NetNews Usenet Archive 1993 #3/NN_1993_3.iso/spool/alt/activism/21387

Internet Message Format | 1993-01-26 | 18.9 KB

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From: [e-mail] (John Covici)
Reply-To: [e-mail]
Newsgroups: alt.activism
Subject: Rant Radio Promotes the Politics of Rage to Brainwash American Citizens
Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
Date: 26 Jan 93 9:44:52 GMT
Organization: Covici Computer Systems
Lines: 387

`Rant Radio' promotes the politics
of rage to brainwash American citizens

by Doug Mallouk

The Way Things Ought To Be
by Rush H. Limbaugh
III
Pocket Books, New York, 1992 304 pages,
hardbound, $22

You're a typical, struggling middle-income
American. So far, you've managed to hold on to your job and
keep up the mortgage payments, but nonetheless your world
seems to have been turned topsy-turvy.
   Your son's graduating high-school class reads on a
median fifth-grade level, but the designers of his
curriculum seem to be concerned only with ``enhancing
self-esteem'' through such course offerings as ``Applied
Auto-Eroticism'' and ``Indigenous Peoples' Alternatives to
European Mathematics.'' Your pre-teen daughter has taken
to babbling that the atmospheric ozone above your town
will disappear and that everyone in the neighborhood will
get skin cancer if you don't unplug the family
refrigerator immediately.
   More and more of your income is gobbled up in taxes,
yet the inner cities are, if anything, even more
poverty-stricken than when the Great Society programs
began in the sixties. And now you get the dreaded news
that not even your once-pristine suburban community is
immune from the crack-and-crime epidemic sweeping the
nation.
   Do you have a perfect right to be hopping mad about
the whole situation? Absolutely! But beware: If you can't
get beyond the simple state of raw rage to actually think
through why this is happening and how it can be reversed,
then you are an easy mark for a growing breed of
pseudo-conservative political hucksters inhabiting a
communications medium most appropriately termed ``Rant
Radio.''
   Take the case of the best-known of these characters,
the omnipresent Rush Limbaugh, now the host of nationally
syndicated talk-shows on both radio and television. Truly
a rising pop-culture icon, Limbaugh prides himself on
being about as ``politically correct'' as whale-meat
burgers, and at 300-odd pounds, he's almost as big as the
critter from which they're made. While his bragging claim
of reaching 12 million listeners a day may be a delusion,
there is no denying that his crusade against ``Communists,
Socialists, Environmental Whackos, Feminazis, Militant
Vegetarians, Animal-Rights Extremists, and Liberal
Elitists'' has tapped into a visceral disgust on the part
of a large chunk of Middle America with the antics and
inanities of the New Age political correctness mafia.
   The problem, of course, is that with Limbaugh and his
legion of imitators on various radio programs throughout
America, it never gets beyond the level of viscera--by
design. Not all talk-show hosts are Rush ``Wannabes'' by a
long shot, but too many of those who are, have become
veritable experts at reducing their mostly middle-class
audiences to a pitiable collection of ``right-wing''
rage-balls, politically impotent to do anything except
maybe pave the way for some ``new world order'' bankers'
dictatorship.
   One need only peruse Limbaugh's recent literary opus
{The Way Things Ought to Be }to comprehend how the
operation works. Rush is truly a heavy thinker and the
fact that his weighty tome has been for several weeks the
national number-one bestseller (eclipsing even that other
social critic, Madonna) speaks volumes as to the current
state of mind of the U.S. population. Some choice
``Quotations fron Chairman Rush,'' with amplifying
commentary, aptly illustrate just how Limbaugh endeavors
to play that mind-set like the proverbial fiddle.


