Remembering Rush Limbaugh

(All these words about a radio host whose show I rarely heard, and just a short, silly poem about a dear friend? Published words measure what people know to be public information, not what they feel.)

People who worked during the daytime were not Rush Limbaugh's audience. That was and still is what my same-age friends needed to keep in mind. The only same-age acquaintance I had who was a Limbaugh fan had become a fan in the hospital. The radio show addressed people in hospitals, and people with mononucleosis, and long-distance truck drivers whose minds were mainly on the road but who found that Limbaugh's voice kept them awake. 

"He belabors every point! He'll say something that makes sense and then spend half an hour or an hour going over it. He preaches! And where does he get those people that call in, anyway?" 

But it worked for my father, during the year he was adjusting to being "legally blind," still able to see blurry shapes around him but unable to read. 

"Well, of course he can't help having cataracts," Mother said. We were driving back from Berea. "I've tried to be patient but your father's in the house, mostly in the kitchen," which was where radio reception was best, "listening to the radio, constantly. Country music and news and sports and there's this person called Rush Limbaugh. Have you heard of him? A retired football player who just talks about politics for three hours a day! It's supposed to be funny, and sometimes it is--but three hours!" 

Dad scheduled cataract surgery and came out worse than he'd been before. He decided it would be safer for him to live in a bare, dim little flat in the retirement project in town. The flat had three main rooms, all facing the street: patient's bedroom, nurse's room, and sitting room, separated by a corridor from kitchen, storage room, and bathroom. I was appointed Dad's nurse because I had more at-home time than my mother or sister had. I had three or four occasional jobs, baby-sitting, washing cars, renovating houses, recording a retrospective album, and an unpaid job of reading and studying as much as possible to prepare for any chance I might get to finish my B.S. I spent a lot of time in the nurse's room; on one side or the other I could hear the Limbaugh Show, most afternoons. 

I actually liked the song parodies. New recordings, with modern technology, often sounded better than the original hit records, whether I had them or not. I regretted that Limbaugh seldom broadcast a song parody twice. Dad caught a few of them on tape. The Clintons were in the White House, good for endless ridicule and parodies. "And a tax cut for you and for me!" "All your money, I will tax from you." "All of Hillary's schemes come crashing down." Hillary Clinton's first use of brain damage as a defense spawned "I don't remember! My brain's been in a blender!" Several songs posted at this web site were inspired by the Limbaugh Versions of classic rock songs. I would have loved for someone to have recorded them for the Limbaugh Show, or the Glenn Beck show. 

Dad and I hadn't been close for about fifteen years--since I started to look like Mother. It was that "Grooveyard of Forgotten Favorites" on the Limbaugh Show that got us sharing laughs and talking again.

The Limbaugh Show was contributing words and phrases to the language, too. "Dittos," "Megadittos," and "Dittoheads." "Rush Rooms" was the new name for the private-party rooms in trendy restaurants, because so many yuppies liked to catch the first few minutes of the Limbaugh Show on lunch break. "Uglo-Americans" was one of the more complex running jokes: Rush Limbaugh knew he wasn't handsome, and when he said the less beautiful were an oppressed ethnic group, that was something a lot of us could relate to. "Talent on loan from God" was another one; people thought it sounded boastful, but they were meant to hear it as a reminder of what "talent" means and that we're all meant to be using ours. Other vainglorious lines from the show, "With half my brain tied behind my back, just to make it even," and "The man millions of women hope their daughters will marry," were just jokes. "The folks in Rio Linda" were people who were even further behind than the audience for daytime radio. Limbaugh "loved the women's movement--especially when I am walking behind it," often sneered at "feminazis" (I prefer "feminitwits" for the sort of embarrassments he meant), but he made Mona Charen famous. He made fun of "victim group" thinking, too, but he actively celebrated the conservative writers who belonged to ethnic minority groups. 

While I was discovering Shelby Steele in The Best American Essays and agreeing that he's one of our best nonfiction writers, Dad was the older person who greeted me on the way in from work with "Have you ever heard of a writer called Thomas Sowell, S O W E L L? He was on the Limbaugh Show today. I think they told Limbaugh to have a Black person on there, because this Dr. Sowell is not a radio person. But he had some good things to say." At the time Thomas Sowell's books weren't in libraries everywhere. The Limbaugh Show created the demand and brought them in. 

