I could have used many harsher terms, but I was exhausted from outrage and despair after reading his latest, and couldn’t really give him my best invective.
Apparently, despite decades of study from medical and childhood health professions, Michael Savage knows better than all of them when it comes to autism. (Like so many of his fellow cultural warrior pundits, an awful lot of it boils down to WIMMIN R DOIN IT RONG (AS USUAL (COZ WIMMIN R LOOSRS)), but there’s a nasty side-dish of JUST SNAP OUT OF IT)
That’s what autism is. What do you mean they scream and they’re silent? They don’t have a father around to tell them, ‘Don’t act like a moron. You’ll get nowhere in life. Stop acting like a putz. Straighten up. Act like a man. Don’t sit there crying and screaming, idiot.’” Savage concluded, “[I]f I behaved like a fool, my father called me a fool. And he said to me, ‘Don’t behave like a fool.’ The worst thing he said — ‘Don’t behave like a fool. Don’t be anybody’s dummy. Don’t sound like an idiot. Don’t act like a girl. Don’t cry.’ That’s what I was raised with. That’s what you should raise your children with. Stop with the sensitivity training. You’re turning your son into a girl, and you’re turning your nation into a nation of losers and beaten men. That’s why we have the politicians we have.
Basically? F*ck you and that ablist, misogynist high horse you’re riding, Savage.
My son is a High Functioning Autistic child. His father has always been part of his daily life. Having a loving father who is consistent with discipline has not made him one whit less autistic, and yet despite his other social difficulties we constantly receive compliments about his manners and his generosity with younger children in our community. His manners derive from us consistently disciplining him with regard to unacceptable behaviour, and his generosity towards younger kids derives from his own sweet nature. He’s also smart as a whip. He’s just not very good at making friends, although that’s improving now that he’s in his teens.
Interestingly, his father’s uncle was a profoundly dependent “classical autistic” (the condition does appear to have some hereditary components). That uncle never learnt to speak, or read, or even make eye contact – yet he too had a father living right there in the house in the between-the-wars UK. There wasn’t a huge amount of coddling happening to any kids during the Great Depression.
My son has challenges that neurotypical people don’t have to deal with, and sometimes he responds differently than most of his peers, but he’s not a moron, he’s not a fool, he’s not a dummy, he’s not an idiot, and he’s not a girl (as if that would make him any lesser if he was, but apparently in Savageworld it’s crucial that he learn that “idiot” and “dummy” are words that go with “girl” (and girls are losers)). Tell me, Michael Savage – if autism spectrum disorder is such a fundamentally girly condition, then why does it affect four times as many males as females?
Notice how there is no autism epidemic but if there is it’s the fault of the single mothers? Also, boys have to be brought up to properly associate “idiot” and “dummy” with being a girl. That’s how Michael was brought up and it took!
And how does that link to our earlier discussion [about "being a real man"]? I think it points out that the worst thing a boy might experience in that alternative reality inhabited by savages and Savages is that he would turn into something like a girl. That equals being a loser and a beaten man.
Now imagine being a girl and hearing that rant. What does it say to her?
What indeed?
Who is Michael Savage and why should anyone pay his absurd and vicious nonsense any attention?
Yeah. Just ignore the stupid pr*ck. He doesn’t have a clue.
But then, the trouble, there are people out there who don’t know the first thing about either autism or Asberger’s Syndrome who might believe him.Until they actually meet someone with the conditrion.
And who is he, anyway? Never heard of him before, tigtog.
tigtog,
I too had never heard of this bloke, but one thing I know for sure: his daddy was right. He IS behaving like a fool. Good on you for telling him!
There are many families with children where only one child is autistic and the other is not, so its unlikely to be caused by environment only.
There was a very interesting documentary on SBS a little while back called “The medicated child” which discussed the treatment and diagnosis of autism. The increasing rates of both autism and aspergers are quite a concern and articles like you linked to certainly don’t help.
FWIW tigtog, autistic and aspergers people seem to be better accepted in the open source programming community compared to the general community so if your son has an interest in computers it may be worth encouraging.
The really disturbing thing about this episode is not that Michael Savage holds such views, but that there is an audience for them whose members will be voting in a few months time to decide who holds the most powerful office in the world.
Savage is a nationally syndicated radio talk-show presenter in the USA. His audience is huge, but at least it’s getting a little smaller in response to this offensive shit. A major sponsor has pulled funding to his show, and at least one string of affiliated stations has dropped the show from their schedule.
He seems to have this notion that parents actually receive money or something if they have a child diagnosed with autism. That’s certainly not the case here, nor is it in the US as far as I can find. The only benefits we received were hours and hours of free speech and occupational therapy when he was small, which were profoundly helpful and I hate to think how we would have coped without them, but I’m sure that I would rather have been supervising playdates for a neurotypical child in those hours, really. Now that he’s in high school, my son gets some time with an Integration Aide at school to help him keep focussed on his work, and he is supplied with an electronic notetaking tablet (no games or internet capability) because his fine motor skill deficits make handwriting both atrocious and arduous.
