{"id":90262,"date":"2021-02-17T18:10:13","date_gmt":"2021-02-18T01:10:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=90262"},"modified":"2021-02-20T21:14:44","modified_gmt":"2021-02-21T04:14:44","slug":"some-notes-following-the-death-of-rush-limbaugh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2021\/02\/some-notes-following-the-death-of-rush-limbaugh.html","title":{"rendered":"Some notes following the death of Rush Limbaugh"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"Cemetery<\/a>
Surely the partisan wrangling and hatred should go silent at SOME point.
(Wikimedia Commons public domain image)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I posted a blog entry yesterday (\u201cLove in a Time of Tribalism\u201d<\/a>) in which, citing the case of Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), I lamented the ideological passions and partisan rifts that are increasingly tearing families, neighborhoods, and friendships apart.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rod Dreher, a writer for whom I have considerable respect \u2014 see, for example, my 11 May 2017 article in the Deseret News<\/em>, \u201c\u2018The Benedict Option\u2019 or \u2018The Brigham Option\u2019?\u201d<\/a> \u2014 had this to say about the Kinzinger case, in an article kindly called to my attention by \u201cLB,\u201d a reader of my blog:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cShame On The Kinzinger Family\u201d<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

And now the death of Rush Limbaugh has given us yet another redundant example of the toxic nature of our current political and other discourse:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cTwitter liberals celebrate Rush Limbaugh\u2019s death: \u2018I\u2019m glad\u2019 he lived long enough to \u2018get cancer and die\u2019: \u2018God has canceled Rush Limbaugh,\u2019 Crooked Media host Erin Ryan quipped\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

To say that I find such expressions as are catalogued here \u2014 and a number that I\u2019ve seen about Rush Limbaugh independently, on my own \u2014 both appalling and utterly contemptible would be putting it mildly.\u00a0 And, for what little it\u2019s worth, I\u2019m the target of similar sentiments on most days, at least once or twice.\u00a0 (Most take the form of anonymous emails.)\u00a0 I\u2019ve even had people vowing to desecrate my grave when the time comes, which, for them, apparently cannot be soon enough.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I simply cannot understand rejoicing at the death of anybody<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019ve been a few occasions when I\u2019ve grimly said to myself that, well, a death was justified.\u00a0 Or that it would end a problem.\u00a0 Or that it served justice.\u00a0 But I\u2019ve never been delighted<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve read about tailgate parties and keggers at the perimeter walls of prisons when a murderer was about to be executed, and about the joy and dancing that have sometimes occurred when news came that the prisoner was dead.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I cannot fathom such reactions.\u00a0 For myself, even when I consider an execution justified \u2014 I\u2019m not an enthusiastic fan of capital punishment, but I\u2019m not a committed opponent of it, either; I would be fine if it were to go away \u2014 my thought is that, at best, it was a tragic necessity.\u00a0 The person executed (just like the person or persons that he or she presumably killed) was a child of God and was, once, some mother\u2019s adorable little baby.\u00a0 What a sorrowful wreck of a life.\u00a0 What innocence and what potential lost.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

So \u2014 since I had no such reaction even to the death of Saddam Hussein or Usama Bin Laden, only grim satisfaction (if even quite that)<\/em> \u2014 I cannot, simply cannot, understand joyous reactions to the passing of Rush Limbaugh.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

