A Boomerang

I'm OK with Rush Limbaugh being dead. I'm indifferent to most deaths that happen, not because they aren't in some private ways tragic, but I'm just not in a great position to hear about them. My facebook friends list still hovers around 100 max, and most of the time the people there are just posting about what they are like if they don't get their coffee in the morning. Even in a pandemic year where there's so much more death going on than usual, I'm just not privy a vast majority of it, so I don't have the opportunity to react one way or the other. The ones I have had the opportunity to hear about (and I recognize my extreme good luck that all of these have been second-hand accounts of people not related to me thus far) I have been appropriately upset by, so I can be reasonably sure that it's not just that I'm not an absolute sociopath. It's just that I'm one man with--even in the 21st century--limited informational input resources relative to the problem of human death.

I wasn't sad to hear Rush Limbaugh had died. I wasn't happy about it either, because honestly, what would be the point? I guess I can empathetically comprehend the instinct behind reveling in an antagonist's demise, the ultimate schadenfreude where a nemesis is stuck moldering and not-existing while you get to keep on doing stuff like breathing and distributing blood to your still-functioning brain. But I have trouble finding the value in a celebratory "in your face!" when the other person's face is now out of the sensory-input business. That's the best thing a face can do! Well, that and look sad when you triumph over the face-haver in some meaningful and emotionally devastating way. But the dead person can't do that either. Nertz.

Beyond that though, Rush Limbaugh wasn't even a nemesis. By 2021, he was just a guy made irrelevant by his own success. I know it pains some leftists like myself to acknowledge his success because of the cost at which it was extracted, but it's objectively undeniable, demographically, societally, culturally, monetarily. In post-Cold War America when we needed enemies once the Soviets had been exposed as the Donald Trump of world super powers,* he's the one who looked at the void and decided the enemy should be us. Specifically, other Americans I mean. More specifically, people who committed the intolerable, murder-worthy crime of slightly disagreeing with him on things like economic policy, for example, within the sadly limited context of the western capitalist system where the primary fight between parties seems to be over how much free money billionaires get to keep. Government health care is for beatniks and traitors.

Oh and for some reason he also very specifically hated black people. And unsupervised women. Both despicable prejudices. But, arguably and tragically, not entirely un-American.

With the weird exception of Trump trotting him out at a speech and inexplicably giving him the Medal of Freedom, ole Rusty was well past it. Over the previous 20 years, a whole group of either greater cynics (if such a thing is conceivable) or (much worse) actual believers took the ideas he chewed up and shit out and used them as fertilizer for a particularly awful set of strangling vines that, a month or so ago, tried to crush the entire republic as they reached full ripening. By contrast his normie broadcaster "bombast" now came across pale and tepid as old milk. Just an old junkie doing a stupid, dated voice into a solid gold microphone, but somehow not even interesting enough to be clownish anymore, despite that description.

This isn't meant to be a eulogy, and certainly no panegyric, even accidental. I've come neither to bury nor praise, mostly just to mark. With Limbaugh, there's now a definite Before and After, but that's true of literally all things. In this case, the evil that men do lives after them. I guess if I gave more of a shit, I'd spend some time trying to figure out what possible good could have been buried with his bones. Maybe his dealer knows?

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*shallow, unattractive, noisy, ultimately pointless and, finally, abandoned