Rush is dead…and I got this response when I posted on it on FB:
I started simply by posting these words:
Rush Limbaugh is dead. My condolences to his family- that said, he caused nothing but damage and misery when he was here.
Someone whom I’d known in high school, decades ago, and had become reacquainted with recently had THIS response to that:
“You are one evil mofo!”
He thought I was the evil mofo.
As opposed to Rush. As opposed to the man with this legacy in life:
Rush spent years nurturing white male resentment against the rest of the human race, even though white males have no valid reason to resent everybody else.
He invented the vile, indefensible insult “feminazi” to vilify women whose only real “crime” was to defend a woman’s right to control her own reproductive system.
He was virulently homophobic and transphobic.
He spent years perpetrating the toxic lies of the “birther” movement- the assertion that Barack Obama was born in another country- something everyone knew was not true- and thus ineligible for the presidency- as if one of this country’s two major parties could possibly be stupid enough to nominate someone for the presidency if that person could be disqualified from office.
He claimed authority to assert things he was not qualified to assert- he simply stated, and his followers unquestioningly believed, that there was no such thing as “battered woman syndrome”, the phenomenon in which continual, relentless abuse could drive a woman to kill her abuser when she saw no other way out- something no one who is not a psychotherapist could possibly be qualified to comment on, and did massive harm to uncounted women in doing so- a weird stance from one of the major inventors and defenders of the racist “stand your ground” laws.
He spent years fighting to prevent the country from having any form of universal healthcare- causing needless suffering to tens of millions of people whose only crime was not having a job that provided health insurance- never mind that those people worked just as hard and did work that was just as important to this country and to life as those who did have health insurance. He was a cheerleader for Bush’s pointless invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan- even though he himself had been a draft dodger in Vietnam and thus had no moral right to advocate any wars after that.
Most recently, he encouraged the fascist takeover attempt of January 6th by perpetrating what he knew was the lie that the election was “stolen” from Trump.
He spent his whole life telling his listeners that empathy was weakness, that activists against bigotry and repression were scam artists, that racism was strictly a thing of the past and that all of us should treat the wealthy like gods that walk the earth- gods to whom we owe everything, yet who owe us nothing
And for this, he was given a presidential medal.
Other than the loss to those who were close to him- and again, I sympathize for them, it is a horrible thing to see a person who is a friend or a relative die a slow, painful death like that- what is there to mourn for anyone else on the planet? What did he ever bring the world but the preservation of injustice and the perpetration of hate?
How am I the “evil mofo” for refusing to mourn a person who is unmournable, whose life was and is defined by a categoric rejection of the very idea of common humanity, the idea that, in a decent society, we owe each other SOMETHING- we owe each other respect, space, a helping hand if we are able to give it, a recognition that we are all, at some basic level, connected?
I’m sorry, but it cannot be considered evil to have no use for an evil man.