                    - Rush fools in -

   {{Dr. Limbaugh's Prescription for Stopping AIDS}}:
``People should just {stop *|*|* around}!'' (deletions in
original). This is quintessential Limbaugh: He gets his
audience going by poking massive fun, quite justifiably,
at the ``safe sex'' maniacs who are unrelenting in their
perverse determination that no American over the age of
nine ever be without a condom or a clean drug needle,
depending on his or her life-style. Rush supplies ``bungee
condom'' skits, tongue-in-cheek suggestions to convert
public school study halls into giant bedrooms, complete
with clean sheets, as supervised safe sex laboratories,
etc.
   But in the midst of all the frivolity, perhaps one
notices a small something missing: a solution to the
spread of the disease. Except for the one-sentence sermon
on the imperative of chastity quoted above, Rush doesn't
offer any.
   And he's got no excuse, either. In 1986, when
Limbaugh's talk-show was based in Sacramento, associates
of Lyndon LaRouche in that state put a referendum on the
ballot mandating a full battery of public health measures
for AIDS, including compulsory testing, contact tracing,
and the option of quarantine. They insisted that only
these policies, combined with a crash research program in
emerging disciplines like optical bio-physics, could halt
the advance of the virus and ultimately defeat it. Their
efforts were viciously attacked by a very queer alliance
of militant sodomites, trendy Hollywood lefty-libs (Patty
Duke et al.), condom-mongers, and oddly enough, some
fiscal conservatives, who felt that the measures would
unbalance the budget.
   Why doesn't Limbaugh mention one word about that huge
battle in his book? It is simple political marketing:
There are far greater gate-receipts to be made screaming
``{Stop *|*|* around!}'' than in forcing the American
people to think through a comprehensive war plan to
actually conquer AIDS. But it's safe to say that the
parents of the late Kimberly Bergalis (who contracted the
AIDS virus on a visit to her dentist) or the millions of
absolutely innocent African children who have the disease
would not be overly impressed with Rush's pat one-line
``remedy.''
   {{Limbaugh-nomics:}} Rush-ing in to defend the
economic track record of the Reagan era, Limbaugh waves
around with great bravado a Commerce Department study
claiming, ``The 1980s were years of an almost unbelievable
revival by U.S. industry.'' Indeed, to those of us who
beheld the shut-down steel mills, foreclosed family farms,
and collapsing infrastructure during that decade, this
assertion certainly is unbelievable.
   What Rush doesn't tell us, of course, is that those
fun-loving government statisticians (never ones to let
reality stand in their way) managed to massage the figures
by such sleights-of-hand as reclassifying personal
computers as ``machine tools''! Maybe Limbaugh could
devote one of his shows to proving that a bunch of Wall
Street yuppies peddling junk bonds at their computer
terminals are really skilled machinists.
   Elsewhere in the book, Limbaugh lets his slip show by
defending as sacrosanct the bailout of the savings and
loan institutions. He argues that the S&Ls were torpedoed,
not by deregulation and the ensuing speculative bubble
that it created, but by the 1986 Tax Reform Act. This was
admittedly a horrible piece of legislation, but Rush's
objection to it is simply that it ``eliminated tax
incentives for investment in real estate''--that is, it
popped the bubble! He says point-blank that ``what this
recession needs is a good dose of inflation in real estate
and a lot of our problems would be solved.'' Who needs
production? Just pump more hot air into the balloon, boys!
   But make no mistake: There are plenty of Americans,
nostalgic for the speculative quick-buck boom days of the
1980s, who passionately want to believe this mumbo-jumbo.
   {{On Being Outrageous for Fun and Profit}}: Limbaugh
explains that he likes to provoke people by saying things
that are deliberately inflammatory. For example, after
trashing Anita Hill and feminists generally: ``I love the
women's movement--especially when I'm walking behind it.''
(If Limbaugh had consciously intended to fill the coffers
of NOW, he couldn't have done a much better job than with
that one.) Or, after complaining that America's poor are
positively rich compared to their counterparts in India,
Ethiopia, etc., he calls them ``the biggest piglet at the
mother pig (i.e., the federal government) and her
nipples'' and concludes: It's time to ``tax the poor,''
take away their extra TVs, stop them from reproducing, {ad
nauseam.}
   Of course, he covers himself by saying, not too
convincingly, that he doesn't really mean it all
literally, that he wants to get people to lighten up and
laugh. But in fact, the whole appeal to his listeners lies
in the notion that he is actually saying in public all
those dark, unutterable things that they have only dared
to think privately. And while Limbaugh spends an
inordinate amount of time remonstrating that he's really
not a racist, and doesn't lack compassion, it is obvious
that he is delighted to have these things said of him by
his adversaries. He knows the audience to which he's
playing.


