So he couldn’t play the flute and he couldn’t box. What was left for him to do?
Forty-Seven
God’s Warriors
PRESENTED DECEMBER 1, 2018, AT THE SPECIAL FORCES CHRISTMAS PARTY, BENICIA YACHT CLUB
NOT WEARING THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE, I’M HU
MBLED speaking tonight before you, who are God’s warriors. How can I, a man who’s never felt the blade or the bullet begin to understand the world of those like you who have?
What I do understand and think I might share with you is my love for America. As an immigrant’s son, the grandson of Sam who fled the Reds of Russia, I am truly a man-child in the promised land, but we are all now facing a new wave of committed Marxist revolutionaries who detest the American way and vow to tear down all that is good and fair and replace it with evil and unfairness.
Pardon me for being a little political tonight, but I have no way around it. It’s all I can do. It’s all I can think about. Taking from those who created and built up to redistribute to those who gave nothing but hatred and destruction, and behind these hardened, aging, communist revolutionaries is a new generation. A new generation of ignorance and platitudes. Nice children walking into a den of hyenas.
How do we go forward when our warnings have been made to sound quaint and even antique? Our words and wisdom mocked, ridiculed, and crucified daily by the legions of the deceit peddlers where fake news and fake history is sold by fake heroes leading us to becoming a fake nation. The long history of western civilization, tied as it is to Christianity, has now been assaulted so that all of its greatness is now tainted with doubt and second-guessing. Where even great religions’ art, envision the Sistine Chapel ceiling by Michelangelo, is mocked by those who could not hold a palette to even a journeyman painter at that time.
Where those who write with a vocabulary of 50,000 words of English are ridiculed. Where those who do higher mathematics are insulted in our schools by those who cannot add two columns of three figures. How do good warriors stand and take this abuse? I’ll quote from Rudyard Kipling’s, “If.” “If you can keep your head when all about you / Are losing theirs and blaming it on you, / If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, / But make allowance for their doubting too; . . . /Or being hated, don’t give way to hating, / And yet don’t look too good, nor talk too wise. . . . / If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, / Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,” that’s how you do it.
I came here tonight to tell you that you are not alone. You are supported by most Americans. Although the fake radical news and the biased social media may not support you, I will tell you the silent majority does and there are more of us than there are of them. If it was not for you heroes and your fallen brothers, we would not be here today. The spiteful communist radicals who put us all down would not have the platform they stand on to spew their hatred. They would be living in the nightmares that they promote, never knowing how great their lives are in the now and how great this country is because of you.
Keep this message alive. Share it with all the soldiers that you know who may not have heard in a long time how thankful America is for the sacrifices they have made. I thank you, the Savage Nation thanks you, America thanks you. God bless America, borders, language, culture.
Acknowledgments
For various family photographs, I would like to thank Sheila Weiner and Sam Furgang.
Notes
Chapter 29 “Monkeys Rampage in Indian Capital,” AFP, November 12, 2007.
Chapter 39 “U.S. Couples Seek Separate Bedrooms,” BBC News, March 12, 2007. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6441131.stm.
Chapter 40 Martinfield, Sean. “Nan Kempner—American Chic.” The San Francisco Sentinel, June 28, 2007.
Chapter 43 Buddha. Teaching of Buddha. Bukkyo Dendo Kyokai (BDK).
Photo Section
The man who started it all. My grandfather Sam in front of his own tailor shop at 548 East 13th Street, New York City.
My father, Neversink River. The famous Abraham and Isaac scene.
I really did wear dead man’s pants! (Pictured here with my realist Russian aunt Bea.)
My silent brother, Jerome (in the snake pit they sent him to).
Me at fifteen trying to look tough during my weight-lifting phase.
High school yearbook.
Jamaica High School, championship rifle team (before kids went crazy on medications).
Plant-collecting years. Viti Levu, Fiji. My son, Russ, with the women who taught me their herbal secrets (1972).
Portrait of the artist as a young father (1972). J. Weiner
Viti Levu, Fiji.
My face appeared in every subway station in New York City (1967).
Psych experiments. Reed College (1966).
My years as an Alzheimer’s researcher (with my private patron, Eric Estorick).
Kew Gardens, London. One of the hundreds of my ethnobotanical specimens in the permanent collection. J. Weiner
Arcadia. Honolulu to Vancouver (1971).
Father and daughter.
Father and son at the gun range (1980s).
Mama Savage in her little Queens kitchen where she cooked for an army (1970s).
In one of my home studios (2002). Leon Borensztein
The Michael Savage family with President and Mrs. Trump at the White House (2018).
Savage family photo
About the Author
MICHAEL SAVAGE was inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame in 2016. The Savage Nation is one of the top radio programs and podcasts in America, broadcast on over 200 stations to millions of listeners. A prolific New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Savage has been profiled in Playboy and The New Yorker, and he has been awarded the Freedom of Speech Award from Talkers magazine. He received his PhD in epidemiology and nutrition sciences from the University of California at Berkeley.
Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.
Also by Michael Savage
NONFICTION
Trickle Down Tyranny
Trickle Up Poverty
Banned in Britain
Psychological Nudity
The Political Zoo
Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder
The Enemy Within
The Savage Nation
FICTION
Abuse of Power
Copyright
Chapters 18–45 previously appeared in the self-published volume Psychological Nudity (2008).
Chapters 45–47 © 2019 by Michael Savage.
Thanks to Thomas Nelson Publishers for permission to reprint the following stories:
From The Enemy Within by Michael Savage (Nelson Current, 2003): “Dead Man’s Pants,” pp. 7–8 and “Fat Pat & Tippy the Dog.”
From Liberalism Is a Mental Disorder by Michael Savage (Nelson Current, 2005): “Sam the Butcher.”
Disclaimer: All articles retain the original copyrights of their original owners.
A SAVAGE LIFE. Copyright © 2012 by Utopia Productions, Inc. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Originally published as Train Tracks.
A hardcover edition of this book was published in 2012 by William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
FIRST WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2013.
SECOND WILLIAM MORROW PAPERBACK EDITION PUBLISHED 2019.
Cover photography © Vincent Remini
Photograph on title page © GikaPhoto By waraphot / Shutterstock, Inc.
Digital Edition JUNE 2019 ISBN: 978-0-06-293640-0
Version 04162019
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-293639-4
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* See Photo Section.
* The nitrates and nitrites are also carcinogenic and associated with Alzheimer’s disease.
* This story is not about a classic financial wipe-out of assets such as occurred in the crash of 1929. It is typical of the losses common to average American speculators between 1969 and the early 1970s. Brought about by an expensive war with no returns, the value of the U.S. currency continued to fall, leading average people into markets for which they were ill-prepared. In this sense, this story is about our times.
A Savage Life Page 17
