 Here is music industry influencer Bob Lefsetz’s commentary yesterday***, via his long-running “The Lefsetz Letter” newsletter, after news broke that conservative talk titan Rush Limbaugh passed away of lung cancer at age 70. Lefsetz begins by asking us not to rejoice—and yeah, I don’t think we should celebrate anyone’s passing unless we’re getting up there into Hitler or Stalin or Emperor Palpatine territory. But the biggest reason Bob urges restraint here is that Limbaugh, as woefully responsible as he is for how the Republican Party conducts itself in the 21st century—he’s perhaps more responsible for it than any actual politician—Rush is just one guy. He was the first, and the loudest, but he just kicked things off...the damage is done, and the need to fix it certainly doesn’t end now that Rush has left the scene. (And by the way, notice I didn’t say The Rush Limbaugh Show has left the scene—nope, Premiere Networks has confirmed the show will live on, with guest hosts.) Which touches on a bigger issue being talked about a lot lately: in America, it seems we tend to treat the symptoms of a political disease rather than the disease itself. The folks who identify as fans of Rush, of Trump, and of Fox News remain aggrieved, and will remain so despite Rush’s departure, and Trump’s departure from office. And that’s because their troubles, be they real or imagined, are as prevalent and painful for them and their families as ever. The 74 million (!) who voted for Trump in 2020 continue to hurt, for myriad reasons, and thus continue to wait for someone in a position of power to not only tell them help is on the way, but indisputably deliver that help. The underlying causes of these folks’ concerns must be identified, taken seriously (assuming they are legit worries and not debunked conspiracy theories or based in hate or discrimination), and addressed with the kind of good-faith intentionality Mr. Limbaugh relentlessly shirked in his own messaging. I’m saying this as someone who is a strong supporter of most of Bernie Sanders’ ideology (maybe 94% of it...I’m not identifying as a democratic socialist just yet). But back in the day, for a brief period, as a South Central Indiana high school senior, I can confirm that I was devoted to exactly 100% of the ideology of Rush Limbaugh (to the limited extent I understood it), his EIB (Excellence In Broadcasting) Network, and fellow Dittoheads everywhere. Yes, for a short time I was a bigger fan of Rush the conservative talk radio personality than Rush the band (and this is after attending the Roll the Bones tour AND the Counterparts tour, both of which inexplicably featured Mr. Big as opening act. I liked Mr. Big, but I’d seen them a bunch already—and no one needs to hear “To Be With You” ever again, in concert or on record, even the band admits that). I found myself listening to Limbaugh’s radio show every day when I got home from school. Why? For the same reason I was such a big Ohio State football fan, I suppose: because my dad was into Rush. (Limbaugh, that is...music-wise he was more of a Creedence guy.) Dad was the nicest, most warm-hearted, most thoughtful and empathetic guy ever. He’d do anything for anybody. He didn’t revel in politics; he just voted Republican because he was conservative by nature, he’d hung out with a lot of conservative dudes in college, his best friend growing up became the head of the Reagan administration’s Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC), and he was just an all-around business-minded guy—he managed sales throughout Indiana and Kentucky for our modest hometown pneumatic controls company that’d been gobbled up by a multinational corporation in the early ‘90s. While I maintain Dad was a staunch Republican in voting record alone, he was thusly pretty staunch: he found Mitt Romney to be a perfectly adequate choice for president in 2012; he loooooved John McCain in ‘08 (although I could tell he secretly wished he’d joined in on the fun and voted for Obama); he held his nose and voted for Dubya both times; he liked Ol’ Bob Dole just fine in ‘96; and he liked George H.W. Bush quite a bit, too. So guess who else voted for Bush, Vol. I, as soon as he was old enough (although apparently not smart enough) to make his voice heard?? Simply hearing Rush on the radio wasn't enough. I (somehow?) subscribed Dad and myself to Rush’s The Limbaugh Letter newsletter; I bought Rush’s book The Way Things Ought to Be for Dad's birthday with my own hard-earned-at-Arby’s money (probably the only book I read cover-to-cover that year); and I started staying up even later on school nights in order to flip over from Arsenio Hall to Rush’s new TV edition of his show, which broadcasted at the very adult-viewing hour of 12:30 a.m. If all this weren't egregious enough, I also fancied myself a songwriter by that point—and a topical one at that! I remember sitting in study hall, writing a riff-rock number called “Everyman” whose sole aim was to make fun of the upstart presidential ticket of Bill Clinton and Al Gore. I just now found the cassette demo I made of it for my first college bandmates so they could learn the tune...wanna read the lyrics? You do?? (You do. Dammit.) Alright fine, please enjoy below the ignorant lyrical stylings of 17-year-old me referencing...
