Courting the Jester: The Slippery Right’s Love Affair With Rush Limbaugh

Posted on 01/30/2009 by Jane Devin

When George W. Bush was campaigning for President, I thought there was no better man he could have in his corner than Rush Limbaugh. After all, who could understand the political aspirations of a privileged, party-going, service-avoiding, C-average candidate better than a privileged, two-and-a-half semester college flunk-out, with a penchant for Oxycontin and bombastic talk, who got out of the service altogether for having a hairy butt boil?

They were a match made in a blinders-on Republican heaven, where the conservative faithful still believe that with a little bit of faith and a lot of charm, they can transform failures and shortcomings into delusory gold, and rebirth multimillionaires into everyday people who really care about the plights of their Joe Six-Pack and Soccer Mom peers. Operating under the premise that if something is said often enough it will become accepted as the truth, they tend to blame the mythical devil of the Liberal Media for their public embarrassments, and don’t find it odd at all when their counterparts wave off abuse-of-power reports, and even court convictions, as if they were the conspiratorial fantasies of an unpatriotic public. Behind the thick cigar smoke and carnival mirrors of such political propaganda, Limbaugh isn’t just a barker, but a godhead with a loyal legion of followers hailing from the furthest backwoods shacks to the hallowed halls of Washington. Those followers are called, appropriately enough, dittoheads.

The slippery, delusional thought processes of dittohead candidates and their lobbying groups were never as transparent as they were during the 2008 election. In the midst of a economic crisis, with the highest national debt in the history of the nation — after eight years of iron-fisted Republican domination — millions of Americans were bombarded with political slogans like these:

Who can fix our economy? Only one party will fix the damage and prevent another crisis. Vote Republican.
Jobs lost. Spending up. Economy down. Energy prices Up. Vote Republican to end America’s economic crisis.
Vote Republican & Restore Balance to Our Economy.
Republicans will eliminate wasteful spending, balance the budget and regain the trust of the American taxpayer.

Of course, Rush Limbaugh was there to lead the charge. And in the foggy realm of Republican obfuscation, Limbaugh is not just a college dropout with an inflammatory radio show, but an authority on capitalism, economics, defense, domestic policy, world relations and more. Never mind that Limbaugh has not passed so much as one college course in business, law or political science — he has a $400M dollar contract with Clear Channel Radio, and a show that reaches an estimated 20 million viewers a week between 600 stations. According to figures obtained by Forbes, Limbaugh’s eight-year contract is only $87M short of what Hollywood’s 10 best-paid actors earned in the year between June 2007-June 2008, and $155.5M more than what the 10 best-paid actresses earned in the same time.

$400M can buy a lot of prestige in Washington, but a charismatic personality is worth much more, particularly when it comes attached to a substantial base of fans. Just ask James Dobson or Pat Robertson. Like Limbaugh, Dobson and Robertson managed to hold political sway based not on their intellectual credentials or objective reasoning skills, but on the basis of their Arbitron ratings. They were given credibility by Washington politicians not because they were giants of integrity, ethics, or reason, but because they were media giants — willing to stand up for even the most beleaguered Republican politicians and truth-bereft party messages in exchange for Washington-sanctioned political standing.

Without that sanction, it is unlikely that personalities like Limbaugh, Dobson, and Robertson would have ever been considered newsworthy outside of the entertainment or religion pages. Certainly, without the sanction of Washington politicians, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal would not be doing what amounts to PR for Limbaugh.

Instead, thanks to Washington and the slavish capitulation of congressmen like Phil Gingrey-R (who backed off of his justified criticism of Limbaugh after fans inundated his office with complaints), Americans who would not normally tune in to hear the opinions of an unschooled political shock-jock, are being inundated with his ridiculous, uninformed messages.

Businesses need tax cuts. The US corporate tax rate is obscene. It is the highest of all industrialized nations. It’s 35%. Cut it. Cut it in half. – excerpt from Rush Limbaugh’s stimulus plan.

