I listened to Rush Limbaugh today for the first time in I don’t know how long. It is amazing to me how seemingly influential somebody can be for saying absolutely nothing. Obviously you have to fill your three hours of airtime, or however much he is on the air minus commercials. But most times when I tune in or happen to hear him it is an astonishing demonstration of nothingness. The dude says absolutely nothing. Maybe nothing is what says it all. I don’t know.

I have asked a few people if they are familiar with Rush. Republicans and righties say the same thing. They never listen to them but they agree with his politics. I don’t think any of them could even summarize his politics. I give Rush some credit though. In response to a caller’s question he once summarized conservativism as succinctly as I’ve ever heard it. Conservatives, he said, want government to be responsible for the infrastructure and the fundamentals. Conservatives want government in charge of roads, the food supply, water, disaster relief, and so on. You don’t want the government  micromanaging what your doctors are able to tell you and the type of advice you are allowed to get from the likes of accountants and individual advisors. That is conservativism in a nutshell. Compare that to liberals, as they are called, who want to do all that. The Affordable Care Act might be the crowning achievement of that kind of micromanagement, as conservatives would call it.

I do not consider myself right or left. Not that it even matters.

But getting back to his so-called influence, I have always questioned how influential Rush really is. People do not tune into Rush because they disagree or because they are open to changing their mind about anything. They tune in because they agree and they want to be soothed. I remember when he was at the center of the NFL Sunday morning controversy where he made vaguely racial or racist comments regarding Donovan McNabb. After he got fired he took to his radio show and talked about how that was the big leagues. It was like a concession to the fact that his own show was not all that. He is isolated in his fame. I guess he has that in common with the president. They both seem like influential individuals but they live in cocoons.

I like when Rush talks about anything except politics. Before he was doing the television appearances for the NFL he would talk about football on Fridays, and it was a nice respite from his usual snakevoice. He knows the sport, he knows what he’s talking about, and he just had an everyman way of discussing it.

I have talked to a few people who knew him before he was on the radio, people who went to school with him or just somehow know him for who he really is. Everybody said the same thing. He’s one of the nicest guys you will ever meet. The shtick he has on the radio is just that, an elaborate act. I guess I believe that. Or do I? What do I know…

I guess my connection to this stuff runs deep. My father used to listen to talk radio out in the garage, morning noon and night. Paul Harvey was a particular favorite. That might have been the only talk radio personality we agreed on. It took me a long time to realize what a demagogue Paul Harvey was. On the surface he seemed to have an easy-going folksy delivery but what he was really doing a lot of the time was planting seeds, allowing people to confirm in their minds that something was evil or wrong without Paul Harvey himself having to articulate it. That is demagoguery.

Time to face what’s left of the day.