So there sits Ed Anger, watching the NFL on the tube, and what does he see but one of those 300-pound excuses for a football player limping off the field whining about an Astroturf burn. There you go - Ed has the next subject for his column, "My America," which runs in the Weekly World News.
"Today's Pro Football Players Are Sissies!" howls the headline over the column, which begins this way: "I damn near spit a mouthful of Old Milwaukee beer into Uncle O.V. Potter's bowl of popcorn last Sunday while watching pro football on the tube." Thank God, writes Ed, that Vince Lombardi isn't alive to see this farce. "He'd have ripped the big sissy's faceguard off his helmet with his head still in it and kicked his chubby butt through the goalposts."
Reader, I'll be upfront with you, Oprah-like. I've been addicted to the Weekly World News since 1988, when it broke the news that Elvis was alive. After that, news was never the same for me. Though the World News has rarely gotten the credit it deserves for this journalistic coup, Elvis is now sighted almost hourly by lily-livered competitors. As if that scoop wasn't enough, the paper then reported the existence of Bat Boy, an alien toddler with a bald head and pointy ears who was found by a zoologist in West Virginia. Although the News reported - exclusively - that the bat child was captured by daring FBI agents after a "27-state reign of terror," he seems perpetually on the loose, spotted almost as frequently as Elvis and John F. Kennedy.
Ed Anger stands in stark counterpoint to his colleagues in the straight press - and I mean stark. If he were online, Ed Anger would be world-champion flamer, blasting cyberpest opponents across the Net. Anger's world is not chic, like cyber communications, and certainly not substantive, like the mainstream press. He'd never anchor the evening news or be nominated for any press association awards. And you can put your life's savings on this: pigeons will never roost on statues of him.
He is cheered on by something like 2 million readers. (The paper claims a circulation of about 500,000 and assumes a pass-along rate of about four.) World News editor Eddie Klontz says the paper is "violently" secretive about the real identity of Anger, but concedes, "I'm about as close to him as any human being is."
Although the paper's readership is believed to be predominantly working-class, Anger has had a cult following among bleeding-heart liberals, college students, and card-carrying members of the media �lite for many years.
He is highly interactive, too, by print media standards. Anger receives around 700 letters per week, more than any other columnist at the paper and more than all but a handful of mainstream media pundits. His spot polls often draw 4,000 to 5,000 responses. One of the latest to enlist reader response (check the appropriate box and mail in the ballot): "Yes! I agree with Ed and Newt - welfare kids belong in orphanages that educate and care for children, giving them the love and support they need to become solid, happy, contributing members of society." Or: "No! Welfare kids belong on the streets with parents who abuse and neglect them until they're old enough to have children themselves - and collect welfare checks of their own."
When he's ticked, he tells you so, and in this great country, there's a lot to really piss him off.
Like the far-more-ponderous Rush Limbaugh, Anger is skeptical about the animal-rights movement. He proclaimed himself madder than Daniel Boone with a rusty musket over a "letter I just got from my local hunting and fishing club," inviting him on what might be one of the last great whale hunts because we're running out of whales. The headline shrieked, "I'm going huntin' for whale! Get 'em while you can, before the Japs kill 'em all." Anger's whale-hunting column has proved so popular, it's been reprinted when he's on vacation. "A whale is just another fish, for crying out loud. Just bigger, that's all," he rants. "I mean a whale's not a heckuva lot different than a 10-ton flounder, if you think about it."
Anger is happy about the Republican resurgence. The era promises such good times for Anger that he's campaigning for a Gingrich memorial, right in DC, like Jefferson's, Washington's, and Lincoln's. This idea was not offered in a typically arrogant media spirit but was accompanied by an Ed Anger poll: "Yes, I agree with Ed Anger that Newt Gingrich deserves to have the biggest memorial in Washington - and that we should break ground by June!" Or: "No! Ed Anger is an imbecile for thinking Newt Gingrich deserves his own memorial. A tombstone, maybe, but not a memorial."
It's hard to read Ed Anger without wondering why opinion in mass media has become so tepid and humorless. Klontz, in fact, can barely mention Ed's name without chuckling.
"The way I see it," he says, "once you read Ed or write in, you're hooked. You've lost your soul." This is the truth. If you don't want to have to stuff the Weekly World News surreptitiously underneath the Cheerios box in the supermarket and endure disapproving looks from the checkers, then don't buy the first one.
SCANS
Ed Anger Is Beer-Spittin' Mad
United States of Identification