     - Crucial omissions: Where are the oligarchs? -

   Limbaugh's book is far more significant for what it
doesn't say. He may rail interminably against various
manifestations of America's economic and cultural decline,
but left out is even a hint as to who or what may be
behind it all.
   For example, he is right in labeling today's radical
environmentalism a pagan cult of earth-worship; he even
cites Dixy Lee Ray's excellent book {Trashing the Planet
}as an antidote to greenie pseudo-science. But he never
mentions the well-documented fact that the eco-fascists
are massively funded by multibillion-dollar foundations
connected to top Wall Street financial families whose
interest in stopping industrial progress has much more to
do with enhancing their own political power than with
saving the biosphere.
   He rightly attacks the abortion and euthanasia
movements as tending toward Hitlerian race science--but
somehow manages to omit that New York financiers Averell
Harriman and Prescott Bush, the father of Limbaugh's 1992
choice for U.S. President, virtually created the
international eugenics movement prior to the Nazi seizure
of power and were actively promoting abortion and
sterilization as population control measures long before
Gloria Steinem and her crowd even existed.
   It should be noted that by the time of the November
general election, Rush had pretty much turned himself into
a public relations flak for the unlamented George Bush.
Indeed, of all Limbaugh's quips and attempts at humor in
his book, none is more hilarious than his dead-serious
contention that Bush underwent a born-again conversion to
the pro-life cause in the late 1970s ``because he became
convinced that it [legalized abortion] was contributing to
an overall decline in American moral values.'' He is
referring to the same moral watchdog who, as a member of
the U.S. Congress, publicly lauded the proposals of the
vile ``race scientists'' Arthur Jensen and William
Shockley for forced sterilization of black females to
prevent ``down-breeding'' of the U.S. population!
   Equally telling is Limbaugh's commentary on the
recent Los Angeles riots. Speaking of the thugs and
vandals, he says that it was ``almost as if they were
poised to begin rioting'' even before the Rodney King
decision was announced. No ``almost'' about it, Rush! That
outburst was pre-planned, not by black or Hispanic ghetto
residents, but by top (white-skinned) new world order
operatives like Warren Christopher and the Anti-Defamation
League's Sol Linowitz, as {EIR} has documented.
   And while no sane person would defend the ``animal
rights'' lunatics, nevertheless, when Limbaugh accuses
only them--and neither the banks nor the grain cartels--of
putting the American farmer out of business, it is obvious
that something is sorely missing here.
   The net effect of these crucial omissions in
Limbaugh's portrait of the political landscape is
elementary. Lacking any comprehension of how the oligarchy
creates and controls these ``movements'' and operations,
the beleaguered middle-class American--Limbaugh's targeted
readership--simply sees a kaleidoscopic array of hostile
interest groups variously trying to take away his piece of
the pie, or undermine his values. And he reacts
predictably, with fear and rage, to ``defend'' himself,
while Limbaugh and his ilk chortle, ``Yeah, that's right,
blame it on the other guy''--defined, of course, as
anybody except the puppet-masters behind the show. This is
precisely how dying societies are caused to collapse into
class warfare, anarchy, and ultimately, dictatorship.


           - How `democracy' becomes fascism -

   The question remains: Is this scenario Limbaugh's
intended result? Is he philosophically some kind of
fascist? The answer is unequivocally yes--but for the
exact same reason that this term applies with equal force
to his liberal New Age nominal adversaries.
   The essence of fascism as a social-political movement
is absolutely not some ``ultra-conservative'' phenomenon.
As Lyndon LaRouche has recently explained, the liberal
establishment ``has found a new name for fascism. They
call it democracy.''
   Democracy, as opposed to democratic republicanism,
can be characterized by the proposition that there is no
higher law governing the affairs of men than the
prevailing majority opinion at any given time. LaRouche
and other republicans have always insisted that the very
worst form of tyranny is the imposition of a set of
arbitrary rules in violation of the laws of God and nature
by a majority upon a minority.
   In contrast, Limbaugh's unabashed support for
democracy comes out most luridly in his argument in favor
of capital punishment. Without rehashing the death penalty
debate here, consider the incredible method he employs
to polemicize for its implementation.
   He doesn't even attempt to dredge up some phony
theological justification for state-sponsored executions
and he readily admits to having not a shred of evidence
that capital punishment deters crime at all. He simply
says that not to pull the switch would ``thwart the will
of the people,'' repeating that ponderous phrase half a
dozen times.
   To fully appreciate just what these words mean, let
us now tune in to a fifth-century B.C. ``talkathon'' in
the city square of ancient Athens, with the participants
discussing a celebrated case of ``democracy in action.''
Our host, Opinionatus Humongous, has drawn around himself
an enormous crowd (some overly sensitive types might say
``mob''), as a stranger steps up to question the Great
Demagogue (a innocuous Greek term meaning simply one who
is popular with the people).