Taking his cue from dogmatic Republicans who can’t stop repeating the mantra of corporate tax cuts long enough to address the truth, Limbaugh used his PR opportunity to mislead more Americans than usual. The 35% tax rate is born from a paper figure that has little to do with the reality of what corporations actually pay. At the risk of repeating information that seems to bounce right off the collective conscience of the dittoheads, the fact is that despite the high bracket tax rate on paper, many corporations pay no taxes at all, and those that do pay, don’t pay anywhere near 35% after deductions, incentives, and loopholes.

America has known many charismatic media personalities but Republican politicians, perhaps still impressed by the number of conservative evangelicals thought to be delivered by television and radio preachers in the Reagan and Bush years (as if they would have voted otherwise), seem especially inclined to lend credence to Rush Limbaugh, even at the expense of their own reputations outside of the Republican party.

I don’t think President Obama was being flip when he told congressional leaders that “You can’t just listen to Rush Limbaugh and get things done”. Rather, it seems he might have been responding to the lack of original thought and leadership within the Republican party, and the seeming eagerness of Republican politicians to hand the intellectual reins of their platform over to whatever colorful pundit they think can best deliver them voters in the next election. If it’s a strategy, it would seem to be one as disastrous as the Palin pick, and if it’s a habit, it’s one that surely needs breaking if the Republican party is to recover from the Bush years with any integrity.

This article also appears on the Huffington Post.

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McCain’s Tax Lie

Posted on 01/25/2009 by Jane Devin

Forgive me for getting a little Rahm Emanuel here, but the lead story of The Huffington Post this afternoon is worthy of a middle finger and some righteous indignation.

McCain Slams Stimulus – Joins GOP Leaders to Attack Stimulus Package. Well, okay. I’m all for healthy debate, even if it is with a party that turned itself inside-out during the last decade to become the unaccountable, freedom-snatching, bloat-ridden, free-spending, debt-driven, war-mongering party it is now. It would be unfair to hold every Republican responsible for the failure of the Bush administration even if, like McCain, their Senate votes supported Bush 90% of the time.

Putting aside the fact that the majority of Americans voted against furthering the Republican agenda, elected representatives from the Republican party still represent millions of Americans. Their voices need to be heard, and their ideas deserve serious consideration.

However, when an idea is not just flawed, but based on a pervasive lie, it needs to be called out until facts overcome propaganda and truth rings from the rafters. In McCain’s case, the lie is that businesses are overwhelmed by taxes, and that a business tax cut is necessary to stimulate the economy.

“We need to make tax cuts permanent, and we need to make a commitment that there’ll be no new taxes,” Mr. McCain said. “We need to cut payroll taxes. We need to cut business taxes.”

While McCain was hawking lower business taxes during his run for President, many of us had already learned the ugly truth. I wrote an article about it in October 2008.

In a stunning report released by the United States Government Accountability Office in July 2008, Americans learned that many corporations, including those with assets over $250M, reported no tax liabilities. In fact, from 1998-2005, 72% of foreign-controlled domestic corporations (FCDC’s), and 55% of US-controlled corporations (USCC’s), reported zero tax liability for at least one of those years. In total, two-thirds of the corporations doing business in the U.S. paid no taxes from 1998-2005, while collectively reporting $2.5 trillion dollars in sales.

In that article, I pointed out that the cuts McCain wanted were something of a manufactured myth, not just because so many corporations paid no taxes at all, but because the majority of those who did pay, paid nowhere near the 35% McCain claimed.

McCain and other Republicans continue pushing the mirage of high corporate taxes despite the nuts and bolts of facts as presented by the government’s own accounting office. At a time when they should be demanding an end to the loopholes and special breaks that allowed so many corporations to exist tax-free, they are instead pushing for more corporate tax breaks.

One has to wonder what America’s bottom-line might look like if all the corporations in question paid taxes at even 10% during the last decade. My guess is that it might have been enough to fund the $700B+ business bailout that the Senate voted for, despite the the fact that the majority of Americans disapproved. We’re tired of paying the price for corporate negligence and greed, a point that is driven home every time we hear about multi-million dollar bonuses, million dollar office makeovers, or lavish parties.

There are small businesses — those without teams of attorneys and accountants at their disposal — who might benefit from tax breaks and other incentives. If the corporations that paid no taxes at all paid their share, we might be able to give relief to those small businesses that are struggling due to the economy, and not their own bad business practices.

