Have you ever felt like you can’t make a difference? How can one small voice make a dent in this vast landscape of a world? It’s too vast and unreachable! How can one lone voice screaming into the wilderness be heard over the cacophony?
One man found a way and became a defining voice in the American landscape through sheer grit, determination, lack of education and absence of any ethical restrictions and his name was Rush Limbaugh.
When you think it’s impossible to break through, realize that this one man almost single-handedly turned the American political scene upside down. With Ronald Reagan greasing the wheels by managing to eliminate the Fairness Doctrine from the broadcasting scene, Limbaugh was unleashed to ignore the former rules of the carefully coded political language of white supremacy that had informed the halls of congress and largely still does. He saw the shock value of speaking in terms much closer to what his listeners actually used when they were at the water cooler or in the break room. He became the spokesman for a whole section of the country that needed bogeymen, people to blame for their own shortcomings or the trickery actually being played on them by their own representatives. People that saw the country changing, evolving, moving in ways they couldn’t adjust to had found a champion to make the case for applying the brakes to progress.
He was quickly successful. In 1988, after a short stint replacing Morton Downey on a Sacramento station, and to their everlasting shame, ABC brought Limbaugh to New York City and syndicated the Rush Limbaugh Show. The Fairness Doctrine had just fallen in 1987, and all the stars were in alignment. ABC had no responsibility to air any counterpoint to Rush’s musings, and the cynical ex-DJ knew that the barn door was wide open.
Ultimately his brand of hatred cut across many boundaries, attacking immigrants, the poor, women (or “feminazis”), gays and “negroes” as he would periodically call them. Anyone was game who wasn’t him, that is a white man with a certain amount of means.
Copycat personalities began to understand the formula that Rush had identified and soon what had been a breakthrough voice was a movement. Rivals would make periodic charges for the top of the right wing hill with Sean Hannity making the most serious surge, but he would always have to settle for second banana to Limbaugh as the headliner. Second place was paying pretty well, though, and Sean soon settled into that role, acknowledging Rush as the Alpha.
Through his efforts and those of his competitors they created a new genre of talk radio that continues to poison the public discourse to this day.
This brand took off, and it wasn’t long before the Republican Party took notice since they essentially had the same message, though more cautiously and surreptitiously sold. With his brand solidly established and the entire right wing broadcasting industry exploding, the George W. Bush administration under the outside direction of my former high school classmate, Grover Norquist, learned how to weaponize this new tool into a precisely calibrated firearm. Weekly meetings were convened at Grover’s home and were attended by senators, representatives and the biggest media giants, crafting coordinated messages that would be repeated verbatim by all for the following week, and then re-worked seven days later, always providing a unified message that could be pounded into the heads of the unsuspecting receptacles that would then regurgitate them like they had been their very own thoughts.
It was genius, and no one ran the play like Rush Limbaugh, or reached more people. His listeners numbered in the tens of millions now and he had a platform that could move a nation. He soon realized that he had as much power himself as those that wished to use it, and he could be dangerous to those on the right that crossed him as much as he could savage those on the left. The party would sometimes be the puppeteer and sometimes be the puppet, and increasingly Rush knew it.
While the officials still had to be careful with the words they used while on the Hill, the radio jocks were much freer to light fires and keep them burning. In the end, this would be a direct line to the rise of Donald Trump who rode a rising tide of hatred right into the White House, and then unleashed the new idiom of open hate speech there, as well. With Trump the crossover was complete, and he had no one to thank for all of his powerful depravity than Rush Limbaugh.
And thank him he would, presenting Rush with the Presidential Medal of Freedom during the 2020 State of the Union Address, and taken within the context of the thesis I share here, it not only made perfect sense, it was the “right thing” to do. Rush had laid all the groundwork, turned the soil and planted the seeds for Trump to come along and enjoy the harvest. It was a natural progression. Rush had been the John the Baptist to the Trump Jesus and similarly acknowledged his predecessor.
So for all of these achievements, today I celebrate cancer. Don’t think I don’t understand the incredible cruelty of the disease. I do. I lost a very cherished sister to it and it was brutal and ugly and unforgiving. I don’t wish it on anyone, but with all of that, something had to stop a blight on the American landscape. Enough damage had been done, and arguably to more people than the disease causes. Evil is never pure, any more than good is. Hitler had the most progressive labor laws in the civilized world in his tenure as Fuhrer, and yet it is hard to identify an evil more complete than he represents. So this is cancer’s day, the day it was the good guy.
The Limbaugh Era isn’t over, not by a long shot. It still has to be defeated and I’m not entirely sure how we will do that. Millions of people have been gaslighted beyond all reason and it is unclear how to reach them. lies having become truth and truth lies.
In my new format for my blogs, YouTube channel and Podcasts I intend to have Wednesdays be devoted to politics from an older progressive’s perspective and to have Friday’s entries concentrate on the various issues of getting older. The news intervened this week as this passing of Rush had to be addressed, but I can somewhat justify this on a Friday as few things have made me feel older, more depleted, more hollowed out than Rush Limbaugh. He afforded me an existential sadness that only his passing could possibly relieve, if only just a little.
When I first heard him in the 90s I thought it was a parody. Then I thought his followers were this weird cultish tribe, a minor entertaining blip on the political landscape. They weren’t.
They attacked the United States Capital and tried to kill representatives, senators and vice presidents on January 6th, 2021.
Thanks Rush. They simply couldn’t have done it without you. Take your Medal of Freedom with you.
Mine arrived yesterday in the form of an obituary.
Clarence Darrow has always been one of the great heroes of the American Story for me. The very highest echelon. He put it as well as anyone.
“I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure.”
This one just tickled me.