Hate Jock

"I am conservative, but I am not a right-wing nutjob," claims KTAR 92.3 FM morning talk jock Darrell Ankarlo in a station promo tease. Oh, please allow this smart-ass starling to differ! Since that boneheaded blowhard took over the AM slot from nice-guy Pat McMahon (you know, the old fart who used to play priss-pot Gerald on Wallace and Ladmo back when woolly mammoths roamed the Earth), the on-air discourse from 8:30 to noon has taken a dive into Sean Hannity/troglodyte territory.

Whether Darrell is smooching Sheriff Joe Arpaio's fanny on the air or making fun of the Sprint RED MOTORAZR mobile phone campaign aimed at donating some proceeds to fighting AIDS in Africa, Ankarlow-brow's slant is just to the right of Ivan the Terrible, despite the snow job he and KTAR put on to convince listeners that he's a reasonable guy.

In reality, Ankarlow-brow's a nasty little piss-ant whose vicious venom-spewing is well known to Dallas, Texas, residents, who used to have to listen to his angry-white-man rants on KLIF AM 570. The favorite whipping posts of Señor Low-Brow? Surprise, surprise — undocumented Mexican immigrants. And last week, when a coalition of immigrant-rights groups in the PHX announced that they'd be taking to the streets May 1 to reprise the peaceful and immensely successful pro-immigrant rallies of last year, the full-of-himself radio reactionary acted as if some dood named Pedro'd peed in his Frosted Flakes:

"There's nothing that ticks me off more than when you know they're in your midst and then they get together and they say, 'Not only are we going to be here — not only are we going to suck the system dry — but we're going to march in the streets and tell you to go you-know-what to yourself.' Hacks me off more than you can imagine."

Of course, that's total bullshit. The planned march's meant to light a fire under the butts of lawmakers, federal and otherwise, to get them to come up with a guest-worker program and a legal path to citizenship for the undocumented.

Ankarlo comes off sounding a lot like former Republican Senator Jesse Helms in the '60s, when he was a TV commentator in The Bird's hometown of Raleigh, North Carolina, raving about civil rights leaders like the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., who were then marching for racial equality.

Bigot boy's personal prejudice was palpable throughout the broadcast, like when he described driving through a Mexican neighborhood in town. He urged listeners to go see for themselves.

"You'll see bars in all the windows," fumed Darrell. "You'll see toilet seats out in the street. You'll see bedsprings out in the street. Just stuff all over the place. I've been to Mexico 40 times, and when I go to an impoverished city in Mexico, that's what I see."

Now, this skeptical sparrow knows Ankarlo's trailer-trash enough to have seen Trans Ams up on cinder blocks and rusted bikes out in the front yards of true-blue Ameri-cun citizens who just happen to be poor Caucasians. The Bird's point being that race and nationality have less to do with urban blight than poverty, something boobs like Darrell fail to grasp.

The drive-time doofus may try to come off like some great patriot on his program, but he revealed on the recent show his antagonism for the U.S. Constitution, specifically the First and 14th amendments.

"I'm all for the National Guard, fully armed, arresting their sorry butts," said Ankarlo of the future marchers, whether they be American citizens or no. According to him, everyone demonstrating on May Day should be rounded up police-state-style and taken to some ad hoc tent city until God can sort 'em out.

Freedom of speech and assembly? Due process? Equal protection under the law? Not for the brown ones, says Ankarlo. And what about them so-called "anchor babies" — that is, children born on U.S. soil to undocumented parents? The 14th Amendment guarantees that "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." But ol' Ankarlo'd rather operate outside the law:

"When you come here, you have that child here, then you argue to the government, 'Well, it's not fair to send us back. Our child is a U.S. citizen. You're breaking up our family, you mean American conservative freak talk show host Ankarlo! Don't you get it?' No, no, I'm sorry, you broke the law, you cheated the system in order to take advantage of the system, and I caught you red-handed. And now it's my fault? Bullcrap!"

In other words, crawl back to Mexico, you effin' diaper-wearer! And take that freakin' rattle with you.

Thing is, Darrell — like it or not — children born here of illegal alien parents are just as much citizens as your Herman Munster-lookin' keister. If you don't like it, start screaming for a Constitutional change.

Attorney Danny Ortega's listened to Ankarlo on the radio. For the well-known Phoenix activist, Darrell's shtick's all about ratings, though the overall effect is poisonous.

"What he fails to see is the overlap of that fear and that hate he's feeding is affecting everybody who's Hispanic or Latino," asserts Ortega. "He's now clearly with the profilers, believing that anybody who looks like me is an illegal until proven otherwise."