HOUSTON DJ I ONCE LOVED TURNS EVIL

From the Fort Worth Star-Telegram courtesy of AlterNet:

Radio ad asks Houstonians to arm themselves against evacuees

A radio commercial for a local gun shop advises Houstonians to arm themselves against "Katricians," adding to the growing tension between Houstonians and the Katrina evacuees who have been blamed for a rising crime rate.

Gun shop owner and radio talk-show host Jim Pruett said Thursday he started running the ad a few weeks ago after hearing a local television interview with a Katrina evacuee living in Houston who implied he would have to turn to crime if his government assistance ran out.

And

Residents in upper middle-class west Houston have blamed evacuees for violent crime rates that have increased almost 14 percent in one district and homicides that have nearly doubled in another.

Earlier this month, the FBI reported that violent crime in Houston jumped 2.4 percent last year, slightly above the national figure of 2.3 percent.

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When I was a kid in the late 70s Jim Pruett, along with partner Mark Stevens, did the morning show on KILT 610 AM under the aliases "Hudson and Harrigan." Actually, I understand that KILT FM continues to have a couple of morning guys under the same nom-de-radio. Anyway, Stevens and Pruett were, to me, extraordinarily funny. Their humor was goofy and juvenile, yes, but it was good stuff, and, along with Monty Python and Saturday Night Live, a major part of my early education in comedy.

Then one day in 1980 or '81, riding the Urban Cowboy bandwagon, KILT went country, and I stopped paying attention--if I remember correctly, I think my two morning men left the station along with the pop songs they spun between sketches and jokes. Years later, in the early 90s, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that they had been hired under their real names to do the morning show on Houston's late and lamented album oriented rock station KLOL. They had retooled themselves for the Howard Stern era, including lots of sexual references and whatnot, but the comedy itself was still the same, still pretty funny after all these years. Then KLOL went Tejano a couple of years ago, and I lost track of the beloved radio comedians from my childhood.

I'm now amazed to find out that half of the duo is now a right-wing fascist. If I had been living in H-Town, I probably would have known about this new talk show Pruett's doing, and I probably would have already been familiar with this seemingly new gun-slinging rhetoric of his. But no. Instead, I'm shocked. It's like finding out that Mr. Rogers molested little boys or something.

Well, it's undeniable that some gangbangers came to Houston after the hurricane, which makes sense given that most of the evacuees the Bayou City got came from the Superdome, which temporarily housed some the poorest people in New Orleans--crime and poverty have been known to be correlated for decades now. But much of that crime has been confined to within the evacuee community, and the overall crime rate in Houston is only slightly higher than the national average. What I'm getting at is that even though crime is worse in Houston lately, it's absolutely alarmist to proclaim a vigilante open season on it. And clearly, such alarmism is deeply rooted in white bourgeois fear: that is, it's racist.

Well, fuck him. Jim Pruett is an evil, opportunistic, racist, son of a bitch. The only consolation I've got here is that gun owners are much more likely to die by gun violence than people who shun firearms. Maybe we'll get lucky.

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