Radio Man

The man had a simple mind. He was not a good man and in his best moments, in his very brightest moments, he knew it. But, of course, this knowledge served only as more fuel for the fear which was the foundation of his simplicity. Was the agar from which his foul vitriol did spring. He had been cowering since childhood and so cultivated a sense of bitter and smug cynicism which he used to mask his crippling inadequacies. As a young man he had been wholly unremarkable, mediocre. In college he did poorly because he had little desire to learn or to think critically or deeply. Bizarrely he acted as though superior to his peers. Those who knew him and disliked him found him to be oppressively smug and somewhat allergic to reason. If ever an opinion was expressed in his presence which did not immediately appeal to his base fears, which did not engage his malformed id, he reacted with blunt incredulity. Those similarly crippled by fear and without a desire to think too much found him magnetic and even charming. They listened to him spout his uninformed opinions night and day. Drunk on their admiration he managed to talk his way into a radio show on the college station. His audience grew, beginning to fill a void inside of him. When he flunked out of college a local radio-station stood ready and waiting to continue broadcasting his brand of fear-based anit-thought, which had already won favor with the local lemmings. In a few short years his listener-base had expanded to include almost every frightened, thought-starved person in the country. He soothed his listeners by whispering to them hatred of the other on their way home from work each evening. He numbed the masses in an increasingly desperate attempt to numb himself. For with each passing year a voice in his head which whispered but one word grew increasingly louder. Fraud. Fraud. Fraud. He got meaner. Fraud. He grew more cynical. Fraud. He grew more frightened. Fraud. He started to slip into desperate self-parody. The voice roared. Fraud, fraud, fraud. When his own voice could no longer drown it out he turned to drugs and when they found out about the drugs and made him stop he just grew decidedly simpler. Unconsciously he broke his mind, ridding it of any critical thought. The voice grew faint again. He found that the more he dumbed down his words the easier it was to sleep. And so he continued to whisper hate into the hearts of his listeners, slowly, steadily, grinding his brain to a halt.