In This Memoir, No Reference Is Made To Rush Limbaugh's Corpulence Or Erectile Dysfunction Or Extensive Plastic Surgery.

I have been engaged with Rush Limbaugh for a long time. When I was freshman in high school outside of Sacramento (also known as SUCKramento and, less frequently but more poetically, Excremento), a proudly chain-smoking Limbaugh matriculated from sales department intern to on-air personality at KNBR, replacing the syndicated, high-concept buffoonery of Morton Downey, Jr¹ with locally produced Reagan evangelism punctuated by taped "comedy" interludes. He quickly became a local celebrity. The audacity of his opinions and the skewering of the easy targets in post 60s California, not to mention that the small pond that was Sacramento provided little resistance to a personality as big as Limbaugh's and had resented having had to be associated with all that California-in-the-60s stuff anyway, enabled him to establish his show and brand in those boomtown days of AM talk.

Meanwhile, I went off to college. I did a lot of stuff. When I can back to Sacramento, I got a job in a scene shop, building sets for dinner-theater productions of Neil Simon and Thornton Wilder. The senior carpenter was named Clanky, or, I would find out after I asked and was given a long story about a noisy motorbike he used to drive, during which I would look at a poster of a SnapOn Tools model autographed to him and realize it was his last name and it was spelled Klanke, Klanke, and would insist we listen to Limbaugh for 4 hours each morning. He was not exactly funny then, Limbaugh, but he was mocking hippies, which, you know, in those days was ok by me because I was trying to be punk rock and secede from the union and everything. And he talked a lot about smoking, and defended his, and therefore my, and, I suppose, Klanke's, cigarette consumption, which was important to me then.

Here Fester smokes, somewhat sloppily, a MonteCristo #2,.

I don't think he had moved to New York by this time, but I won't pretend to be sure. He had not yet become the sort of party-line conservative he would quickly morph into. He was sort of a community college PJ O'Rourke then. He had not yet invented his imaginary Excellence In Broadcasting network or embraced the the stentorian delivery, particularly the creepy, disingenuous "...,friends"/"Friends,...." he overuses. He also hadn't incorporated the Christian right dogma or the social conservative issues which these days define the right much more than economics. I seem to remember a particular day when he made an out of tone personal confession about having changed or formed an opinion on choice/abortion.

It wasn't ever that I liked him. It was a workplace compromise. We listened before lunch, because Klanke liked it. After lunch, I got to pick, so we listened to KZAP or whatever. If he was gone, I'd turn something else on. But, you know, he was making fun of Jerry Brown just like the DKs. Limbaugh's Old Boy affectations, though, have always seemed little transparent, and, a little sad, to me, like Madonna's English accent, because of that time when I listened to him every morning and could hear him trying it out.

I moved along from that shop and from Sacramento. Limbaugh became a sort of mogul and prime profiteer of the culture war. I went to New Orleans, which could be stressful in it's way, but in which it was possible to shut out the tragedies of the outside world. The LA Riots went off on the weekend of JazzFest, and a lot of people didn't know for days. Except for occasionally passing him on the radio dial, I didn't hear about him much for years, until I returned to San Francisco and an oral fixation and an interest in Cuba led me to cigars.

I was a little bit ahead of the curve on the so-called Cigar Boom of the 1990s, and when it hit hard, I was working in a cigar store. Most of my regular guys, whatever their position on Limbaugh, weren't really interested in talking about anything but the notes of candied cherry and dark chocolate in the Padron Anniversario or whether I could get them Havanas². It was the dilettantes, the people who had read reference to the popularity of cigars and were on vacation or usually didn't get all the way downtown, who upon seeing the humidor and all the cigars laid out in their cedar coffins, would come inside and start touching and squeezing and putting their noses on them. I would rush into the humidor to protect my merchandise and provide excellent customer service. These were the Clinton years, the boomtown years, when Limbaugh was insinuating himself into the national discussion, fusing himself to the Newts and Bushes. Some of these fondlers in my humidor, the same ones who a few years later would invoke Lewinski as what they imagine to be a humorous and convivial conversational gambit, would ask, much to my delight, which ones Rush smokes, or the cleverer ones, which ones were the "AR-turra Fwentees" like Rush smokes? To which I would get to reply:

"I don't know who that is, but the Arturo Fuentes are right over here?"

It was best when they were incredulous or thought I was just misremembering or something and tried to explain who he was without getting controversial.

I would try and reply "Huh. Never heard of him." as many times as I could, while they would try to clarify further or change the subject. 

Then came the drugs. I got no truck with people doing drugs. In fact, I am generally disposed to like drug users, but I am sort of a drug nazi, in that I don't give it any weight as an excuse for bad behavior. If you act like an asshole when you are drunk, you are still acting like an asshole. Your responsibility is to not be an asshole, high or not, and if drugs make you an asshole you better figure out how not to do them, because, you know, we just said it, you have a responsibility to not be a asshole. I try to be charitable, and nonjudgemental about it, but if you aren't someone I love, and you don't become Robert Downey, Jr, it's hard to have much patience. And if you make your career as a propagandist and theorist of the law and order party, and you make sport of people who use drugs for reasons every bit as valid as your own, when you then have chemical and legal issues of your own and ask for sympathy, you look fucking pathetic. I don't even really object to him ratting out his maid and her husband or boyfriend. This is, to paraphrase JayZ, what a ditto look like when a ditto in a roaster. It is only partially the hypocrisy of himself and his audience in minimizing his behavior and insisting it does not affect his credibility. It is the fucking apologies, the apologies of a cocktail party drunk who makes a ham-fisted pass and follows the gropee around all night demanding she demonstrate to him that she still sees him as the person he was before he tried to grab her snatch.

