What Rush Limbaugh Steals From Us

I finally figured out why I find the FOX commentator so objectionable.

It's not so much what he is saying--bizarre though that can be--it's what is happening as the result of it. By holding his listeners in a state of perpetual churning resentment, he is siphoning off people who still have a role to play in building this nation's future. We need his listeners--older white men mainly--to be part of this new world. Rush is holding them prisoners to their own resentment.

That's why I don't respect him. In the interests of his own profit, I see him depriving the rest of us of these men, and as a nation we need them.

I came to this realization the other night when friends from our RV days, George and Valerie, stopped by on their way through town. George ran for office once an has an acute sense of what is wrong with the nation. He sympathizes with some of the positions taken by the Tea Party because he sees the malaise and selfishness that riddles this country. I have to respect that he at least believes in something, even if it is just a past that looks better from a distance than it was.

By listening to him, I realized how incredibly cynical I have become. Everywhere I look, I see corruption. Religion, politics, corporations, hospitals, universities, the military, civic organizations--there's nothing left to trust. Our lives are now completely run by corporate interests--food, medicine, newspapers, entertainment, education, transport, and even Congress, the one place that is supposed to take care of us. Every thing is for sale, and everything is for profit. Capitalism unbridled. Our world is shot through with special interests and their money and the general population is  not much better.

Bleak though this picture is, it is also where I respectfully part company with George. He listens to Rush and told me that Rush had "never lied." This interests me, because everyone else has, sometimes under oath.  He trusts Rush and dreams of reinstating a time when people took responsibility for themselves.

Most of us could be attracted to that vision if were not for some of the rather ugly truths that lie behind it. The Jeffersonian small farmer has long gone and even that was often built on the back of slaves and, in many cases,  of women who were often considered chattel. My grandfather, for example, refused to educate my mother because he said it would be giving something to another man.

I am not among the government bashers, because imperfect and coopted as it is, the government is the only place that tries to serve the nation rather than itself. Were it not for the government and the nation's laws, I would not have the education that I do today.

The conclusion I come to, then, is that this nation is in desperate need of a call to higher meaning. George is right there. Some people thought that Obama was going to provide it. Nothing short of a new political Messiah can do the job because the whole lot of us need to be called to something larger than ourselves and our tribal tendency to take sides on issues as if we were rooting for Super Bowl teams. We need someone to come forward with the almost religious message that our nation and the human race is larger than our individual grubbing--and we all do it, "rounding" on our income taxes and greedily standing outside the government's door with our hands out--and that includes not only the Apples, Starbucks, and Halliburtons but also any of the other big pretenders who hire the pricey lawyers to cheat the taxpayers left and right.

Where can such a leader come from? Certainly not from Limbaugh who  will find no interest or profit in looking to the future and saying, I see the world is changing. We can't stop it. How can we shape what is coming to preserve the best of the past?  It will have to come from us and from the people like George who have looked at the political process first hand.

In fact, this process of redefining our future as a principled and ethical nation is the  one that Limbaugh destroys by taking from us the very people who could help us best.

Freedom, Anarchy, and Gun Control

It's amazing to me how badly people confuse the words freedom and liberty. I'm quite sure if they thought about for a moment, they would not be running around proclaiming freedom at the top of their lungs.

To give a succinct explanation of the difference, consider the following:  if you have a well and your neighbor decides to come and pee in it, he has the freedom to do so as long as he is willing to deal with your very angry personal response.

On the other hand, he does not have the liberty to do it because we live in a society that has laws about property rights and harm.

Liberty in the case of your well means that if your neighbor pollutes your water supply, he will be arrested. His arrest will be sanctioned by law and custom and you will not expected to go out and punch him in the nose.

Freedom, on the other hand, is the anarchy of doing whatever you want whenever you want to and to hell with anyone else. In this case, you might want to take boxing lessons.

Anyone listening to the gun control debates should be able to see this ignorant confusion playing out quite insanely. It is everywhere: letters to the editor, columnists, advertising. It is current among members of the community that I can only describe as paranoid conspiracy theorists who confuse efforts to promote social responsibility that are the hallmark of liberty with the so-called freedom to buy anything that fires however they damned well please.

The worst yet I have come across is the truly ignorant letter printed in today's newspaper that claims that gun control doesn't work because it didn't prevent the Boston bombings. I hope the newspaper printed it with a shake of the head so we can see what this society has come to.

No amount of sanity penetrates these self-righteous brains. They seem unable to realize that a large number of their fellow citizens do not appreciate weaponry in their suburbs. Sorry, Chums, we, and I include myself here, do not feel safe with guns in your hands or in our houses, and we don't trust your judgment on the matter, particularly not when you quote the gun lobby.

In fact,  I am now so disgusted with the irrational frenzy surrounding this matter that I wait for the argument that once nuclear weapons can be made portable, they will be covered by the second amendment and people can keep them in their houses for self-defense.

God preserve us when that debate happens. At that time, I assume the National Rifle Association will change its name to the National Weapons Association.

Politics, Religion, and What Do We Really Know?

When one thinks about it, it's pretty scary how little we really know.  Pretty much everything is based on our own assumptions. Take the proposition that the sun will rise tomorrow. True, thousands of years of experience suggest that we will see the first signs of light in the morning, but all it will take is one experience of the sun not being there for our assumption to be exposed for the theory it is.  And that's not even factoring in the predictions that our sun will die one day of old age anyway.

Science has no trouble with the concept of the one exception bringing down a mighty theory. That's because science basically is aimed at the exceptions that disprove the rule as a way of moving our understanding forward.  If we knew everything about the world that there was to be known, generations of graduate students would be without dissertation topics. This means that with every generation, there can be no sacred cows. Unfortunately for the scientist, this skeptical approach to all ideas has sometimes led to the bonfire. Most of the rest of us just call it progress and we adapt more or less gracefully depending on how threatened we feel.

Judging from the firestorm over allowing gay marriage, increasing taxes on the wealthiest, providing medical coverage, and limiting the plethora of weapons used by peeved citizens against one another (anyone who thinks that personal guns are to defend against the government hasn't visited North Dakota nuclear silos lately), there has to be a lot of threat and paranoia swirling around us.

In fact, I am having trouble identifying where religion and politics begin and end. They seem to be on a continuum. Religion has become political and politics has become religion. On the one side, we have religion (heavily evangelical but also Catholic) attempting to use the political process to impose sectarian moral dogma on everyone regardless of personal beliefs. On the other, we have politics (primarily conservative) that keep alive the dogma of failed economic policies (trickle down, free markets, make a buck at all costs). Neither position can stand the test of truth, but that seems beside the point.

As anyone who reads this blog knows, I have scant sympathy for either religion or politics. My primary objection to both is their blatant hypocrisy. Neither advances our understanding of the human condition or makes our lives more productive. Religion imposes the morality of two thousand years ago while politics merely encourages the self-serving. Both are probably necessary. Both need to be kept in their places.

But who can be objective about them in the glorious mud bath that is our current experience? I've heard our time called the age of me-first. I would call it the age of the wallow.

We wallow in religious nonsense designed to make us feel superior to the other church down the road. We wallow in taking sides in political debates that mean nothing in the context of history and remind us only how tribal we are.  We know nothing for sure, yet we are willing to send our sons to war to "prove" we are right--or is it maybe to convince ourselves that we matter in an expanding universe that science is bringing to a computer near us?

If anyone wants a good thing to ponder, it might be what Christ's teachings would be
about corporate America. Want to bet he'd sound more like Occupy Wall Street than FOX news?