I'm not sure how many other ethnic-minority writers Limbaugh introduced to other people. I don't make much effort to remember such things, but I'm fairly sure he was the first to introduce me to the work of Dinesh d'Souza, Michelle Malkin, and Allen West--all of whom have been quoted and linked to more often, at this web site, than Limbaugh himself has, for the following reason: they put more of their work on the Internet free of charge.

A lot of Democrats seem to want to believe that Republicans are racists. I suppose they can talk about their relatives and I'll talk about mine...I don't know any Republicans who hate any other ethnic group, as such. I know some Republicans whose post-traumatic stress flares when they see Asian faces or smell Asian food, but they consciously and conscientiously do not hate Asian or even Vietnamese people. Generally, my experience is that the older generation of Republicans want to have friends who look and sound different from them, but haven't met many of them and have been shy and awkward when they did meet one. Republicans my age and younger mostly do have close friends who look and sound different from us. So they're (and I'm) like, yes, if people are going to feel "hurt" by not getting more handouts at other people's expense, by all means hurt their feelings--but leave our friends and relatives' ethnic identities out of it, thank you just the same! 

(Tangent alert: "Reparations for slavery" is one of the easiest left-wing talking points for R's to ridicule, and it is indeed ridiculous, on the scale they talk about it. But I did once discuss it with a Republican I knew well--my mother, actually. "Though most people have no idea what their ancestors were doing in 1860, most White people's ancestors were not slave owners and quite a few Black people's ancestors were not slaves, our very special family has kept track of these things. We have the ancestor who blew out his fortune by freeing 300 slaves in one day, and he gave those ex-slaves jobs in his business and encouraged some of them to use the business name as their family name. Wouldn't it be fun, and cool, and wouldn't it just show those Jeffersons, if we set up a Family Foundation to raise money for scholarships for our Black and Lumbee namesakes?" Mother thought about it; I could tell she liked the idea of showing up the Jeffersons, and then she said, "But none of the White ones have that kind of money. The business never recovered." Now I'm not a Republican, but Mother was, and that's the way Republicans feel about reparations for those who can prove exactly where their ancestors were enslaved. About large groups? Bad joke.)

Older people seemed to like the Limbaugh Show more than my own generation. "He is a nut," said the real estate investor I was helping renovate houses, fondly. It was at one of her houses that I watched one of the great moments of layered wit in the TV version of the Limbaugh Show. Democrats were still cackling about the way Dan Quayle had read a misprinted cue card on a game show and insisted that "potatoe" was the correct spelling. Limbaugh set up a whole half-hour show around a simple math mistake a Democrat had recently made--and right in the middle of that show Limbaugh made a simple math mistake. 

"Did he just say what I thought I heard?"

"Did he? But that wouldn't be right..."

He had said what I had heard. I got the message. Intelligent people make stupid mistakes when they're talking fast in public. Lighten up! It was one of those times that made it clear that Limbaugh was several I.Q. points ahead of his show. He did little things like that for those of the audience who were alert enough to appreciate them.

Cognitive dissonance set in, for me, when a co-worker who wasn't much older than I was said admiringly that Limbaugh "was a gentleman." He certainly didn't talk the way older Virginia gentlemen, like Dad, used to talk. Even Virginians my age didn't talk like that; we weren't old enough, I suppose. Yet there were episodes of compassion and forbearance on the Limbaugh Show. Mocking other entertainers was Limbaugh's job, and once he kept his audience laughing for almost an hour with an elaborately exaggerated apology to a snowflaky sort of caller, but he was kind to and about people who just didn't belong on radio. 

Perhaps an all-time high point--he remembered it as one--was "Dan's Bake Sale." It started with a joke when a caller tried to tell Limbaugh he couldn't afford to subscribe to the Limbaugh Letter, and Limbaugh advised him to take a fiscally conservative approach to his problem. "Have a bake sale!" People picked up the idea and ran with it. Dan's Bake Sale grew into a sort of Republican-fest where people bought and sold all sorts of things. Yuppies, Limbaugh reported, came to the show to advertise themselves--"Will work for $50K," fifty thousand a year. "Dan" made a lot more money than he needed to subscribe to the Limbaugh Letter. Limbaugh made money, too, and so did several people in his audience. For weeks the Bake Sale was the best and funniest thing on radio.

