Ted Nugent

Nugent writes gleefully of killing and eating pigs, composes songs with titles such as “My Baby Likes My Butter on Her Grits” and “My Love is Like a Tire Iron,” and is unafraid of releasing albums with covers so sexist, they would make Spinal Tap blush.

This rope-swinging, loincloth-clad, boulder-tossing Hemingway of Heavy Metal’s entire life is so broad and hyperbolic, Nugent is almost impossible to caricature. He even hosted a reality show where the game was to avoid being hunted down, caught, and humiliated by Ted Nugent while camping on his wildlife preserve. The program was canceled shortly after the Motor City Madman accidentally injured his leg with a chainsaw, requiring 44 stitches.

Seriously”€”what’s not to love?

Especially after he came out of a meeting with the Secret Service last week purring like a cat. “I’m havin’ the time of my life,” he told an interviewer. “They work for me. I pay their salaries, and I mean that seriously….So when you say Secret Service, all I can do is get a big grin on my face and realize that we’ll either be shooting some taxpayer ammo at targets or we’ll be eating barbecue.” If anything, Ted’s scandal may have taken some heat off the Secret Service for their own hooker scandal.

Still, the day after the Secret Service deemed he was not an imminent threat to the president’s life, Nugent pled guilty to a misdemeanor federal charge for knowingly transporting a black (of course) Alaskan bear in 2009. Apparently some half-assed minor wildlife-transporting charge was the only thing the feds could make stick to him, at least for now.

Almost entirely absent from the furor surrounding Nugent’s comments was something he repeatedly cited in his defense of said comments”€”he felt he ticked off the Attorney General and the ATF with his published criticisms of the unfolding “Fast and Furious” scandal, where the feds allegedly walked guns south of the border and into the hands of Mexican drug cartels.

To my knowledge, none of Ted Nugent’s guns has killed a human being, but at least one American”€”Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry“€”was killed with guns given to Mexican cartels as part of Fast and Furious.

Via Skype, I asked a Russian friend in Kaliningrad to take a gander at a clip from one of Ted’s reality shows and give me his impressions. Here, exactly as typed, are his responses as they came in line-by-line:

he is good
all Americans who like guns are good
in my opinion
he is cool
white guys mostly loosing the coolness un big metropolies like NY
hipsters are also part of culture
but wild guys are always protecting the nations
hipsters can’t protect families

Even if, as his liberal critics insist, Ted Nugent has a tiny penis and all the macho posturing is nothing more than frightened bluster, I find it refreshing that he’s at least making an attempt to be macho. As things stand, we have neutered, bespectacled, agreeable, compliant statist prog-frogs who look like this calling Nugent a “coward.” The government seems as if it wants all males, at least the white ones, to look like they write for Gawker.

To such oversocialized, hyper-urbanized jelly blobs, Nugent probably embodies some notion of violent subhuman psychotic atavism. But I’m not sure if “psychotic” is the right word to describe Ted Nugent. He may only be what my mother-in-law, who’s lived in Georgia her whole life, calls “wild.” Many urbanized nudniks would seem to prefer if everyone was rendered permanently deaf to the call of the wild. I suspect a lot of people hate Ted Nugent because there’s a part of him that hasn’t been tamed like they have. But if civilization falls apart like nearly all of us seem to think it will, only the uncivilized will survive.

Thank you, Ted Nugent, for being Ted Nugent. Your personality is a national treasure. You are the anti-Cobain. I’m glad they haven’t killed you yet.