Rush Limbaugh. How I hate this man. I used to listen to him off and on while I was commuting to work because he pissed me off so much he’d really wake me up and make me fight my way through traffic – but he’s gotten so unreasonable that he makes me want to track him down and destroy him with my car.
I read a horrible statistic the other day – how Time magazine had a circulation of 3 million readers, or something – I can’t seem to figure out the readership of the New York Times or Scientific American or even just Toyfare with my limited interest in research today – but Rush has an international claim to 20 million listeners, making him far more effective desseminator of (dis)information.
And so it infuriates me as he reports blatant distortions of science, or spectacular misinterpretations to meet up with his right-wing political agenda – and then some similarly-striped close-minded racist nominates him for a Nobel Peace Prize?
This is very, very, very sad. My friend Chris writes: “not exactly sure why I found the “no more bananas sorry” sign so funny but the coffee that should be traveling down my throat is now staining my shirt.”
I wonder if there’s any other single man who’s done more to distribute racism and hatred to the world, who’s fought so hard to bend facts and focus his listenership away from making decisions for themselves, away from listening and learning, and towards listening to “the only news you’ll ever need” and his dogma.
I think the thing that finally broke my poor dromedary’s back was something as simple as the most recent global warming paper discussing how “there is a consensus that global warming is probably caused by human behaviour” – Rush leapt on that and claimed that you can’t have science by consensus – which just displays a spectacularly ignorant opinion of science as a whole. The idea that it’s a dead thing, unchanging, and that a test tube proves something and then everyone agrees instantly… I guess it’s a good thing the first guy with credentials he was talking to wasn’t a believer in a Hollow Earth, or poor Rush would have some severe issues with the fact that his show is rebroadcast via satellite.
This is where little picnic tables come from. LOOK AWAY!
Okay, marginally done ranting.
Racism is such an odd thing – and as I grow older, I fear that it’s not how you think, but how you act.
When I was younger and people told me that “everyone’s racist”, I thought they were insane, jaded, stupid, closed-minded… but here at the age of thirty somethinsomethin I hate the fact that after being held up by two black males, I have that background trauma to cause me to flinch when confronted with black males… voila… it’s there. That there’s all sorts of scars and scares and presumptions and assumptions that go into play as soon as I see someone or hear them talk, just layers of things that have accumulated over the years. I came into this Life as open-minded as you can get, with parents who insisted that all people were equal and in schools where this white male was in the distinct minority – and I fear that somewhere in my head, I’m losing a battle to keep that even keel. But isn’t it what I DO that’s important? If I can speak to everyone evenly, and act kind…
Ah, finally – affordable goat shoulders. They’re meat, by the way.
I remember reading once that if you smiled, it can actually affect your emotions and sort of releases the right kind of chemicals into you to perk up your mood a little bit. I’d like to think that our actions can be similar. Act a way long enough and you begin to believe it, perhaps? But I hate seeing that the people who were grown-ups when I was a kid, trying to teach me tolerance, have become such bigots later in Life – and I hate even more that I have to hear them talk about it.
We occassionally have fans who have… differing political or social ideas than we do. Who’s to say who’s right or wrong? But MAN I find these people offensive, and I sometimes get fed up with it or have the strength to say fuck off – and other times – well, we’ve got to sell the CDs, you know?
I’m still not sure where to draw that line. You seem to have to have a certain stability before you can have morals, and that eats at me. And some days you’re strong, and some days you’re not… and some days you’re just hungry.
I’m rambling. Badly. More later.
