When news of the passing of iconic talk radio host Rush Limbaugh arrived, people to both sides of him were quick to pounce. The New York Times (in an era of ongoing lows for the paper) offered up its own sadistic screed. Others were delusional in their defense of him.
I have my own take on Rush. He was one reason I became a radio host in the early 2000s—and also a key reason I stopped.
I first heard him in the summer of 1993 (I remember because the McDonald’s that my lawn mowing crew got lunch from each day had Jurassic Park themed meals). Unlike most of my liberal friends, who labeled him a conservative demon, I wanted to listen to him. I wanted to know what the hell the uproar was about, to not just hate on him, but to understand him so that my critique of him, if it came to that, had merit.
And here’s the thing: I got to know the man pretty well through his radio work over the years.
A divisive bloviator? Sure. But he was more than that. He could be very funny and, at times, oddly charming. He gave voice to a right-of-center politics that was kept out of the mainstream. He took the lineage of ’60s liberalism and exposed its unpleasant inner workings (the Clintons were frequent targets) and under his watch conservatism became the new voice of outrage and counterculture.
To discredit him for his style of brashness is to engage in an act of convenient hypocrisy: how else would we expect a voice representing the excluded and marginalized to sound? Rush gave a voice to millions. That he was greeted merely with reactionary disdain from those who didn’t agree with his politics is less a statement about Rush than about how we tend to form our sense of morals around political expedience. (We have Rush to thank for a generation of self-righteous and mean-spirited commentators coming from both sides of the divide.)
A master of his craft
But the politics aside for a moment, I also envied Rush. He could fill a three-hour show with his ideas and rants. When I started my own radio show in 2001, I had trouble doing this for 60 minutes. He knew how to rant—and also how to pause. (I was too insecure to pause.)
Love him or hate him, he was a master of his craft. He wasn’t a talk radio host—he was the talk radio host. I compared myself to him, and each time I did, I felt small.
And then all that changed. When my wife and I gave birth to our first child I questioned what I wanted to do for a living. My work in radio, as much as it awed some others when they found out what I did, felt empty on a certain level. Five days a week (same as Rush) I was required to “sound off” on a topic of my choosing, to play the expert—even when I wasn’t.
So, here I was, 31 years old and looking into my future 20+ years and imagining myself looking back on a life spent talking, like him, to a radio audience because people were entertained by it and someone was paying me to do it and I was willing to talk about….to talk about…. nothing more than whatever controversy would fill the airwaves that day.
Is it worth it?
And I had to ask: is it worth it?
I felt it wasn’t. The world had its Rush Limbaugh, warts and all. And it had others too: Chris Matthews, Rachel Maddow, John Stewart, Keith Olbermann, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly. None of them helped us better understand the world; they only helped us become more angry about it.
And so I quit. I became a devoted father, placing family before work (all thanks to my wife!), and embarked on a profession in psychotherapy. I’ve returned now with my own podcast, built in no small measure on the lessons learned from Rush. God bless.