Wasted all your chances Cheating Father Time I found your lost halo In 1969 Would things be any different If they stayed the same Thank God you came along To rain on our parade Everyman, make me feel special today Everyman, make me feel special Takin’ you a journey Soaring overseas Bring on home a hero ‘Specially for the trees Help us maintain our health Lord knows we can’t alone When it’s OK to breathe We trust you’ll let us know Everyman, make me feel special today Everyman, make me feel special Sadly, the other guys in Dreadnaught (*retch*) declined to add “Everyman” to the setlist on the grounds that it sounded, in their studied estimation, “a little gay.” The drummer, in particular, was quite suspicious I would ask another man to make me feel “special,” and perhaps not coincidentally he left the band soon thereafter. (His loss!) Not only were his worries for naught (*retch*) that I might be a member of the gay community (I don’t think we’d even made it to “LGB” in Indiana by then, let alone “LGBTQ+”), for my part I had yet to even meet a member of the gay community. Hell, I was another year out from knowingly meeting a member of the Jewish community for the first time. (I say knowingly because, unbeknownst to me, I’d been playing with two Jews for six months before the keyboard player in this band, college band #2, mentioned in passing he was Jewish. I must have appeared taken aback, because the bassist, who I’d known for much longer than the keyboardist, was like, “Wait, you didn’t know I was Jewish?” I mean, I was exhilarated—I’d met multiple Jewish people, all in one day! And I started dating a Jewish girl soon after...not because she was Jewish, but because she was cool. But I did, in addition to her being cool, think it was cool she was Jewish. But anyway....) Despite such Sheltered White Boy Syndrome flare-ups, I had by that point begun a merciful about-face in my worldview. The turning point? One beautiful upperclasswoman from suburban Chicago making a lightly researched-but-passionate case in a communications law class for libel against some wicked far-right scoundrel or another; that was all it took for me to instantly flip on whatever Limbaugh credo I’d half-assedly dabbled in to that point. Mr. Lefsetz also included in his missive on Mr. Limbaugh a link to a Washington Post piece reporting that “A majority of the people arrested for the Capitol riot had a history of financial trouble” (https://wapo.st/3s6gGam). The article made one Capitol invader all the more infamous with its account of her taking a private jet to the Save America rally on January 6, hawking her real estate services while livestreaming the insurrection, and later appealing publicly for a pardon from the president. Upon first reports, I was pretty repulsed by this lady’s behavior and I’m not sure how differently I feel now that less incriminating details are available on her. But for a moment, let’s give her the benefit of the doubt when she says: “I bought into a lie, and the lie is [the ‘Big Lie’ that the election was stolen], and it’s embarrassing,” she said. “I regret everything.” The quote that really got me, though: after she had, over a relatively brief period of time, evolved from casual Republican, to sampling the far-right Epoch Times, to watching the ferociously unhinged Alex Jones’ Infowars, to soaking up the batshittiest of batshit QAnon spewage, she admitted she had simply become unthinkingly enthralled by all of it. She was “just having fun:” “It was all like a football game. I was sucked into it. Consumed by it.” That’s my 17-year-old self’s excuse, too. It was fun. I liked this guy Rush, he was a funny guy! And the snobs he was roasting, grrrr...so snooty! I wasn’t privy to all the details, per se, or all the politics he was talking about, but, did I have to be? I knew enough to know it was high time somebody showed those highfalutin wacko Democrats what-for! At least that’s what I imagine I was thinking back then. Like I said, though: it didn’t take anything more than the power of a pretty girl to turn me around. And while it took a bit more than that for my dad to get there—namely a malignantly narcissistic sociopath—even he voted for Hillary in ‘16; it was his last presidential vote before he passed away and his very first vote ever for a Democrat anywhere on any ballot. A bunch of the Capitol insurrectionists’ viewpoints appear to be shifting as well. I can’t get over how the lady quoted in the WaPo article sounds more like a glorified tailgater than a committed seditionist. The piece describes her agenda on January 6 as if “coup” was just one of the touristy stops on her list that day, right between tipsy bocce at Vinoteca and drunk dancing at Heist. Now she feels duped: “Now I see [storming the Capitol] was all over nothing. [Trump] was just having us down there for an ego boost.” I realize WaPo was her chance at some good publicity before heading off to her next (*gulp*) federal court appearance. But I feel like we as a nation have no choice but to trust that a sizable chunk