Invasion of the Pod People: Valley DJ, liberal blogger, offers political take

Story by Chris Graham

“Who’s Pedro?” Eddie Garcia says to me - only I don’t know it’s the radio DJ that I’d interviewed on the phone a week earlier that I’m talking to, because he’s not in radio-DJ character, as he was then, and otherwise I only know him from his diary on the liberal website Daily Kos.

“Um, well …”

I was wearing the only piece of clothing with anything remotely political on it that I had hanging in the closet - a T-shirt requesting a “Vote for Pedro” in the spirit of the cult movie “Napoleon Dynamite” from a couple of years back.

I explain this to the wild-looking man that I knew not at the time to be Eddie Garcia who as it turns out just happened to be standing out in the parking lot in front of WZXI-95.5FM’s headquarters south of Harrisonburg on what I also knew not at the time was for him another in a long series of smoke breaks this particular early-spring afternoon.

“Oh, yeah - I remember that movie,” he says, though I can tell from the tone of his voice that it barely registers, if at all.

I make my way inside to the front desk and ask for Eddie Garcia - I was to sit down with him for his 4-6 p.m. shift to get information for a profile piece that I am writing on him, I relate to the receptionist.

Who responds cheerfully.

“There he is,” pointing at the man from the parking lot, who was now standing behind me. “Eddie, this man is here to see you.”

***

People never look the same in person as you would assume they would by listening to them on the radio, but Eddie Garcia comes closer to the image that I’d had in my head than most - average height, slight build, understated, casual dress, words coming out of his head and mouth 1,000 miles a minute, like he’s had way, way too much of the caffeine.

Garcia has been in the Shenandoah Valley for two years - that’s right, he ain’t from around these parts, as some of the listeners to his afternoon oldies show lament to no end.

He spent his formative years in Stockton, Calif., where he got into radio in college and began a career that at age 42 already has him a quarter-century in the business. His stops along the way have taken him to Ohio and Vermont before he landed in Virginia.

The imagery of that phrase - having him land in Virginia, as opposed to having him arrive here by any of a number of other means - is meant to make you think of what would make its way down from an alien spaceship more than your conventional airplane disembarking with a load of unassuming business and vacation travelers.

Two years into his run at WZXI, Garcia is taken to calling his time in Virginia “a very disorienting experience,” and deflects a question on how he has been able to adjust to life in a Red State.

“The way you phrase that sounds as if you’re proceeding on the assumption that I have adjusted. I haven’t. And I don’t see how it’s possible,” Garcia says.

Life in Vermont, his most recent tour stop before Virginia, was even more like home than Northern California.

“Our whole life was different. For instance, in Bennington, our house was like a social center. We had a bunch of friends, most of them younger than us, and the issue used to be, How are we going to get these people out of here on Friday nights so we can get the kids to sleep now?” Garcia says.
“Now, we have very few friends - a couple of very sweet older people who come around and have kind of adopted us. And we love them to death, and they’re nice to have. But I don’t have the social dynamic that I had in Vermont in any sense,” Garcia says. “In Vermont, I was an active boots-on-the-ground political activist. Here I don’t see any Democrats with an ounce of anything resembling testosterone, so I don’t bother with them.”

Which gets us to his blogging on Daily Kos - Garcia attributes his continued sanity to discovering the liberal blog and signing on as a regular writer.

“If I hadn’t discovered Daily Kos, I’d probably be in a rubber room,” Garcia says.

Which isn’t to say that his blogging hasn’t led management at WZXI to their own rubber rooms from time to time.

“You can’t please everybody all the time. You can’t do it. So we’re not even going to try,” says Joe Collins, the program director at WZXI, who has taken more than his share of calls from listeners irate over a particular Garcia rant on the air.

Garcia admits to wanting to push buttons in that respect.

“I perceive this country to be in a crisis right now,” he says. “We have a president who has defied the will of the American people, defied the results of the election, is not supporting the troops, is denying them the money they need to complete the mission. Very realistic timetables, flexible withdrawal dates were set, and this guy is just stomping his foot and throwing a tantrum like a little spoiled child - and he’s going to do whatever the heck he wants.
“I think George Walker Bush is probably the most impeachable president in the history of this country - him and (Vice President Dick) Cheney both. And I frankly will not be silent. I say as much as I can get away with. And I’ve been chewed out for it more than once,” Garcia says.

It’s not just conservatives who are in Garcia’s crosshairs. No, Fast Eddie gets “hacked off,” as he told me between oldies, at liberals and local Shenandoah Valley Democrats just as easily - and readily.

“They are beaten down - and they’re afraid to stick their heads up. Me, I don’t have those bruises,” Garcia says of Valley Dems, noting their lack of success in even being able to find candidates to run for office in recent years.

