John Batchelor Knows He's Weird

It was 7:30 in the morning in New York, and nationally syndicated radio host John Batchelor had only one thing on his mind: the jobs numbers, set to debut in about an hour. Naturally, this struck Imus as odd, like most of Batchelor’s tendencies.

“It’s all about the midterms, Don,” said Batchelor. “If that number’s really good, the President’s got a good chance. If that number’s not good, the Democrats are in trouble.”

Though he sounded spooky, Batchelor claimed he was doing fine. “The news continues to be extremely grim,” he said. “And, of course, that’s my business.”

Batchelor spends a not insignificant amount of time addressing what he perceives as threats, and he shared with Imus today an odd threat that he’s still trying to figure out.

“They call themselves the ‘deflationistas,’” he said. “Although it sounds kind of exciting, what it means is that we’re headed for a bad patch of deflation, something we’ve not seen since the 1930s.”

Deflation is bad for jobs, employment, the economy, and pretty much everything else, he said. “Some big names on Wall Street are talking about deflation,” Batchelor reported. “And now the Federal Reserve is worrying about it.”

He was unwilling to classify Wall Street’s behavior over the last few years as “organized crime,” as Matt Taibbi did yesterday, because he thinks it lends the perpetrators too much credibility.

“It was a whole lot of grownups ignoring the fact that the car was going really fast, and no one was at the wheel,” said Batchelor. “And those grownups are still employed, they’re still out there. So we don’t have any defenses from this happening again.”

Batchelor agreed with Taibbi’s assessment that the country is on pretty much the same path as it was three years ago, just before financial disaster struck. “It’s the same people, the same banks, the same politicians, no change whatsoever,” he said.

The only change he sees is with the American people, who are saving money and paying off debts, actions he thinks are “good defense” in a deflationary period.

Though Batchelor was making good sense this morning, Imus was still picking up a weird vibe from the dude, who admitted he’s lost “a sense of the world” over the last ten years because he’s always focusing on the next threat.

“I don’t see the better things happening,” he admitted. “I try to see them, but then at night I talk to people who are worried and it’s sort of easy to follow in that direction.”

Like many New Yorkers, Batchelor does not want to see a mosque built near Ground Zero, but has no problem with putting one just a few blocks away. He’s most concerned with where the funding for the mosque is coming from, an issue he said has been far less transparent in this instance than it would be with any other religious organization.

Luckily, Imus had a suggestion. “How about we make them come to your house, and you get them down in the basement there, and, well, make them tell us,” he proposed.

Batchelor laughed, but did not refuse the I-Man’s idea.

-Julie Kanfer