Limbaugh discusses his fishing buddies after his fishing trip to the Domenican Republic

His act has gone on. I pay less attention. It's easy. I don't have cable, and I don't drive too much, so I only have to hear about him when he does something really stupid. So, the Chinese President comes over to collect some of the vig on what we owe them and meet with Limbaugh's mortal enemy Barack Obama. What is "excellence in broadcasting's" take on the head commie, human rights sledge-hammer, currency manipulator, US creditor Big Daddy? What is the voice of conservatism trenchant criticism of the incarnation of communism and totalitarianism? That the speech needs to be translated faster because "who could possibly understand that?" and then to proceed into a ching-chong-ding-dong worthy of Mickey Rooney in Breakfast At Tiffany's or any fourth-grade recess in the country. Quarter of the world's populace, Jack. 

It isn't so much that the chop-suey Chinese embarrasses me as an American so much as it embarrasses me as a guy who sometimes tries to be funny and has tried to imitate a Chinese waiter or storekeeper or gambler who spoke in a particular way. It is embarrassing in the same way as when one of the guys I worked with in that cigar store would greet our Engish co-worker with "Good morning, bloke."

Limbaugh feebly attempts to demonstrate his purported heterosexuality on an eager  volunteer.

I would usually go into the humidor and start straightening boxes, muttering under my breath "Why can't you just shut the fuck up?"

His response to the inevitable criticism of his moronic schtick? "Sid Caesar was called a genius for impersonating foreign languages..." Unlike his "no one understands this gibberish...", which is just his narcissistic obliviousness breaking through his bombastic asshole facade, this is straight up disingenuous. Sid Caesar was a genius because he was funny. You can tell you are funny because people laugh, not because they applaud. Audiences applaud a joke because the support the ideas in it. They laugh at a joke because it is funny. They laugh at Richard Pryor and Early Cosby. They applaud Andrew Dice Clay (after initially, perhaps, laughing at the audacity of his language and the caricature greaser persona) and late Cosby. As a comic, Limbaugh has a very high laugh-to-clap ratio. I am old enough to remember Sid Caesar. You, chief, are no Sid Fucking Caesar. Sid Caesar is still alive and doesn't need me to defend him. I would imagine you have already received communication from the Great Man or his representation with regard to keeping his name out of your overly tanned and moisturized blowhole.

I am not easily offended. At least I try not to be. I have heard funny racist jokes, funny AIDS jokes, funny abortion jokes. What Steven Colbert calls Limbaugh's "kung pao jibberjabber" just isn't funny. It's like that Seinfeld episode where Tim Watley converts to Judaism and Jerry thinks it's just so he can tell jew jokes. He goes to the rabbi or the former priest or whatever and tell him this, the the clergy asks if this offends Jerry as a jew. "No, it offends me as a comic." Colbert's ultimate satire, the show's meta satire, maybe, is that where Limbaugh uses attempted comedy to dodge the idea that his criticism of events should actually be trenchant, he uses the the attempted commentary on events to dodge the idea that his comedy should actually be funny. He does a hilarious impression of a guy with Parkinson's, and I remember in the Sacramento days, he would "abort" callers, hanging up on them mid-sentence to the sound of a vacuum cleaner. Funny. I see you got a whole suitcase full of props there.

I'll be in the humidor.

_______________________

1 Morton Downey, Jr. you might remember, was at first a proto-Limbaugh who himself chain-smoked and had very disturbing carbuncles on his face. In a stroke of brilliance, he took his act to television, where he sort of became a proto-Jerry Springer or lower rent Geraldo. He added bleachers and handed out free tickets and had guests from various fringe groups, whom he would taunt and ridicule. This simultaneously delighted and infuriated the audience, consisting as it did of supporters of the guests' causes, Los Angeles adolescents and punk rockers, outright shills, and the odd seeker of enlightenment who couldn't get a ride to the Dr Gene Scott taping, which would obligingly explode into insults and fisticuffs as the credits rolled and the host smoked. Limbaugh is something of a country club version of MDJr, dispensing with the guests and distilling Downey's gleeful nihilism and defensive intellectual superiority into a conduit for the Republican agenda and a smugger, more Buckley-ish delivery. Downey, say what one will, did embody and exploit a bleakness and cynicism that was pervasive in the Reagan era and seemed especially palpable in LA in those days. And, late in its run, it sometimes had area punk bands on. As his popularity waned, Downey perpetrated a hoax in which he said he was attacked by neo-Nazis in an airport mens' room, emerging with a swastika magic-markered onto his face. It was drawn backward though, and immediately appeared to everyone who saw it as if it had been made while looking in a mirror. He is mostly remembered today as the father of the cute call-girl Tom Cruise bones on the empty El train in Risky Business.

2 I could. I wouldn't usually, but I could've.