It's not hell, just Limbaugh: excellence in bombast - radio and television talk show host Rush Limbaugh

Commonweal, June 4, 1993 by Frank McConnell

Celeste, with connubial exasperation dripping from every word: "You're going to watch him gain?"

"Well, yeah," I said, lighting up and punching in channel 13. "I said I'd write about him." "But you've been watching him for a week, now," she said. "Okay, look." I said, taking a long drag and deciding to come clean, "I can't help it: I get a kick out of Rush Limbaugh."

"Mph." she mphed. leaving the den. With the cat.

Well, it is the kind of thing you only admit to your wife and/or your best friend. nicht wahr? Sort of like owning up to a preference for brandy boilermakers or the Captain and Tenille: not quite, as the Brits say, "the done thing."

Rush Limbaugh - just in case you're recently back from a UFO abduction - is - is - oh, hell.

He's a two- or three-hundred-pound (it varies) ultraconservative in a dark Dacron-looking suit and some of the ugliest neckties ever allowed on TV, with a face uncannily like the later Orson Welles and the vaguely West-Texas accent of a televangelist. He's been for years now the host and the only star, performer on a radio show where he happily expresses opinions that have been known to send even mild liberals running for the Xanax bottle. He makes very large bucks selling copies of videotapes where he does the same thing. He's the author of a book, The Way Things Ought to Be (Pocket), where he says the same stuff he says on his radio show and his videos, and which is selling just fine, thank you. And now he's the host and star performer on his own, syndicated TV show. Where he says the same stuff. Here's some of the stuff he says.

On "Today," the third day of the L.A. riots, it was ol' Rush who first insisted that the real cause of the riots was not the Rodney King verdict, nor yet the urban frustration of inner Los Angeles, but those perky liberal telecopters who covered the riot. On his own show, ol' Rush continually referred to Spike Lee's Malcolm X as "Malcolm the Tenth," and suggested that students who wanted to cut classes to see the premiere (as Lee had urged) should go all the way emulating the film's hero, and loot the candy counters in the theater lobbies. He insists again and again that the capitalist system, as it stands, is full of benefits, joy, seashells, and balloons for the people really willing to work at it; that nothing is really wrong, except for the liberals; that Rodney King obviously was a threat to the four cops who beat the hell out of him. And, since the inauguration, each installment of his show begins with the legend, "America under Siege," and usually with a Monty Python-style cartoon of Clinton, Hillary, or somebody from the new administration.

Ol' Rush. If media genius is targeting, arousing, and maintaining the precise audience you need to keep on the air, then this is the man.

The wonderful thing about Limbaugh, though, is not that he expresses irresponsible and often vile opinions for an eager audience who, apparently like irresponsible and vile opinions. That has been done in America since the electromagnetic media were born: who can forget Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy? The wonderful thing is that Brother Limbaugh, as far as I know, is the first ultraconservative on the scene to understand that his outrageousness can only be sustained by the media. Limbaugh may or may not really believe everything he says. But he does know, and has acknowledged, that what he says is, in its outrageousness, just what allows him to stay on the air and keep saying it and keep making money. Like a radio shock-jock, he understands that his opinions are a commodity whose adrenalin-content can never be allowed to drop, that every show is an audition. Think of Rush Limbaugh, in his frantic quest for permanent outrage, as a Rotarian Howard Stern.

That wise man, Neil Postman, wrote in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that one of the most deleterious effects of TV culture was the transformation of political discourse into showbiz. When everything becomes entertainment," Postman argues, even presidential campaigns are emptied of their fundamental seriousness: and this, mind you, three years before George Bush made Willie Horton his running mate and seven years before Ross Perot and Razorback Bill Clinton made campaigning an extended talk-show. I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the full darkness of Postman's prognosis: the last campaign seems to me to have produced some very good things, indeed. But the Limbaugh phenomenon surely is, whatever else it is, a textbook sample of the Postman principle.

Think about the chief media voices on the conservative side before Limbaugh. The most audible/visible have to be William F. Buckley, Jr., and George F. Will. Both authors are also TV products, but with a kind of virginal recalcitrance about, you know, getting too seriously involved. What both these characters have in common is, first, that they are writers before they are TV folks: Buckley, perennially encumbered by a hypertrophied vocabulary, the founder of National Review,, and Will, a syndicated columnist, imprisoned in the cell of his own compulsive allusiveness. What they also have in common is a deep reluctance, when they are on TV, to be on TV: notice how seldom either ever looks directly at the camera; notice how Bill's languorous, Oscar Wildean intonations and George's quick, nervous, prep-school-debater's ripostes (one of his own favorite words) are designed to hold the tacky business of TV performance at a tweedy arm's length. It can be embarrassing, like watching the school librarian trying to get loose and boogie at the class picnic.