This should be chiseled into that gravestone Howard received for his birthday. It pains me to write yet another critical post about someone for whom my admiration has steadily deteriorated. But how long can fans continue to stick their collective heads in the ground and ignore the abuse directed at them by Howard Stern?
Fans have been loyal to the show, made it possible for Howard to live like a king, and forked over money every month for the privilege of hearing a show that has given them less and less, and taken advantage of them more and more.
My tipping point for writing this post was listening to the owner of AshleyMadison.com on today's show. Howard knows that nothing good can come from his fans cheating on their spouses. From my point of view, Howard is no better than a ghetto pimp. If Howard could make money selling us drugs he would. It's the height of hypocrisy to make money promoting AshleyMadison.com, and at the same time wanting to be viewed as a humanitarian for fleecing his fans for donations to his wife's hobby charities.
As if all this wasn't bad enough, the show's entertainment value is at it's lowest point ever -- 4-day weeks, long vacations, vapid wrap-up shows, endless bit recycling, bad guests, more crappy commercials, and lack of unscripted callers to the show. By the way, the reason Howard has closed the gates to real callers is his metamorphosis into the kind of person he used to ridicule -- a person who doesn't want to hear anything real, critical, or spontaneous. He's too fragile and can no longer deal.
As fans, I believe we've been abused far too much, and for far too long. And all this has been done in a very calculated, phoney, and insincere way. We had a good run, but our flaws have caught up with us. Maybe Howard has always been a reflection of society, and is therefore an example of one facet of society's search for a new bottom. Man that's heavy, I might have to bronze my keyboard, or at the very least throw away my bong.
Some might opine that I'm ungrateful or disloyal. I beg to differ. (Isn't this style of writing annoying and elitist?) My writing about the obvious shortcomings of the show is in fact a noble act of loyalty in that my words are the same words Howard himself would use were he to write about someone else acting like him.
For Howard Shrine Spews and Views, this is I. Humphrey saying, "Thank God I'm not Lisa G!"