But please permit me to say something about my own reaction to the man.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Many years ago, probably all the way back in the nineties of the previous century, in the last millennium, I listened to Rush Limbaugh\u2019s radio program quite a bit.\u00a0 Not every day, and never for a full three-hour show \u2014 my teaching schedule wouldn\u2019t allow that \u2014 but in stolen snatches of time between classes or while driving or doing routine, mundane, mindless tasks.\u00a0 He was never my intellectual guru with regard to my free-market-oriented, constitutionalist, federalist conservative beliefs.\u00a0 I had already been heavily influenced by such writers as William F. Buckley, Henry Hazlitt, F. A. Hayek, George Will, Russell Kirk, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Bastiat, Milton Friedman, Ludwig von Mises, John Stuart Mill, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and, relatively briefly but quite intensely when I was in my teens, Ayn Rand.\u00a0 But I almost always agreed with Rush Limbaugh, and I thought him extremely entertaining and often very, very funny.\u00a0 He was, I thought, a genuinely happy warrior.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I saw the repeated claims of critics that he was hateful, a racist and a bigot, and so forth, but I never really encountered that supposed side of him and, candidly, I don\u2019t believe it.\u00a0 But, of course, maybe I was deceived by a sampling error.\u00a0 Perhaps he was a toxic racist and homophobe all the time except when I was listening.\u00a0 More likely, though, it was just people on the left refusing to grant that people on the right might, occasionally, be decent, principled individuals who simply saw things differently than they did \u2014 but who were not driven by hatred and moral depravity.\u00a0 (I\u2019ve been on the receiving end of such hostile mind-reading myself for a very long time now.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I haven\u2019t really listened to Rush Limbaugh at all for at least<\/em> the past five or six years.\u00a0 Mostly, I suppose, and certainly initially, because my schedule and commitments just didn\u2019t really allow it anymore.\u00a0 But then his broadcasts began, or so it seemed to me, to be as much or even more about fervent loyalty to one particular politician than to the principles of free-market conservatism and limited government.\u00a0 I simply couldn\u2019t stand it, so I stopped even dialing through.\u00a0 It was the same reason that I stopped listening to Sean Hannity, whom I had, anyway, never enjoyed nearly as much.\u00a0 (Even in the old days when Hannity shared his show with the liberal co-host Alan Colmes, who sadly passed away back in 2017 at only 66, I often found myself liking Colmes much better than Hannity, despite my far greater agreement with Hannity on the substance of any given dispute.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Still, I mourn the loss of Rush Limbaugh.\u00a0 He helped to break the stranglehold of progressivism on the mass media \u2014 to the extent, anyway, that that has actually been accomplished.\u00a0 Indeed, he may have been the one indispensable person in that achievement.\u00a0 And I liked him.\u00a0 At least, I did several years ago.\u00a0 Requiescat in pace.<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

His death should remind us that political issues are not the most important issues.\u00a0 That even wealth and fame and success and vivid personalities cannot deliver us from death.\u00a0 That a few things will matter forever, while most things are both relatively trivial and entirely transient.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Where did we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going?<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Political disputes and partisan factions have nothing important to say on such questions, no comfort to give, to ultimate meaning to bestow.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

***<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Yesterday, I posted the following little note in a blog entry:<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cFinally, I\u2019m happy to report that I\u2019ve accepted an invitation to write a column (bi-weekly or, anyway, as bi-weekly as I choose to\u00a0make<\/em>\u00a0it) for\u00a0Meridian Magazine.<\/em><\/a>\u00a0 It will start when I start it.\u201d<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019m being attacked for it, at the usual place.\u00a0 Quelle surprise!<\/em><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

It was, apparently, an arrogant, bizarre, and childish outburst.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s what happened:\u00a0 The editors at Meridian<\/em> asked me to write a regular column for them.\u00a0 I agreed to do so.\u00a0 And I asked when they wanted me to start.\u00a0 (I\u2019m going through an uuusually busy two weeks just now.). Whenever you\u2019re ready, they responded, asking me simply to tell them when I intended to begin, so that they could adjust their internal scheduling accordingly.\u00a0 Hence my comment that \u201cIt will start when I start it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

This is a minor and trivial example of precisely the continual and seemingly reflexive demonizing of The Enemy that I so lament in today\u2019s discourse.<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u00a0 \u00a0 I posted a blog entry yesterday (\u201cLove in a Time of Tribalism\u201d) in which, citing the case of Representative Adam Kinzinger (R-IL), I lamented the ideological passions and partisan rifts that are increasingly tearing families, neighborhoods, and friendships apart. \u00a0 Rod Dreher, a writer for whom I have considerable respect \u2014 see, for 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