The show Jim Traficant took over was the episode that convinced me that Limbaugh had a kind of genius. Congressman Traficant of Ohio was a Democrat. That hadn't prevented him from making some statements that were approvingly quoted on the George Peters FacTapes, nor did it necessarily have anything to do with the trouble he eventually got into for some business dealings in Ohio. I suspected it was of him that P.J. O'Rourke had written that, when he visited his U.S. Representative, of the hundreds of letters his Congressman got none was appreciative. So here was a political opponent on his way down, calling in to the Limbaugh Show, making himself a big fat target. 

And Traficant was terrible on radio. He choked, he fumbled, he dithered. Limbaugh didn't need to try to make him sound like an idiot. Some people, when put behind a microphone, just naturally do sound like idiots. The difficulty, if you are doing a radio show with them, is finding smooth ways to shut them up before they sound worse than they already do. If they're your opponents and they're on the way down, do you even try?

Limbaugh didn't even try to shut the older man up. He helped him out. Repeatedly. 

Anybody can make fun of a victim of mike fright, and anybody who has any business even in the school radio lab can ease one off the air, but keeping one on the show and getting intelligent statements out of him takes genius. 

Limbaugh could ad-lib for hours, even when he was in pain. He had the basic show business gift of being able to make a mistake into a joke. Only for one year did I hear the Limbaugh Show with any kind of regularity, and during that year I often turned away from it--"Who wants to listen to that crowd kick that around for another hour?"--but I did learn to respect Limbaugh's talents. 

I had agreed to live in the nurse's room in Dad's flat for one year and not a day more. After that my mother or sister could have the room if they liked. Toward the end of the year Dad said, "I've learned my way around this place. I'd rather be alone at night, in case I want to get up and play back something on a tape or something. I want you to go home and your mother and sister to stay where they are." So we did. I was getting more work hours, anyway, and had fewer occasions to hear the Limbaugh Show--except when people for whom I worked were listening to it. Quite often they were. And my parents paid off my college loans, in exchange for a year's work caring for a difficult patient. Dad didn't mean to be a difficult patient but he was.

Dad eventually lost patience with the Limbaugh Show. "They don't let him talk about anything of any consequence," like the Waco disaster, because attention to the disaster had supposedly inflamed Timothy McVeigh. The George Peters FacTapes investigated stories like that one, "for our Select Audience, for whom we know this information will be dangerous only to some people's continued employment." The FacTapes were more fun but still, from time to time, Dad continued to listen to the Limbaugh Show and try to tape-record any particularly good song parodies for me.

I think the Limbaugh Show was very good for Dad and for the other blind and disabled people who got involved in the FacTapes. The existence of cassette tape technology had been there to give them the idea that there was still something useful they could do. The success of the Limbaugh Show, the proof that people were interested in intelligent debates on serious topics, led directly to the FacTapes. The audience were actually more interested in information about medical news and charitable organizations than they were in politics; still, the Limbaugh Show convinced them that it was useful for blind and disabled people to collect and report information. 

The show went on. It continued to spawn neologisms. Eventually there were "Rush Babies." What was that? Young adults who'd grown up hearing the Limbaugh Show as babies. They made people my age feel old. But the way they rallied around when people called for censorship of the Limbaugh Show, even the young women who changed the phrase to "Rush Babes," made us feel better about becoming old. 

Limbaugh wasn't perfect. No one is. He became addicted to prescription painkillers, opening the national dialogue about this social problem. He taunted Michael J. Fox about Fox's disabling disease, causing some to feel that Limbaugh's own disease was conscience-activated "karma." 

There was that ambiguous "joke" about Chelsea Clinton. 

The original joke was, "Welcome to Washington. If you want a real friend, buy a dog."

George H.W. Bush's variation was, "I don't need a dog; I have Barbara." Well--I thought she was a fine-looking grandmother; I dressed like her, to some extent, and still do.  But grandmothers aren't what a typical college boy wants to date, so "dog" was ambiguous.