of Trump’s 74 million 2020 voters are less seditionists than disillusioned conservative bubble dwellers particularly susceptible to being entertained into malfeasance (as many of us are, to be fair). Some are seditionists, though, so, eff them. (Although...I’d imagine they can be rehabilitated, too, right?) Some others I’d guess are moderately proud Make America Great Again’ers who, whether they’ve contemplated so or not, would probably draw the line at attending a simple Trump rally—kinda fun driving for 90 minutes to wait on a cold tarmac for the former host of Celebrity Apprentice to roll up and yowl out all his venomous hits, but can we wrap this up by dinnertime? And for a sizable portion of Trump's 2020 voters, I’ll bet they just have the red cap hanging on a hat rack in the basement. And that’s the extent of it. I choose to believe the majority of these folks slipped rather easily into supporting Donald Trump in the middle 2010s—because it was fun, and certainly catered more to their conservative values than the Democrats’ agenda seemed to. As for 2020, “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” The fact that Trump mostly just delivered on the “promises made” part? Well, we’ll worry about that later. Or not. So now it’s later. And now the mainly-for-fun protest club that is MAGA for most people isn’t as fun anymore. And the ills that led them to unrest in the first place, and to unsuspectingly open their hearts to demagoguery, still persist. What if we all—they, we—were now presented with boldly realized, tangible, significant fixes for the everyday problems of everyday folks? Whether asked for by some of these folks or not? I know I’m oversimplifying it. But I’m not ready to give up on those among Trump’s 74 million voters who aren’t seditionists, who just want somebody, somewhere, somehow to improve their damn lives a little bit, for once. I fully acknowledge that a vote for Trump last November, whether cast consciously or not, was effectively a vote for child separation at the border, as well as all the other pure evil that in my view far-outweighed any good the Trump administration may have done. But if MAGA life does stop being all that fun, who knows? Maybe some new trustworthy public figure or personality, agreed upon by damn near everybody, will step forward and, this time, make it fun for everyday folks of every race, background, and worldview to team up against the powerful interests holding us all back so we can demand genuine liberty and justice for all. (In other words: C’MON, TOM HANKS!! You could totally save the world, Hanks, and you know it!!!) I think a lot of folks could be persuaded to unite like that, if everybody on all sides felt they were being respected, empowered, and included by everybody on all the other sides (an Obama-era edict, there, incidentally: respect, empower, include). It was a long time ago, when I was 17, and there was very little at stake for me since I was a straight white American male afforded every privilege. But I’m tellin’ ya, it only took a pretty girl whispering heartfelt near-nothings for me to see through the cult of Rush Limbaugh’s personality. * * * * * * * * * * * * *I’m working on a magazine-style website (a magsite?) devoted to (1) finding common ground amongst dissimilar folks and (2) promoting the common good for everybody in America who’s not a filthy rich dickwad. (Although, if you’re filthy rich, and not a dickwad, you’re certainly welcome to join us!) Vertical ideas include: “21st Century Social Justice for Straight White American Males” (i.e., privileged straight white dude publicly learns about the systemic prejudice baked into his worldview from birth so you don’t publicly have to), “Worthy Opponents” (i.e., fans of the same sports team but with differing politics compare notes...or fight to the death, we’ll see), and “With All Due Respect…” (i.e., reaction articles to the work of media personalities I usually-but-not-always agree with, with subtitles like “Blog Save Pod Save America” and “The Lefsetz Letter Letter”). **I think Rush’s fans called themselves “Dittoheads” in solidarity with one another, to signal they all agreed implicitly with their hero. But a few decades removed from my own Dittohead membership and it sures seems like Rush delighted in the moniker mainly because his folks were only too content to parrot his viewpoints with little regard to their substance. ***At the earliest you are reading this the day after Mr. Limbaugh passed away and Mr. Lefsetz wrote about it; while I wanted my post to be as fresh as possible, I was reminded to take my time in publishing by this little visual note at my desk:  That’s supposed to be Rush, drawn a couple years ago. He’s not necessarily crossed out because of any disdain I might have for him, though. Rather, I’ve been concentrating on trying not to *rush* through projects I’m excited about...this per the guided meditations I typically rush through so I can get back to my exciting projects.
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