With our country in crisis, this is not the time for smokescreens, mirages, and propaganda. It is time to face the truth, hold businesses and people accountable, and give relief where it is needed — and not just where it’s politically expedient or advantageous to do so.

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How It Feels To Know He Is Behind Bars

Posted on 01/24/2009 by Jane Devin

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This is one of the men who raped me when I was a teenager. He was 19 then, he’s 51 now, and he is still a rapist. I look at him and see a life gone wrong, but I feel no pity. I imagine that at one time he was a little boy who liked action figures and riding his bike, but that something (or someone) terrible happened in his youth that robbed him of his innocence and his conscience. Still, I feel no pity. I wish him only a long life behind bars, where he will never again have the opportunity to lay his hands upon a child.

I feel guilty. It would not have been safe for me then to tell my parents or authorities, so I told only my older sister, who earlier that day introduced me to him as her friend. She didn’t tell, either.

I feel pride in the young girl who braved whatever circumstance she was in to tell her story to family, law enforcement, attorneys, and then in court. Giving the details of a rape, over and over again, is uncomfortable for adult victims — for children it can be excruciating. Whoever she is, she did something that likely saved other children from knowing the same kind of pain she experienced. I wish I could have done that, but I suspect it wouldn’t have ended up the same way. It was a different time and place.

I feel angry at the never-ending cycle of child abuse and neglect — at the society that helps perpetuate it through weak social services and laws — and at those who continue to bear children they don’t want, or can’t love and care for properly. It is likely that this rapist, like so many others, was sexually, physically, or otherwise abused as a child. It may also be that he is a sociopath, and would have been one regardless of his upbringing. In either case, it seems to me that there were opportunities to derail his sexually violent tendencies before he began victimizing children while he was still a teen himself. The recidivism rate for molesters and rapists is extremely high, the cure rate near zero — but I can’t help but wonder what might happen if we turned more of our attention toward preventing the causes.

I feel hopeless in a way. We live in a time of such desensitization that child abuse and rape have become cliched topics. The victims are getting younger and younger. The rape of infants, once a horror story limited to third-world countries and sick child pornographers, is becoming more and more commonplace. The sentences for child rape can range from one year to five to life in prison. All rape is heinous, but those involving prepubescent children should be especially repugnant in a civilized nation, and there should be long mandatory sentences in place to protect society from poor judicial discretion and the plague of repeat offenders.

I feel gratefully far removed from the abuses in my own youth, but connected to those who are experiencing the same now. I wish I could do more. I wish I could change the laws, right all the wrongs, and make every child safe. It’s an impossible task, but I’ll never stop talking about it, no matter how many people refuse to listen.

I feel relief knowing that, at least for now, a serial rapist who once affected my life is incarcerated.

I feel genuine joy for every child and woman left untouched by this crime. I feel blessed for knowing that there’s innocence left in this world.

I feel strong, and alive, and lucky.

I feel like I can tell now, so I do.

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Anchors

Posted on 01/17/2009 by Jane Devin

I float relatively unencumbered in this life, steadily attached to only the two people I helped to create. I wonder sometimes if I should feel lonely, in the same way someone with an all-yellow garden might wonder if they should plant something wild and red.

I harbor sentiment for distant friends and strangers almost unwittingly, and don’t realize its depth until I open a letter, see a mother kiss her newborn child’s head, or stand in the boisterous crowd of someone else’s family. I’m always surprised at how ready the lump in my throat is, as well as the laughter. I am often inexplicably touched by someone else’s life stories, anecdotes, photographs, poems, music, or thoughts. The tears or the joy rise impulsively, out of some unmapped, visceral place.

Excited teenage girls out shopping for a prom dress can evoke the same tender feelings in me me as two outcast middle-schoolers in deep conversation at a coffee shop. An elderly couple holding hands can rouse my sentiment as much as a pair of five year-olds standing at a bus stop. I feel downright gleeful when I see any display of love, whether it’s a mother bending over a stroller, or a couple who can’t stop kissing in the back row of a theater.

Yet I am alone, and in so many ways I’m grateful for solitude, and for being able to embrace my nature, which needs the retreat of waves more often than it needs the solidity of an anchor. Then again, perhaps my anchor is something I’ve always carried with me rather than let sink, and one day I’ll find myself wanting to ease it down into peaceful waters.

