In addition to one obscene and illiterate missive from a Ted Nugent fan, my post the other day has attracted substantial email traffic from readers more familiar with Nugent than I was, or want to be. He’s a man of many parts: NRA Board Member, WSJ op-ed contributor, racist, draft dodger, child molester … really, quite a resume. (I gather he plays guitar as well.)
Racist:
My being there (South Africa) isn’t going to affect any political structure. Besides, apartheid isn’t that cut-and-dry. All men are not created equal. The preponderance of South Africa is a different breed of man…They still put bones in their noses, they still walk around naked, they wipe their butts with their hands. And when I kill an antelope for ‘em, their preference is the gut pile. That’s what they f***ing want to eat, the intestines. These are different people. You give them toothpaste, they f***ing eat it.
Detroit Free Press Magazine, July 15, 1990, as quoted by CampusProgress.org.
As patriotic as Uncle Ted claims to be, he pulled a nasty stunt to evade Uncle Sam during the Vietnam War. In a July 15, 1990, Detroit Free Press interview, Nugent crowed about how he managed to dodge the draft. He claims that 30 days before his draft board physical, he disavowed personal hygiene. The last ten days he ingested nothing but junk food and Pepsi, and with a week to go until the physical, he stopped using the bathroom altogether. When the big day came, he had been living in excrement-caked and urine-stained pants. Always the hero, however, Nugent reassured the Free Press, “But if I would have gone over there, I’d have been killed, or I’d have killed all the Hippies in the foxholes. I would have killed everybody.”
Child molester
Reportedly Nugent admitted/bragged about multiple sexual encounters with minors in his interview with Behind the Music. On the same show, Nugent explained how he persuaded the parents of his seventeen-year-old girlfriend to make him her legal guardian on the theory that this would allow him to bang her with impunity. There was apparently more discussion of that incident in “The 100 Sleaziest Moments in Rock” in Spin sometime in 2000, but I can’t find a link. Courtney Love reportedly told Howard Stern that she gave Nugent oral sex when she was 12 and he was 28. Apparently when Nugent wrote the song “Jail Bait” he knew what he was talking about. Too bad he never experienced the “jail” part.
Somehow I think that if this guy was a board member of the ACLU, we’d hear about it from the right. But apparently it doesn’t bother the Governor of Texas, the Wall Street Journal, or the NRA. Really and truly, It’s All OK If You’re A Republican.
Footnote Nugent’s flagrant racism makes it even more encouraging that he felt compelled to pay lip-service to the civil rights movement in his screech of hatred directed at “the Sixties.”