Just how many Rush Limbaugh fans are there? Listeners to his radio show number somewhere between fourteen and twenty million daily (why not confirm these statistics yourself if you're dubious?). That would be about 4.5-6% of the American public, right? A listener doesn't make one necessarily a fan, of course.
The Limbaugh listeners I've met over the years were/are fans, however. They form a disparate group, united -- apparently -- only by their delight in Limbaugh's spewings. Otherwise, they'd probably spit on each other before sharing a meal together.
One, a guy Marxians might call a bourgeois specialist (a group that also includes teachers), worked for years as a corporate lawyer for one of the Big Three auto companies in the Detroit area. In his late sixties now, he was the son of a guy from Downriver who worked in manufacturing, of Polish Catholic background. He married a woman from Downriver in the 1960s and they had three kids together. After he become a lawyer, the family came to have a lot more money, and they moved up to Rochester Hills in the 1980s, into one of those McMansions with a menacing garage out front, plopped in the middle of a development near Adams High School (Madonna's old school) with no sidewalks and not much sense of community. By the time I knew him (through his daughter, an ex- since 2000), Bill Clinton was in office, and this guy was full throttle for Rush Limbaugh. We argued quite a bit about politics and culture. He then owned a small yacht (and eventually a large motorboat) with a berth in the Grosse Ille Yacht Club, and also a second home in a gated community in Florida, and a rental lot "Up North." He was a Republican, having switched parties during the "Reagan Revolution."
But there was more than this socio-economic backdrop. His wife was a terrifying tyrant (i.e. like Grendel's mother), and he feared her -- not without reason. Not able to get mad at her directly, he turned to Rush, and channeled much of his frustration and anger that way. Rush's enemies became his enemies. Sitting fat and secure, ruling the Home Front roost, his wife approved.
For the sake of brevity, end of story. Other Rush fans I know (and they are all white, mostly men), range from Lumpenproletariat to Fodderstompf, from Yobbo to Chav, but more on them at a later time.
Today's Rune: Movement.
4 comments:
As has ever been the case, the disenfranchised need a rally point. Personally I hope that the uber conservative right stays disenfranchised for as long a time as it takes the left to correct the dire straights the nation has been led into.
If Limbaugh and 4.6 % of the population wish to rant and carry on let them do it from their isolation, let them stay locked away in their mansions and studios and rave on. Words have power but the lunatic words only have power to garner the Xanax prescriptions.
National (mental) Health Care NOW!
I once had an argument with a Rush ditto head. It was enlightening. I've since stayed away from that crowd as far as possible. Talk radio is scary.
DAVE LETTERMAN SAID LAST NIGHT ON HIS SHOW THAT RUSH WAS "A BONEHEAD GANGSTER". HE IS AN UNELECTED OFFICIAL, A TALK SHOW GAS BAG AND YET EVEN REPUBLICANS FEAR HIM. STEELE AND OTHERS BACK DOWN AFTER CRITICIZING RUSH. I WONDER IF DAVE'S NETWORK WILL MAKE HIM APOLOGIZE? IT IS A SAD STATE OF AFFAIRS WHEN A MAN LIKE LIMBAUGH LEADS THE GOP.
America has now seen what the hard right can "accomplish" when given sufficient power. Now they wander in Limbaugh limbo...good riddance!
JC
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