Miss America.

• Author: Gillespie, Nick

For reasons that are clear - if not at all convincing - the media absolutely loathe Howard Stern, the New York-based radio and TV personality who just happens to be the country's greatest living satirist. Stern is, of course, hugely popular with wide segments of the American people: His daily drive-time radio show airs in about two dozen markets across the country; his nightly show on cable's E! network is among that channel's most popular features; his first book, Private Parts (1993), was a chart-topper and his latest, Miss America, is the fastest-selling title in its publisher's history. But critics - whose moralistic pronouncements are not burdened by familiarity with Stern's radio, television, or written work - take a quick peek at the man and his shtick and cluck their tongues, convinced that here is just one more example of vulgarity uber alles.

"Because he continues to embrace the qualities of a child splashing in sewage, Stern still belongs among those icons of depravity who make their living pandering to humanity's basest instincts," proclaims Al Martinez of the Los Angeles Times, who dubs Stern the "king of excrement." Stern's popularity, Martinez cryptically warns, "ought to tell us something about ourselves in an age that fawns over what it loves and blows up what it hates."

For Alan Ehrenhalt, the executive editor of Governing magazine and the author of The Lost City, Stern is symptomatic of an economic system that dares give people choice. Writing in The New York Times, Ehrenhalt invokes Stern as the horror child of laissez faire economics: "The tyranny of the market...has destroyed the loyalty of corporations to their communities; customers to their neighborhood merchants; athletes to their local teams; teams to their cities. The market has given us Howard Stern."

"Stern is no satirist, a latter-day Jonathan Swift making 'a modest proposal,'" contends Linda Chavez in USA Today. "He incites nastiness, crudity, and effrontery...Stern has made millions with this trash....[M]aybe [we] can shame the media executives who give Stern a platform." Echoing the Times's Martinez, Chavez asks, "What does it say about the state of our popular culture that radio shock-jock Howard Stern can replace Colin Powell as the best-selling author in America?"

Short answer: It means things are pretty damn swell.

Contrary to Chavez, Stern is indeed a latter-day Jonathan Swift - and not just because he is nasty, crude, and scatological (go read Gulliver's Travels some time). There is a quasi-political message to be gleaned from Stern's inspired rants and ramblings, one that is particularly relevant to a media-saturated, market-based society. In the tradition of folks such as Mark Twain and Lenny Bruce, Stern's search-and-destroy hijinks puncture the pretensions of all manner of fakes and phonies. He relentlessly and systematically debunks the fictions we tell about ourselves. He is particularly brilliant at deconstructing the pat, cliched narratives that actors, politicians, and other public figures spin to their own advantage. In an age of overweening celebrity, that alone should make him a national treasure.

No wonder, then, that the media dislike him. They crave good "stories" - tight little tales that assume predictable, easily recognized shapes and reinforce already-held notions. But in this sense, Stern is resolutely anti-story, revelling in the mismatch between perception and reality...