The combination of these absolutely stupid claims with the vitriolic “don’t be a girl” crap just horrifies me. Paul Burns is right – people do hear this stuff and believe it, and you bet there’s people here in Oz thinking and saying the same crap, just not yet on air.
Definitely, Chris – he’s already having some success on that front. (Our house has a computer for each family member on a LAN, and he’s been coding for a couple of years now).
Of course, Savages’s “thesis” would imply that any woman suffering from autism would be a hard case indeed and would never amount to anything.
Further to Paul Burns’ point, there are a lot of children whose parents quite blithely tune in to the Savages of this world on days when the kids are home from school due to holidays, illness, etc., and who are thus exposed not only to the filth blaring out from the radio but also to their parents’ approving comments. I speak from experience, having shared many a school holiday morning in the 1960s and 1970s at home with my mother and various reactionary demagogues on 3AW.
It behooves child protection campaigners such as Hetty Johnson to consider whether resisting this kind of child abuse shouldn’t be a higher priority than moral panics about Bill Henson’s photography.
Michael Savage has clearly never come into contact with an autistic child.
I wonder if it was Mike’s dad who told him to stop being a weiner.
Drongo is far too nice a word for this man. The word ‘drongo’ comes from the name of a racehorse who consistently ran last. Words fail me with this guy.
He approaches the world with the rabid dogmatism of the convert. He projects his own youthful naivety onto his opponents, and hates them in a way that we can only hate our imagined former, lesser selves. He needs to learn that he was mistaken – not some other person – and that blindness was a part of himself and remains so: it is immanent to his life no matter how he strikes out at others. After all, it is not the fault of autistic children and their families that he was so uncritical in his admiration for Allen Ginsberg and the like decades ago.
My wife worked with childen who had autism many years ago. Believe me if the cure was as simple is Mr Savage pupports everyone would be doing it.
Of course he seems to be one of those upper middle class taxpayers who seem to suffer this odd sort of “lucky ducky” jealousy of the sick and less well off due to the real or imagined tax breaks/credits they might be recieving from the little tax he’d have to pay.
Good thing Dickens and his peers managed to nail down and expose that sort of attitude so we can recognise it in a pinch.
To put it in political terms, Paul Norton’s thesis of the inversion of the New Left chain of equivalences has some explanatory power:
Explaining the Grumpy Old Men (and Bettina)
Autism is just a prop in this drama.
I’ve always taken it for granted that shock jocks are paid to say and do whatever will attract attention, buzz, an audience, thereby making money via advertising for the company that owns the station, sort of like Sam Newman, and that the actual content is quite detached from any order of reality apart from the money-making one.
Pavlov’s Cat – well there was the accusation against Murdoch that companies he owns like Fox doesn’t actually represent his views. Its just that he saw a gap in the market to make a lot of money and took it.
Feh, he’s just a shock jock. Life’s too short to worry about arseholes like that.
Nominative determinism strikes again.
Last year a child psychiatrist friend sat me down gently and asked if I had looked at the criteria for Asberger’s diagnosis. I admitted I had glanced at them, and yes some did look err, rather familiar. She gave me a more complete list and I think that I ticked 23 of 25 of them for my childhood behaviour. These days I’d probably be down to ten. While my parents were lefties it was an impeccably stable nuclear family with moderately strict discipline.
One of the noticeable features of my childhood behaviour (although I can’t remember whether this was on the Asberger’s list) was that I was exceptionally sensitive to criticism from adults, particularly in raised voices. On the very rare occasions when my parents spoke to me as Savage says his father did I spent an hour in the foetal position whimpering. I’m not sure much was gained by anyone as a result.
FS – he was obviously a girly man and didn’t shout loud enough to straighten you out. Don’t blame yourself though.
Perhaps meeker parents could have ear trumpets surgically attached to their kids, just to be sure.
This is all pretty funny really – except to the extent that anyone believes it yadda yadda – because anyone with (as Robert noted) the slightest exposure to autism knows that sensory assault like shouting is practically a guaranteed epic fail.
Reading Savage’s comments, I don’t know whether to laugh or cry.
No-one, I mean No-one, can possibly be that stupid.
Surely he’s living proof that the Almighty has a sense of humour.
One of my sons was diagnosed with high-functioning autism. Once I’d read the criteria (before we actually got a diagnosis), I also recognised my grandfather, my father, myself and another of my sons. I don’t know whether savage is a liar or a fool, but it’s conceivable he’s both. What an arsehole.
