Rush Limbaugh.

Hey Unf*ckers. We have a new essay coming out on Monday, loosely titled “Unf*cking Congress,” so be on the lookout for the release. It’s a bit of a departure, and silly in parts because someone was drinking and writing again. (Something about Congress that drives one to drink, amirite?) In the meantime, I wanted to interrupt with some thoughts on the passing of the great Rush Limbaugh.

“Great?”

Oh, yes. He was great. In the broadcasting world, and in terms of his influence over a generation of politicians and other talking heads, he stands pretty much alone. I also hope he died very much alone. Limbaugh collected wives over the years, but appears to never have had any children.

So, while he leaves behind no seedlings, he is by no means without an extensive legacy. Limbaugh sired a new language of hate and cynicism that was truly unparalleled in broadcast history. Nothing left of center escaped his eye, and vitriol spewed from his mouth like an open fire hydrant in the sweltering summer heat.

He showed what was possible by “going there.” Nothing was sacred. No one was spared. Not Michael J. Fox, whom he accused of being overly dramatic and phony. Not young Sandra Fluke, whom he thrust in the spotlight by calling her a slut for advocating for health insurance coverage of birth control. Not the President of the United States, whom he derided as Barack the Magic Negro.

These anecdotes are rightfully making their way through social media to remind us that this recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom was a monster. And one who loved every minute of it.

Should have listened to Rush the band instead.

When I was a much younger man trying to find my voice and place in the world, I often played the part of contrarian. If you said white, I said black. Up, down. Left, right. I was a bit of an asshole, I suppose, but I truly loved to debate and enjoyed learning from these exchanges. The first two clubs I joined in college were the Black Action Movement and the Young Republicans. I wanted to learn it all. Every side of every debate. So I would “try on” philosophies and ideals that were sometimes a fit and other times a disaster. But it was always in the spirit of learning. Plus, nothing is more didactic than getting your ass handed to you in a debate.

I wound up at a very liberal college in the northeast. I wasn’t politically informed, but I was desperate to follow this path and soak up as much as I could. My contradictory nature led me to adopt the role of conservative, determined to tweak the “credit card hippies” that were all around. They, too, were mostly trying on different masks and identities, which is one of the great luxuries of self discovery.

It was during a snowstorm in the early 1990s that I took an ill advised trip home to visit my mother. My dad was away on a business trip and I missed her. So I decided to surprise her. (I am, and have always been, a momma’s boy.)

Along the way, I popped in the audio book cassette by Rush Limbaugh. I think it was, See, I Told You So. I was all about beating up on Bill Clinton at the time, and there seemed like no better way to fill my bag of debate tricks than to listen to Rush. (Today, I’m disgusted by the Clinton years, but for entirely different reasons than my younger conservative self was at the time.)

About an hour into the trip, I hit a patch of ice on the road and overcorrected the wheel… hard. I sat motionless as my car spun around several times. I remember the whole thing vividly and in slow motion. These things really are like that. As I did 360s down the highway, the car was lit up with each passing turn by a fast-approaching 18 wheeler that I had passed moments before.

And then, impact.

The tractor-trailer slammed into the passenger side of my car and tossed it to the shoulder like a rag doll. My car was destroyed. The only thing that remained completely intact was the driver’s side seat, the steering wheel and the radio. Up ahead, the truck came to a stop and put on its hazards as I sat there, frozen, for several minutes just listening to Rush Limbaugh shout about liberals and “feminazis.” It was surreal.

Eventually, I opened my door, walked slowly through the snow toward the truck ahead and knocked on the door of the semi. The driver told me to wait as he radioed the police and told them that he just struck a car on the highway and the driver was dead. (Spoiler: I wasn’t.)

When the police confirmed they were on their way, he finally looked down and asked me if I had seen what happened. When I told him I was the driver of the car, he was in complete disbelief. Strangely enough, I have no memory of what happened next. I can only remember sitting at home on the couch with my mother. No idea how I got there. Nothing.

Was it all an act? Doesn’t Matter.

Limbaugh didn’t vote until he was 35 years old. Until that time, he was a small time disc jockey who discovered that talking shit about politics between records was more popular than the music. He was smart enough to drive a freight train through this opportunity and reinvent himself as a right wing political maven. The subject didn’t really matter to him as much as the response. Love him? Great. Hate him? Even better. Limbaugh possessed the ability to compartmentalize the man from the entertainer. Spell my name right, and all of that.

I heard Nicole Hemmer interviewed on a podcast about Rush earlier today and she was asked about this phenomenon. Did she think there was Rush the man behind Rush the entertainer? Her response was essentially, “Why should we care?” She went on to say that it shouldn’t matter what was “in his heart.” His words and work literally created the right wing culture that we have today. He was the spiritual head of the alt-right, the man who developed their shared language and customs and fanned the flames of hatred for decades.

No one has come close to what he achieved, though cheap knockoffs like Mark Levin on radio and Fucker Carlson on TV have tried to attain this status. No, Rush Limbaugh was the top of the mountain. The right wing of the Republican party today owes a great deal to this man, which is why you’ll not only see outpourings of support for him on conservative media outlets, but a race to see who will fill his shoes.

The best part of his death is that, well, he’s dead. It’s fine to say that because his life was destructive to our democracy and mental health of so many of our citizens. The further his listeners descended into madness and conspiracy, the wealthier he became. He profited from their mental decline and the instability he wrought on our society, so there’s really no need to mourn him.

But his death is also meaningless in terms of progress. Because he was around and relevant for so long, his brand of misogyny and racism has become the status quo. His views and mannerisms are part of us now. So many of his destructive thoughts and vocabulary are ingrained in the political lexicon of our country. He’s the one that made this all acceptable. Not Murdoch or Mercer, not Fox or Newsmax. This was Rush’s playbook, and he left it behind for all to follow.

So, as much as I would like to say “good riddance to bad rubbish,” I know in my heart that his legacy will endure, and that really, really pisses me off.

Tiny Epilogue

Days after my accident, I rented a car and drove back to the junkyard my car was taken to. It was that moment that I realized just how much of a miracle it was that I was alive. Literally the only thing left was the driver side seat, the steering wheel and the center console. I fished through the middle to grab some personal items, grabbed the registration and then signed the insurance form to acknowledge the car was beyond repair.

And, though the radio was there and accessible, I did not retrieve my Rush Limbaugh tapes.

For years, I took it as a sign that I was being punished for listening to Rush. Honestly, I still do.

Image Sources

• Gage Skidmore from Surprise, AZ, United States of America, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Changes were made.