http://www.thedailylight.com/articles/2011/01/13/opinion/doc4d2f391300058200712412.txtWinslow Myers
Beyond War
I tuned in Rush Limbaugh’s radio show because I was interested in his response to the question of whether he shared some responsibility for leading the deluded young alleged assassin in Arizona over the edge—on the face of it an unanswerable question, though many on the left have been very quick to answer yes, in thunder.
Unsurprisingly, Limbaugh’s line of defense was to aggressively deflect blame onto others, including the sheriff in charge of the investigation into the killings, Clarence Dupnik. Sheriff Dupnik came across, to me anyway, as the absolute best of America, an official who spoke authoritatively about how he sees the present sorry state of civility in this country. Dupnik reminded me a little of the lawman in Cormac McCarthy’s novel “No Country for Old Men,” almost overwhelmed by new forms of evil but still willing to stand and deliver.
Limbaugh went on the attack against the sheriff and others he perceives as adversaries without even a nod to the victims of the Arizona tragedy. It was an astonishing demonstration of narcissism.
The parents of the little girl who was killed provided an instructive contrast. Holding themselves together with heroic composure, they made sure the story was not their own pain and loss, but what a remarkable person their daughter had been. They even wrote to a woman friend, herself wounded in the attack, who had taken the girl to Gabrielle Giffords’ gathering, to make sure that she felt no guilt.
It is difficult, maybe impossible, to write about Limbaugh without being sucked into the battle dynamic which Limbaugh is paid multi-millions to sustain. The restraint of silence, in humble imitation of the creative silence of Jesus before Pontius Pilate and the high priests, is probably the most prudent approach. Albert Einstein, implicitly echoing Jesus’s creativity, wrote that you cannot solve a problem on the same level of thinking that created the problem.
No doubt Rush Limbaugh has some good ideas about how to improve our political, economic and cultural institutions. But they are drowned out by one meta-idea that thoroughly undermines his effectiveness as a conservative change-agent — his desire to preserve at all costs an oppositional modality, “us against them.” That’s what keeps his loyal supporters coming back for more and his advertising sponsors underwriting his mega-riches.
Whether Limbaugh is partly responsible for what happened in Arizona is unclear. What is clear is that this very talented broadcaster is paid to be a panderer. The Encarta dictionary defines the verb “to pander” as “to indulge someone’s weakness or questionable wishes and tastes.”
In this case the weakness is the jumble of helplessness, fear, and anger that many citizens feel in the face of huge powers that they perceive to be stealing their autonomy. The questionable wish is the desire to fix blame on an “other” and lash out. This is a further paradox of Limbaugh’s oppositional spirit, what is sometimes called a performative contradiction: it cries at the same time for taking responsibility and for the irresponsible helplessness of blaming someone else.
Limbaugh’s universe is very similar in its narrowness to another seductive universe of pandering, pornography, where the complex and deep encounter of sexuality is reduced to the simple dimension of scratching a fantasy itch.
If Limbaugh allowed a sliver of “I am responsible” to penetrate his world of “others are always at fault,” the soufflé of his pomposity would collapse. He remains stuck in a frozen limbo of self-defined authority and radio-booth isolation, where the price of admission is toadying agreement — from which authentic relationship can never come.
Real relationship includes respectful listening, acknowledgement of the validity of other points of view, openness to multiple perspectives. There is a poignant irony in the fact that Limbaugh has become totally deaf in both ears.
The irony does not stop there. Limbaugh’s sneering contempt for political adversaries is not so unlike what he despises in the extremist dogmatism on the fringes of Islam. Events in Arizona chillingly complemented the assassination, only a few days previous, of the Pakistani provincial governor Salman Taseer, by one of his own bodyguards. The bodyguard was outraged that Taseer had taken a position of liberal tolerance toward supposed blasphemy.
The noted Tibetan Buddhist scholar Robert Thurman reminds himself not to pose enemies and fall back into anger and hatred by remembering the Buddhist doctrine that everyone is eventually reborn as everyone else.
He exercises this larger perspective by imagining someone like Dick Cheney as his own mother. Once we really see that Limbaugh’s almost God-like yet also clown-like self-assurance traps him in his own persona, irritation lessens. A feeling of compassion wells up — not only for all the pain out there for which Limbaugh provides only pseudo-answers, but even for Limbaugh himself.
Winslow Myers serves on the Board of Directors of Beyond War, an educational foundation, and is the author of “Living Beyond War: A Citizen’s Guide.”
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