I am an uncle to a young boy with Aspergers, who is sometimes in my direct care. So all I can say to Mr Savage is I hope you never have a child with this disorder, and if you do that child protection immediately remove the child from your ‘care’ and influence.
You, sir, a first class idiot and arsehole, who deserves every bit of adversity that comes your way as a result of your venal outburst.
over the past couple of years New Scientist has done quite a few stories on autism and Aspergers.
In February, a news story with the following comment:
There have been letters to NS all year from people who don’t want to be marginalised by such extreme negativity. There are many scientists and people in other professions who have worked with their autism or Aspergers and feel they are making a difference. Everyone would like to see the negative (anti-social) aspects better managed, but don’t need bozos like Savage or those who classify them as hopeless and helpless in order to help them.
Son #2 has a severe language disorder which was diagnosed when he was three. He’s also intellectually disabled. At first, we thought he was deaf, because of the lack of language development, then that he was autistic, because of behaviours like hand-flapping, tip-toe walking and head-banging. I had never heard of language disorder and had no idea what a profound effect it would have on the family.
Getting the diagnosis wasn’t really much comfort, but fortunately our parents were a tower of strength and helped us deal with the emotional stress of having a severely disabled child.
We were disadvantaged because we lived in a small country town, so there was very little in the way of disability services, apart from an hour of speech therapy a week and absolutely no family counselling. Eventually, we found there was a support group of parents, but because it was 350kms away, there was very limited opportunity to attend meetings and family functions.
Because of the nature of his disability, he was prone to huge temper tantrums and there were plenty of people, including some of his teachers, who were convinced that it was the result of poor parenting and a lack of discipline at home.
My husband was informed by erstwhile friends, that a f*@#ing good hiding would solve the problem. He kept this to himself, to the detriment of his health, figuring that I had enough to cope with. I think I would have ripped their heads off, if they’d ventured recommending the Savage “cure” to me!
Our boy finished Year 12 and got his SACE certificate, working with a modified curriculum and lots of one-on-one from devoted SSOs and teaching staff.
He now works at the local supported employment service, got his P plates in January and will be 21 in October. We bought him a car and he drives himself to work and has high ambitions of taking himself off to Adelaide on solo shopping trips. We’ve been practising to make it a reality.
Having a family member with a severe disability has a profound effect on families which you don’t realise until you are that family. I wish we’d had access to help for our family, especially for our other children, but we were left to manage the best way we could, like most other families in the same situation, I imagine.
Unlike Hilker, I would like to wish a child with one of these disorders on that waste-of-space Savage, but I could never wish a disability on a child. However, I’m not above wishing one on him and encouraging people to subject him to his own “cure” for a long, long time.
How much do you bet that during that far-off, wonderful time of the 1950s and before, when men were men and women were women and children knew their place, and they hadn’t discovered much about Autism and nothing at all about Asperger’s, that a Bloody Good Hiding, historically, is what they would consistently have got?
Awesome.
Helen, even worse, they would more than likely have been slung into whatever was the local version of Bedlam and left to rot after having their brains and bodies fried by ever increasing doses of ETC.
I am a conservative, and I have Asperger’s Syndrome. Please do not make the mistake of believing that Michael Savage is a mainstream conservative. In fact, most of the conservatives I know think he’s a tool, and wish he would shut up. It is particularly appalling that he blames single mothers for false autism diagnoses.
In fairness, he does have several clips on his website where he specifically says that truly autistic children need support, its just that he feels that misdiagnosis diverts funds from truly needy kids.
The problem is that some people believe that I just use Asperger’s as an excuse to be rude. One of the big problems with AS is that patients often have high IQs and excellent verbal communication skills, making it hard for people to believe that you really don’t get non-verbal communication, or why anyone would be offended by what you said, since it was factually accurate.
I was not diagnosed until I was 38 years old, but there is no doubt that I have a form of autism, and that it has negatively impacted my life. My inability to understand other people, other than what they communicate to me directly, has impaired my ability to maintain employment, make friends, find a mate, and generally enjoy what life has to offer. For years I felt tremendous guilt, since I was clearly smart enough to do better, but kept failing. Now that I understand that I am effectively “color-blind” in one area of communication, I am doing much better, since I can compensate. I am actually more likely admit when I make a mistake, since I now know that I miss information that other people have. Hardly what I would call making excuses.
Comments like Savage’s make it easier for people to be bigoted.
TomF, that’s a marvellous summary of exactly what the problem is for high-functioning autistics, especially Aspies whose love of words and skill with wordplay can be at a savant level. (My own son, who is not Aspie but is HFA, has a few problems composing phrases in speech but is an excellent writer).
Anybody can look at a profoundly dependent classically autistic child and know that they need assistance. The idea that someone can, as you say, have strong verbal skills but be totally colour-blind to non-verbal communication is hard for people to grasp, and so they think that autistics are “putting it on”, and that their families are attempting to game the system.