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Women, Writers, and Those “White Hot Moments”

Posted on 01/09/2009 by Jane Devin

The bubble and I have a love-hate relationship. It keeps me feeling safe, insulated, and even hopeful. Outside the bubble, there are too many people who make no sense to me, and too many bad things to count. There are so many horrific events, really, that I am often left somewhere between wanting to rail against an ugly world, or wanting to curl up inside the shelter of idealism.

I waver, I struggle, I rage, I hide, I justify — I have what musician Daniela Nardi calls “white hot moments” — where I collide against myself, and that tiny piece of the universe around me. I want acceptance / I don’t care if I’m accepted. I want understanding / It doesn’t matter if other people understand. I want success / Success isn’t that meaningful.

Writers, particularly those who write fiction, hear no a lot more than they hear yes. Rejection is far more common than acceptance, which imbues the rare acceptance letter with a joy that has no grounding whatsoever in common sense. You mean you’ll print the story I spent weeks sweating over, and pay me absolutely nothing but a copy of the book? Yay! It’s hard for non-writers to understand that kind of thrill, but it exists, and it has less to do with seeing one’s work in print than it does with knowing that someone thought you wrote a story worth telling.

Like me, most of the women writers I know have a deeply hermitic side — their own version of the bubble. They thrive in solitude, and carve as many free hours out of a day as they can in order to be alone with their stories. When the work is done though, the mood shifts and the desire changes. A finished story isn’t meant to stay pristine and isolated — it’s meant to get dog-eared, creased, bookmarked, and highlighted. It’s meant to get dirtied by critiques, loved by some readers, hated by others, passed around, or given away. A story is meant to have a life of its own, quite apart from its creator.

When a story is stillborn — when it never knows life outside the bubble, or dies upon its first gasp of outside air — there’s sadness and a sense of loss. Some writers are too cool to admit this, but I’m not. I am not cool enough to be indifferent. I’m not, as Jewel once sang, fashionably sensitive and too cool to care. I get nervous when I submit my work to publishers, and even when I post a new story on my blog. I get a huge rush of joy when I get an acceptance letter or feedback, and feel somewhat crushed when my work is rejected or met with silence.

So yes, I pulled a story from this site. Eleven hours, 473 readers, and zero comments later, the silence was too sad for me. Some wonderful women* wrote me letters afterward saying some really beautiful things, all of which were deeply appreciated but still….those eleven hours filled me with doubt. I think I could have done better — I know I could have written something that was not as elusive or enigmatic.

I also wondered if it was too gay. I know most of my readers are straight, but I really don’t think about my sexuality or other people’s when I write. Being a lesbian is as natural for me as other people’s heterosexuality, so I tend not to explain it or qualify it in my stories. I don’t think I’ve even used the words lesbian or gay in any story I’ve written. Straight writers don’t mention they’re straight, they just write what comes naturally, and so do I. Readers here know me though, and the ones who’ve stayed aren’t the homophobic kind.

I wanted to give the story another chance for life, so I submitted it to a gay literary site that on first glance seemed to be a good match for me. Still Blue: More Writing By (For or About) Working Class Queers. It was rejected less than 24 hours later. The author’s bios are considerably more impressive than mine — MFA’s, lawyers, award and fellowship winners — a different kind of working class than where I come from, but the stories, as might be expected, are good. There’s no expectation that working class equals poor language, or an inability to speak of anything outside of the slum. I appreciate that. Wendell Ricketts has an eye for stories. I can’t hold it against him that mine wasn’t one of them. Instead, it just confirmed for me that the story needed work. It confirmed that there was silence for a reason.

A white hot moment can last for days, and they are almost always unexpected. On some days, our bubbles just aren’t insulated enough — or we feel a need to challenge ourselves by bursting them open and seeing what happens. Of course we never know what we’ll feel about the outcome until we’re facing the consequences — and the dichotomous, sometimes fractured, parts of ourselves that are more strongly felt in a crowd than in solitude.

—————-

*With special thanks to the wonderful women I feel so privileged to know. Along with Daniela, you helped turn my white hot moment into a manageable glow.

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