And then Limbaugh said, "Bill Clinton doesn't need a dog; he has Chelsea." Reactions broke down pretty precisely by birth date. People I knew who were born before 1950 thought that obviously the message was "Hillary is not a true, loyal friend," and the joke was funny. People who were born after 1950 thought that obviously the message was "Chelsea is not attractive," and of course she was too young to be someone a college boy wanted to date; she looked like a child because she was a child, and making fun of that was just plain mean. 

Who knows what Limbaugh meant with that crack, except that when you ad-lib for three hours a day or more you're likely to come up with a stupid attempt at a joke now and then. Most of us would probably have come up with more clinkers, and clunkier ones. Anyway he apologized, and, to be fair, he was born at the cut-off point.

Then there was the flap about Sandra Fluke. I seriously think that it's appropriate for men to leave it for women to chastise the women who embarrass us, as she did. Men calling a woman stupid can sound like sexist bigots. In the case of Fluke, who wanted tax-funded birth control pills, there was no shortage of women to call Fluke stupid. She was at a university in Washington. If you don't learn how to enjoy a date with no fear of pregnancy while at university in Washington, you are beyond hope.

And the cigars...I wonder whether Limbaugh used the cigars just to give people something to make stale jokes about. Life's too short to try to think of a cigar joke that's not stale.

There were also aspects of Limbaugh's life and work that weren't featured on his show. One that comes to mind is the classic joke, "God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve." I don't think Limbaugh was the first to say it but I'm sure he was the first to have it printed with his name on a best-selling T-shirt. If opposing things the homosexual lobby are screaming for is "antigay," then probably most conservatives are "antigay." This web site, which has actively promoted the work of people we know to be homosexual, also maintains that the homosexual lobby's decision to scream for same-sex marriage as opposed to an end to discrimination against the unmarried was "an own goal," was stupid, was tacky, and showed a howling lack of public spirit. As with opposing some of the things some of the ethnic minority groups have blathered about, it has nothing to do with hating people and everything to do with despising bad ideas. Meh, I don't know, maybe Limbaugh gave haters more occasions to call him antigay than I've done...well, I claimed lesbians as friends back when that was not trendy and took courage. I don't know whether Limbaugh ever had a "gay" friend but it was acknowledged, even by his enemies, that he gave hundreds of thousands of dollars to AIDS charities.

Some accuse Limbaugh of "polarizing" people too much. In 2000 many people said that candidates Bush and Gore both looked and sounded like a matched pair. The clamor to "radicalize" and "polarize" seemed to originate on the Left and affect primarily Democratic Party leaders, often setting them up against their followers. (Some surveys showed that, apart from voting for the handouts on which they depended, many D voters--possibly the majority--otherwise held views as "conservative" as the average R voter.) Limbaugh was a moderate and temperate conservative; he was also a solid, consistent one. If you see that as more harmfully "polarizing" than the way some D's want to work with the assumption that all R's and even I's must by definition be horrible people, well I say you need new glasses.

I think Limbaugh deserves to be remembered as a trailblazer who inspired, and opened doors for, thinkers from all sides. Michael Moore, James Carville, and Al Franken were among his imitators and competitors. I remember trying to decide which D's work came closest to Limbaugh's and thinking it was Moore. (My husband maintained that it was Carville. We used to debate that sort of thing for fun, with no emotional attachment to convincing each other, while driving at night.) Even when the Limbaugh Show focussed on football, or when other serious radio and TV talk shows focussed on medical news or car maintenance, Limbaugh was the first to bring serious content back to the commercial media. 

(Who can take his place? I'm not sure why bloggers have even bothered raising this question. He has a brother who's done some good work. I think Glenn Beck and Laura Ingraham come closest to Limbaugh's style. Some like Mark Levin, and younger, untested talents I don't recognize yet. Still, it's a silly question. There will never be another Rush Limbaugh.)

I think Limbaugh also deserves to be remembered as someone who passed "retirement age" and kept his career alive, for the last twenty years, in the face of intense pain. 

I think Limbaugh probably deserves to be remembered best for organizing the Bake Sale--the event that showed the world that Republicans can be warm, lovable, goofy, and public-spirited. I always knew that about the ones who are related to me. Much of the world remained to be convinced. Limbaugh did that.