   {{Stranger:}} I'm really bothered by the recent
decision in the case of Meletus versus the condemned
man....
   {{Opinionatus Humongous:}} Stuff it, you
lice-infected liberal fuzz-brain! Look, the guy they
convicted was a first-class, Grade A pervert. Seventy
years old and he spends all his time hanging around young
boys! You know what that means, don't you, heh-heh-heh?
{(Crowd titters.)}
   {{S:}} But Opinionatus--
   {{OH:}} Furthermore, he's got no visible means
of support and claims he makes his living peddling this
thing he calls philosophy. Yeah, right, and I'm King Tut!
   {{S:}} I don't think you underst--
   {{OH:}} Look, this country needs another weirdo
beggar like we need a slave revolt!
   You bleeding hearts have to get one thing straight.
Not only was this character preaching disrespect for the
trusty, home-grown gods that any red-blooded All-Athenian
regular guy would be happy to adore, but he's even gone so
far as to say that there is only one God who made the
whole universe! What nerve! Can you imagine the incredible
snafus we would have trying to rely on Centralized
Theocratic Planning?! Instead of making a simple sacrifice
to your own local deity, you'd have to get in line behind
every nincompoop worshipping the sole Creator of Heaven
and Earth. Just processing supplications could take weeks!
   {{S:}} I don't think it will be quite as bad as
you indicate.
   {{OH:}} {(Voice dripping with sarcasm)} Geez,
I'm just {so }glad to hear that!
   Listen, sap, the next thing you know, this guy will
have the helots and other riff-raff believing that they
are our equals in the eye of God. There would be a
complete breakdown of law and order! Now even a nice
liberal like you can understand what that means, can't
you?
   {{S:}} {(About to open his mouth)}
   {{OH:}} Stop interrupting. Besides, I can tell
from your accent that you're not from around here. {(To
crowd)} Is he, boys? {(Audience murmurs in assent.)} See,
stranger, this fellow you're so in love with was convicted
by a unanimous decision of an All-Athenian jury backed by
overwhelming popular demand. And for folks in these parts,
that about settles it. So unless you or your God
(heh-heh-heh) have any more objections, we'll proceed to
the business of killing that menace Socrates!
   {{Audience:}} {(Cheering and whistling)} All
hail Opinionatus Humongous!

   An unfair parody of Mr. Parody himself? Not at
all. It is absolutely indisputable that both Socrates and
Christ were executed in a thoroughly democratic fashion,
fully in accord with the popular mood. And while today's
death row inmates are obviously not comparable to those
two great benefactors of humanity, what is amazingly
similar, then and now, is the mob psychology demanding the
``satisfaction'' of executions.
   At one point in his book, Limbaugh even answers the
objection that crowds demanding the gas chamber for one
recent California convict were ``screaming for blood, too
excited, too happy about it,'' not by denying the charge,
but by affirming this mob mentality as natural,
understandable, justified! When Hitler and Mussolini
employed Limbaugh's precise turn of phrase ``will of the
people,'' this is just what they had in mind.
   Therein, it must be said, lies the key to Limbaugh's
meteoric rise. No matter how many valid skew points he may
score against the ``feminazis,'' greenies, etc., the hard
kernel of his appeal lies in the fact that he's a skillful
(and very democratic) fascist manipulator, or to put it in
Rush-ian, a ``demo-nazi.''
   To reach you, all he does is to follow the path of
least resistance. It is much easier to blame the plague of
drugs in your town on some local hoodlums (or, simpler
still, on the hapless parents of the kids who get hooked)
than to launch a serious attack on the highest level
Anglo-American bankers (and their Anti-Defamation League
hired thugs) who constitute the command center of Dope,
Inc.; far less difficult to wail about ``welfare cheats''
in the ghettoes than to take on and dismantle what is
easily the biggest something-for-nothing program in the
country--the Federal Reserve System that hands hundreds of
billions of dollars each year to a clique of international
financial parasites; and too often a lot more comfortable
to listen to a Rush Limbaugh articulate ``your'' pet
peeves than to someone like LaRouche who will tell you the
hard truth about these matters and demand that you do some
real thinking.

From Executive Intelligence Review V20, #5.

----
         John Covici
          [e-mail]