"Rush Limbaugh"

Louis Proyect, Marxmail

Rush Limbaugh, the dean of rightwing talk radio, was forced to resign as football commentator for the ESPN cable sports station (he actually got his start in broadcasting in sports) after stating on a pre-game show last Sunday:"I think what we've had here is a little social concern in the NFL. The media has been very desirous that a black quarterback do well. There is a little hope invested in McNabb, and he got a lot of credit for the performance of this team that he didn't deserve. The defense carried this team."

It is one thing to bash affirmative action on his radio show. It is another to bash it in a sport where blacks have a powerful voice as star athletes. Perhaps Limbaugh would have been better advised to attack gays and lesbians, who are regarded as open game in the professional sports world. Such prejudice finally convinced Boston Herald sportswriter Ed Gray to come out of the closet. In a column that announced his homosexuality, Gray cited recent comments by New York Giants tight end Jeremy Shockey, who called Dallas Cowboys coach Bill Parcells a 'homo', and San Francisco 49ers running back Garrison Hearst (an African-American) who said, "I don't want any faggots on my team." Both athletes came away relatively unscathed.

Gray stated, "I'm out because I can no longer, in good conscience, choose to ignore the unabashed homophobia that is so cavalierly tolerated within the world of sports. I’m out because the silence of a closeted gay man only serves to give his implicit approval to bigotry."

Today Limbaugh's reputation took a turn for the worse when the New York Daily News reported that he was a heavy user of black market pain-killers. His housekeeper Wilma Cline supplied him with OxyContin, Lorcet and hydrocodone, which are heavy-duty opiates prescribed for acute pain such as that suffered by cancer patients. OxyContin in particular has become an epidemic in economically ravaged regions, such as Maine and Kentucky. When Limbaugh learned in 1998 that Cline's husband was taking the medicine for a broken leg, he asked her for a couple of pills to try out. In no time at all he became an addict. During one 47-day period she supplied him with 4,350 pills, enough to "kill an elephant" in her words.

Although Limbaugh is on record as favoring the legalization of heroin, cocaine and marijuana -- an unsurprising choice for a libertarian -- many of his followers are social conservatives who will be deeply shocked and disillusioned by this revelation. It will certainly have an impact on the unraveling now in progress as the Bush administration contends with Iraq setbacks and scandal.

In my review of "The Revolution Will not be Televised", I drew attention to the overtly counter-revolutionary role of private television networks in Venezuela. In the USA, AM radio plays the same role. Although rightwing commentary has been a staple of this medium for a very long time (Paul Harvey, who broadcasts on Limbaugh's station, got started in 1933; fascist priest Charles E. Coughlin took to the airwaves in 1926), it has really only been since the Reagan era that such programming has become dominant.

WABC sets the pace for rightwing radio. Through syndication, personalities like Limbaugh and Sean Hannity can be heard by tens of millions of people across the USA and Canada. Until he was fired for telling an on-air caller that he should go get AIDS, Michael Savage held forth on WABC from LA each evening. All of these characters put forward a steady drumbeat of racism, homophobia, xenophobia and warmongering throughout the day. As media concentration deepens through the open connivance of a Federal Communications Committee run by Colin Powell's son, we can only expect things to worsen.

On the Marxism list we have been discussing a perennial chestnut, namely why the US working class is so quiescent at best, and reactionary at worst. Although much of the conversation revolves around questions of political economy, such as the role of surplus extraction from the Third World, you cannot overestimate the role of the "superstructure". As Karl Marx said in "The German Ideology":

"The ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas, i.e. the class which is the ruling material force of society, is at the same time its ruling intellectual force. The class which has the means of material production at its disposal, has control at the same time over the means of mental production, so that thereby, generally speaking, the ideas of those who lack the means of mental production are subject to it. The ruling ideas are nothing more than the ideal expression of the dominant material relationships, the dominant material relationships grasped as ideas; hence of the relationships which make the one class the ruling one, therefore, the ideas of its dominance."

Is there anything that the left can learn from the likes of Rush Limbaugh? The other day I was reading an interesting commentary on George W. Bush, where unfortunately I cannot remember. It stated that he has been underestimated by the left and is capable of a wolverine-like intelligence when it comes to the imperial interests of the USA and the privileges of the ruling class -- and just as importantly, he *never* doubts himself. He is absolutely convinced that he is acting on behalf of humanity and that disaster awaits us one and all if the program of the Republican Party is not carried out mercilessly.

By contrast, the left in the USA -- at least the academic and mainstream versions such as the Nation magazine -- are filled with self-doubt and second guessing. With much hand-wringing from the likes of Todd Gitlin, we walk around like Hamlet doubting ourselves. Instead of being absolutely convinced of our mission -- as is appropriate for the tasks before us -- we blame ourselves for things that are utterly beyond our control -- like Pol Pot or the Moscow Trials. If the left is to prevail, it will have to recover the kind of Jacobin self-assuredness it once had -- or else it is doomed to fail.