“And you also have the factor of Southern civility here - a high premium is placed on civility, and the Republicans and conservatives twist that around by clamoring for civility or elevating the discourse,” Garcia says. “I’ll tell you what - the Republicans lost any right to clamor for civility from me the first time they called me a traitor. It’s civility when it’s convenient for them. They don’t want to seem shrill, they don’t want to seem like they’re screaming. I don’t care - I’m a pit bull.”

A pit bull, indeed - blogging under the name Kestrel9000, his screen name evoking a species of falcon, Garcia admits to being less a journalist or political commentator than he is a “cheerleader.”

“You’d never mistake me for a conservative,” Garcia says. “I’m more of a community person. I value the community. It has a very important role in my life. The first thing that I do in the morning is get up and check what’s going on - and it’s the last thing that I do before I go to bed at night. I’ve met some bloggers from there - and another one is going to come down and destroy a six-pack of beer with me the first part of next week.”

One of those things about life - I have to wonder if the world would have ever heard of Kestrel9000 and read any of his numerous calls for the impeachment of President Bush or diatribes against Republicanism in general if he hadn’t ended up in the Valley.

“I find the mindset of this area goes beyond what I was taught to believe that conservatism was - say, in the approach of someone like Bill Buckley. What you have here is nattering and parroting of White House talking points and stay the course and fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them here and traitor this and terrorist that and how much duct tape and plastic did you buy when Tom Ridge told you to?” Garcia says.
“You live this close to (Jerry) Falwell and (Pat) Robertson, and you have people like Dean Welty of the Valley Family Forum right here in Harrisonburg, and it’s basically no different than the Taliban,” Garcia says. “The only difference between them and the Taliban is the book that they attend to and the language that they speak. These people are a cancer. They take one of the world’s greatest religions, pervert it to their own political ends, and draw people into wedge issues so that they can lead them around by the nose and get them to vote for Republicans.

“I’ve never seen anything like this. It reminds me of the movie ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers.’ I call them Pod People,” Garcia says.

Go figure, then, that our friend Fast Eddie would go and say something on the air that would get him in trouble. Right?

“I’m sick of his left-wing views on the radio,” a listener complained to WZXI program director Joe Collins in January - after Garcia dedicated his daily “Top 5 at 5″ list to “America at War,” finishing up the selections of oldies but goodies with John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance” and The Rolling Stones’ “Sympathy for the Devil.”
“He’s insulting the veterans, and now he’s playing satanic music!” the caller continued, before raising issue with Garcia’s on-air defense from several months before of a liberal activist who had been roughed up by a staffer of former senator George Allen.

Collins’ response - “Eddie is Eddie. And anybody who tunes into Eddie’s show, if you listen long enough, you pretty much can figure out where Eddie’s going to come from,” he says.

“I don’t necessarily encourage Eddie - we don’t have to. But at the same time, I don’t discourage anybody from being their own person on the radio. I just tell them, Look, you know, you can’t please everybody all the time, and how boring would it be if you tried? That’s the direction that I try to go in,” Collins says.

The angry calls to station management have died down in recent months.

“I think that that’s mainly because of the fact that people know who Eddie is - and anybody who has something to say to Eddie will say it to him,” Collins says. “The level of the discourse is not so much, Well, gee, you said this on the radio, now what are you going to do about it? It’s more like - Ed, what are you talking about? And it goes directly to him.
“People have begun to accept Eddie as Eddie - and they don’t flip out when he says something that might not jive with their public beliefs. Because there’s a lot more to the show than politics,” Collins says.

“I don’t do a political show - overtly. I throw in little hits here and little hits there. You know where I stand. But you won’t too often, except for that one day when I had an issue with the Military Commissions Act. I’m not good for a full-tilt boogie rant very often,” Garcia says.

***

I almost wonder if Garcia isn’t somehow bothered by this - if he isn’t energized by the occasional outburst from the political right, if he wonders if he might be getting stale, and that’s why people aren’t calling anymore.

I mention this to him - and the cauldron reignites.

“This is the fourth state that I’ve lived in - and the politics of division, the hatred, the pointing the fingers. Democrats are traitors, homosexuals will destroy your marriage, the Muslims will kill you when you sleep - and people take this seriously. I find it disgusting. It’s revolting,” Garcia says.

“It goes against everything that I believe in, everything that I was raised to believe was right, proper, true and correct. Bigotry and hatred in this area seems to have a license - and all I can do is stand against it.

“If there are consequences, then there are consequences - but I am who I am. I have my values, and I compromise them for no one.”

For further reading

Eddie Garcia’s Daily Kos blog - http://kestrel9000.dailykos.com