Pale Horse Rider by Mark Jacobson

Author:Mark Jacobson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC
Published: 2018-09-03T16:00:00+00:00

17

There was no fucking way he would be William Cooper if Bill Cooper was a racist, Andrew Kissel told me. He’d done his research, satisfied himself. There was nothing in Behold a Pale Horse, nothing he’d ever heard on The Hour of the Time, that led him to suspect that Cooper was a racist.

It was something to think about, the sum total of Bill Cooper’s many views on the subject of race. Long before the phrase came into common usage, he hated identity politics. Americans should be Americans, he said. Obsessing over ethnicity was a danger to the Republic. If Jews cared more about Israel than the US, they should go live there. “Make your dream come true there. Fight there. If you have to, die there.” If black people insisted on calling themselves African Americans, they might as well “go back to Africa,” Cooper was heard to say. He screamed the same thing about Italian Americans, the Chinese, and the Irish, too. But still, it is piercing to hear the phrase “go back to Africa,” when said by a white man.

On the other hand, it is unlikely that another patriot shortwave radio host would have created an episode like “Vomit from the Sheeple.” As usual, Cooper was in the midst of lambasting the audience’s lack of commitment to the restoration of republican constitutional government. The patriot audience was nothing but a bunch of “couch-potato, do-nothing, never-contribute-to-anything, what-can-I-do-I’m-just-one-lonely-human-being” complainers, Cooper said. It made him sick, like he was going to barf.

Cooper made a loud chundering sound, a deep, phlegmy “Blulafff!”

Then he taunted, “Come on people, get real,” and put on a 1929 recording of the Louis Armstrong orchestra’s rousing performance of “St. Louis Blues.” When the tune was done, Cooper, as hep as any cat on Fifty-Second Street, said, “All right, Louis!”

Armstrong didn’t wait around for anyone to pay for his trumpet lessons, said Cooper, who had just started playing the instrument again after a long hiatus. “He just got a horn and played it better than anyone else ever had or will.” It was no surprise that Armstrong’s birthday was the Fourth of July, Cooper noted. He was an American, a real one.

For as many times as he’d play Lee Greenwood’s gummy version of “God Bless America,” Cooper’s musical choices often seemed to be an assault upon the resolutely square and know-nothing portions of his listenership. One time he played George Clinton’s 1982 hit, “Atomic Dog,” with its exaggerated heavy-breathing funk and the eternal question of why the singer always felt the need to chase the cat. “Just the dog in me,” Clinton concluded.

“I know most of you people out there don’t like this kind of music,” Cooper addressed the funkless portion of the audience. “But this is good music.”

Probably the most sustained statement Cooper made about race relations in America came in a pre-WWCR broadcast pertaining to the riots following the verdict in the Rodney King case.

“Ah, it’s May 6, 1992,” Cooper began. “It’s my birthday, folks, and

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