Limbaugh Remembered...One Last Time

Learning of the death of an individual you’ve never met is a tricky thing. It can be a cause for ambivalence, reflection perhaps, or even empathy. For most of us, nearly all of us I suppose, the death of a stranger, famous or otherwise, is rarely a cause for delight. Death and delight seem just so incompatible for those of us who don’t run with, say, the Russian Mafia. 

I have written several posts to this blog over the years with a focus on Rush Limbaugh. One I wrote eleven years ago was titled The Most Evil Man in America . Prior to that and ever since my opinion never varied, although became increasingly etched in stone.  I hated Rush Limbaugh, but not like I might hate someone who callously killed my dog. I hated Limbaugh like I could hate a disease. 

I believe most of the people who loved Limbaugh, and there were millions, never understood exactly what he was. If they understood without it affecting their devotion, it was due to envy.

Rush was an entertainer and an opportunist. The black sheep ne’er-do-well in a family of distinguished jurists, he was unleashed in 1987 (at the age of 36) by Ronald Reagan’s ending the 38 year old FCC regulation called The Fairness Doctrine. He realized he could apply his glib talents by being able to say and broadcast words appealing to the dark side of the American mindset without contradiction. 

Who were these devotees? I would bet my meager fortune that every one of the mob that formed on the Capital Mall January 6^th , to the last Man or Woman, were faithful listeners. Take that and extrapolate. 

Was Limbaugh an opportunist because he found a medium to relay a political and social philosophy he held dear? Not a chance. Nothing in his first 36 years indicates he had an activist bone in his body.  Like Roger Ailes, who in 1996 saw the same opportunity to create a news network that would make him and Rupert Murdock hundreds of millions, Limbaugh was motivate first and foremost by money…and succeed he did. 

Rush Limbaugh’s personal fortune is estimated to be well north of $500 million. Not bad for a college dropout disc jockey. I suspect we will find out specifically one day since his ego would never allow the degree of his success to go unappreciated. It is his happy legacy. 

Will his followers ever realize that he was milking them with every racist, misogynist, homophobic, hate laden, and conspiratorial utterance he made? Not likely. Perhaps their children will. 

So how does one deal with the death of someone as objectively dissolute and immoral as Rush Limbaugh? I almost reluctantly have to admit that delight was not the first reaction I had to the news. Had there been a compatriot nearby I might have high fived them, but it would have been without enthusiasm. 

Perhaps the only thing left is to survey the damage and move on.  The only real joy is the satisfaction of living long enough to see it happen. 

Be a RINO

How do you get the word out to solve an obvious problem? It’s becoming clearly evident that the Republican Party is at a crossroads…long in coming. It will be a battle in which the outcome impacts everyone. 

Much rhetoric, really lip service has been given to the idea that unity for a politically split America can be achieved with just so much kum ba yah.  Obama thought he could sell it and, as a result, he got his clock cleaned by the Mitchell led Republicans ending in four years of Trump horror. Now it has become a lead infomercial for Joe Biden. 

Our Nation has a majority left leaning, moderate electorate. There is room in that majority for moderate, conservative Republicans and the Nation would be politically less dynamic without them. However, since the beginning of this century the Republican Party has been hijacked by an extreme Right wing of the Party, primarily by philosophies rooted in White Supremacy and Christian Nationalism. 

They have cloaked themselves in flags, “patriotism”, prayers, slogans of “law and order”, and “righteousness”. However, what really drives them is an endless dirge of fear propagated by power hungry politicians and a dedicated, profit driven media. Rush Limbaugh deserved a metal, sure, but it should have been for amassing $500 million by soaking the faithful. 

The far Right (otherwise known as the Trump base) have been brainwashed (truly brainwashed) into fearing that “Liberals”, Government, minorities, immigrants, intellectuals, homosexuals, and the poor are conspiring to take away everything they hold dear, and, even worse, poisoning their children to their values and beliefs. This mindset is virtually no different than that embraced by white Southerners immediately after the Civil War. 

Like political fundamentalists, there is no wavering from Right Wing Conservative dogma, so any Republican that strays is immediately thrown into the Liberal stewpot. In fact, those Republicans are the most targeted, not just for their “heresy” but because they can actually be taken down within our democratic process. 

It wouldn’t be an issue was it not for the fact that the arcane mechanisms by which we choose representatives in Government is weighted in their favor.  The Electoral College, the Senate, and gerrymandering gave this minority real power. They created a President Trump and the people who enabled him for four years. This should not, cannot happen again. But to stop it will take more creative effort than has been rallied to date. 

Democrats and Independent voters (D&I) need to take on Republican extremism. Not by trying to win general elections in Red states and districts, but by controlling them where it counts…at the Primary level. 

Democrats and Independents need to vote in Republican primaries to assure that the only choice available in the general election is between two individuals who believe their power and future will ultimately be determined by defending the Nation's well being. 

A movement needs to begin right away to prepare D&I to register as Republicans in those states that require such to vote in a Republican Primary (closed or semi-closed), or to educate them to vote Republican in those states that have no requirement (open or semi-open). Every adult American citizen should have the right to vote in both Republican and Democratic Primaries, but that would have to occur at the state level, and we’re probably decades away from that. 

