The Limbaugh of It All

I hope the worms that eat him don’t get indigestion.

By Timothy Holmberg

I wrote this to all the social media unity evangelists intervening with friends who express some level of “good riddance “ at the passing of one Rush Limbaugh.

Against a tide of scolding and moralizing about the divisiveness in our society, I felt compelled to interrupt the preaching about a decency that Limbaugh never extended to any of his targets, so readers can consider why this division exists.

This is from a discussion containing just such an exchange, it is my unvarnished response...

“The next a-hole that tells me how I should express my feelings about the passing of Rush Limbaugh gets this:

(Name omitted) well, it’s pretty ballsy of you to drop in on a post like this with your lengthy treatise, shaming the inhumanity of us all. I suppose I should thank you for telling the victims of Limbaugh’s decades of abuse that they should display their sentiments in a more humane and compassionate manner.

So, since you decided to plop yourself down here, I may as well return the favor and type your ear off too. 

I, too, came across your dearest Rush back when he had his TV show. I started my political life as a “young Republican” at Orange Coast Community College, in that great bastion of conservatism, Orange County, CA.

Our representative at the time was “B-1” Bob Dornan, also nicknamed the “great white hope”. As racist a man as you would have the displeasure of meeting. His greatest rhetorical “high note” was calling a fellow Congress Member a “lesbian spear chucker”. And Limbaugh dutifully defended the abomination.

He and his Windsor tie knot wearing Hitler Youth (or ditto heads as we called them) had a profound influence on the tone and content of conservative thought, turning it from misguided to abominable and fratish.

Hearing these blatantly racist, misogynistic and homophobic notions repeated at the young Republicans convinced me within two weeks of joining, that I wanted no part in it. I had assumed that once his show was canceled, that terms such as “femi-Nazi” and chiming the deaths of gay men to AIDS would fade into a footnote. 

But no. America was far too sick to leave such an odious hate monger without a stage. Thanks to the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine, there would always be an unchallenged space for him to spread his disease. 

What you don’t seem to understand, having not been at the receiving end of his hate, is that our feelings at his passing are not just based on some mere political disagreement. He devalued and dehumanized us on a daily basis. Dehumanizing is a process that countries use to prepare citizens to make war on another population. It is also called “othering”.

The aim is to make it easier to commit inhuman acts against a group. If they are sub-human, then we need not respect their basic human rights. We develop a pejorative lexicon as shorthand to reinforce the dehumanization process. Of course, truth must be attacked directly, lest people be led back to seeing the selected group as actually human and worthy of human empathy. 

Limbaugh’s actions directly fed a wave of violence against our community. His preaching helped delay civil rights legislation for gays, women, and people of color for decades. He formed a part of an alternate universe in which people like you could reside and feed your confirmation bias. There was no balance imparted to your life by Rush. You just had a problem with truth, and Rush, and Fox gave you a nice lazy boy to sit in and crack a beer.

They validated what are genuinely invalid and vestigial views. If it had stopped there, it would be bad enough. But it went much further. We all thought some day that his flirtation with fascist principles might lead to a dangerous place.

When Trump was elected, many of us were convinced that this danger was at hand, though most dismissed such a view as paranoid. “What could Trump really do in four years”. The answer came in the final year of Trump’s term (if not from the beginning), and could not be more clearly expressed than it was on January 6th. Limbaugh dies with an award for helping usher America to the brink of a coup and insurrection. He even stayed alive long enough to proudly defend it. 

I hope the worms that eat him don’t get indigestion. The world is better for his passing, as it was when Hitler poisoned himself. Evil does not warrant kind eulogies.

This bit of advice - Don’t tell a group that lived with the effects of his oppression how we should feel. And don’t be outraged when we tell you to piss off. It’s not personal.”

Timothy P. Holmberg, Former reporter with the Gay & Lesbian Times

Lead image by HoteyDonkey