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| Rush Limbaugh died today. |
Unless you've been in seclusion, you know that Rush Limbaugh, patron saint of disaffected white folks who can't deal with their privilege slipping away, lost his battle with cancer today. I don't believe in celebrating the death of any human being. But I also don't believe in sugarcoating the legacy of any prominent figure who has passed to the great beyond. And there will probably be a lot of sugarcoating of Limbaugh as is. To me, he was a creep. He was a racist, homophobic bloated windbag whose rhetoric had a double negative impact of me as a black gay man.
To LGBTQ people, Limbaugh was the epitome of homophobia's hypocrisy. On one hand, he dehumanized us, made fun of how the AID/HIV crisis was ravaging our community, and asserted the standard lies about us supposedly "ramming our lifestyle down people's throats." And then on the other hand, claimed to not understand why we were so angry.
To African-American people, he was the epitome of racism's hypocrisy, claiming that we are being held back because we want to be victims, we are holding on to much to the past and we can succeed in life if we only try. But on the other hand, he was the main one sending up the alarm to his white listeners when any of us did achieve.
I don't see the need for a lot of discussion with regards to Limbaugh's legacy. One can break it down via few articles:
Limbaugh repeatedly refers to Obama as a “boy” and a “man-child”
Limbaugh was never a friend of any Democratic president or contender, but something about President Obama always set him off. He not only felt the need to make fun of Obama, his family, and his policies, but there was also a desire to peg Obama an incompetent child. Or a boy in a man's job who had no business in the White House, with the heavy emphasis on the word "boy." Forget Obama making it to Harvard, getting elected to the United States Senate or two terms as the first black president. To Limbaugh, he wasn't a man. He was a "boy" and will always be a "boy."
It wasn't by accident that Limbaugh made this point. He, like so many of us, knew the racist history of white people referring to black men as boys as a way of stripping away our manhood and implying the false notion of no matter how hard we try, we will never be on the same level of competence as them. And that somehow all of our success comes with stealing jobs and positions from them because of "white guilt" or "affirmative action."
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Media personalities attempting to play nice will no doubt marvel about his "connection" to his audience. I prefer to say that he articulated the anger and resentment from a lot of sad Americans who preferred to stew in their anger over the country becoming more colorful, diverse and competitive while they are becoming less prominent and desirable.
And Limbaugh stirred that stew like a master chef. He did not "connect" with his audience. He exploited them. He fed them illusions designed to inflate all of their anger, their fear, their false sense of self-entitlement, and their prejudices. Then he sucked it out of their souls, making sure to convert the noxious mix into cash which he filled his bank account with over and over again.
That's Rush Limbaugh's legacy. And that's all which needs to be said.