Changing registration to Republican would also allow Democrat and Independent voters to influence Republican caucus states. 

This should not be stealth activism, quite the opposite. We want to encourage moderate Conservative Republicans to take on the extreme Trumpian candidates, and we want existing Republican lawmakers to know they don’t have to define their actions through appeasement. 

The sacrifice of not using a vote to influence the Democratic nomination is minor compared to the need for keeping the door closed on Right Wing extremism. It’s time for the American majority to define the future. Become a Republican in name only…be a RINO.

We Need More Wind

On August 11, 1949 Margaret Mitchell stepped off the curb on Peachtree Street in Atlanta, a street known by millions of people because of her. She was suddenly hit by a passing car, her husband watching just behind her, and died five days later at age 48. 

She had a minor career as a journalist while in her 20s, but she gained extraordinary fame and literary “immortality” for the only book she ever wrote as an adult, Gone with the Wind. Published in 1936, this first book by an unpublished and unknown author sold for $3 a copy (probably due to its 1037 pages), the equivalent of $56 today. It sold a million copies in the first six months…during the depression. 

It has been and is considered one of the greatest works in American Literature.  Polls as recently as 2008 and 2014, have the American public rating it as their second favorite book of all time...after the Bible. Mitchell was awarded a Pulitzer Prize and won the National Book Award. The epic film from her book was completed only 3 years later, and, more often than not, listed in the top five of greatest American films to this day. 

The book appears to be somewhat autobiographical, in the sense that Mitchell used her experience growing up in Georgia in a relatively wealthy family and had close relationships with her grandparents who had firsthand experience of the Civil War and Reconstruction years in Georgia. Once published it appears she lived off her fame with her husband, John Marsh, giving interviews, christening warships, and such, till her untimely death. 

There is no equivalent publication story in American literary history, even though were it written today…it would never be published.  We’ve come too far. 

As a child I saw the movie actually in a movie theater, for the film was periodically re-circulated to theaters until the early 1960s. I thought it was incredible. It was a major reason I grew up (in New York) with a sense of empathy for the plight of the scrappy Southerners during and after the Civil War. It remains one of the finest examples of “educating” the general population about history in the form of entertainment. As with most movies that center on wars, entertainment trumps history every time, and ignores the insidious themes that flow beneath. 

Decades later, incarcerated in a pandemic, with time to spare, and in search of another book to read; I thought Gone with the Wind …why not? Now having read it and, at nearly the same time, watching real history being made, such as the mob assault on our Capital Building, I am taken aback how this beloved novel found its way into the darkest regions of America’s beating heart. 

Movie goers would give casual description of Gone with the Wind as an epic love story, which is understandable from the marquee posters to the last words of Rhett Butler as he walks out into the fog. Certainly the novel devolves into a well conceived romantic melodrama in the last 200 pages or so. 

The movie makers knew what they were doing. It takes reading the book to understand the underlying message which laments stolen heritage and the wicked destruction of rigid social classes. 

I write this not as a review of the novel. It is, in fact, beautifully written, really quite extraordinary for a first time author. The characters are rich with character and the story is complex and complete. I am writing this because both story and characters define the essence of what reactionary Americans, who count themselves as Christian Conservatives, have become in the 21^st century. 

I could almost see the tinsel insurrectionists screaming through the halls of Congress with a Bible in one hand and a copy of Gone with the Wind in the other, just as those sympathetic with their motivations might imagine it so, but with endorsement. 

Nearly countless signs, flags, masks, hats, and politician rhetoric on January 6^th at the Capital sported the phrase: Stop the Steal. Those signs, et al, echoed Trump’s endless drumbeat, begun even before the election and daily thereafter, to perpetuate the “Big Lie”. Still, in the light of virtually no evidence to justify The Lie, why have so many Americans so emotionally embraced it to the point of debasement. 

I believe the “steal” they feel so heinous is not simply about an election outcome. You can find it in the pages of Margaret Mitchell’s book. They have been fed the illusion that the lives they envision for themselves and their children are in the process of being stolen.  Her novel begins with goodness surrounding a class of landed, white aristocracy, seeking only God given freewill, Nature’s manna from heaven, and self determination. This honorable goodness is ripped away by a criminal Federal government, “scallywags”, and “free issue N-----s”. 

Today's Trump supporting Christian Conservatives want a life back that they never had; that they were told had been theirs. Trump and those like him have fed that anxiety for 155 years. As a candidate and then President, Trump used his honed persona and seemingly endless lies and conspiracies to rally and incite white Christian Conservatives to believe that a “Great” America was something to be reclaimed. 

Trump did it primarily for his own enjoyment and aggrandizement; even to the point when lost he and his confederates engineered perhaps the most ludicrous attempt to overthrowing a major government in modern world history. I wouldn’t have been surprised had the mob been armed for the final attack with MyPillows. Humor and tragedy are so often different sides of the same coin. 

It is sad for me to think someone as gifted as Margaret Mitchell might have supported the assault on the Capital last month, but it’s hard to see it any other way, after all…she wrote the book. If Republican Senators had any sense at all, they would take that book and throw it directly at Donald Trump.