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Rush Limbaugh & Co. Very Limited

Rush Limbaugh is a drug-infested, lying high-school bully, who - for the reasons explained below - has been getting away with uncontrolled outbursts of hatred and verbal abuse of others. Recently, I watched a video tape of Rush drowning in self-importance, while dreamily talking dirty about a young woman, who dared to assert that she was in control of her body and destiny. He reminded me of a teenager who was jerking off while cursing. But Rush's age is 61, not 16, just like 1984 is not 1948.

On a fourth wife, roughly half his age, Rush still seems to be incapable of controlling rage when he senses a challenge to his male dominance. I would advise Rush to work out issues with his snow white manhood, drugs, and aggression towards women with a psychiatrist or psychologist. The whole world doesn't need to participate.


I wonder what the three earlier wives would tell us about Rush's brutality? How often did he hit or abuse them? If we paid these three wretches as much or more as they are being paid to keep silent, one wonders what would they say? Newt's second wife was pretty direct when describing her own paragon of fidelity, marital support, and christian morality. 

Let's not forget, however, that Rush is an ex officio member of a larger team of hand-picked hate mongers and professional liars assembled by Faux News. (If you don't already know it, faux, pronounced as fou, is a French word for false.)

Bill O'Reilly, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, Greta van Susteren, Geraldo Rivera, Neil Cavuto, etc., are all highly paid actors and professional propagandists, for whom a "no" becomes a "yes" for cash. It is telling that the Urban Dictionary defines a hate monger as "a media personality who spreads hate under the guise of a political affiliation or a religious belief." Ann Coulter is a prototypical hate monger.

The Faux News stars may have their own problems with anger management and other symptoms of madness, but in truth they all work hard and with great skill on the implementation of an ideology of hate, division, and backwardness. An atomized, suspicious and angry, poorly-educated society - without universal healthcare, but with constant distractions of pop music, sports, facebook, reality shows, celebrities, and fashion - is easy to manipulate. Of course, neither my observation nor the current implementations by Rush or Faux News are original. George Orwell described it all in 1984, written, as you've already guessed, in 1948.

The able agit-prop functionaries of Faux News have been working diligently to deliver what they are paid for.  Agit-prop, a contraction of the words "agitatsiia" and "propaganda" was an omnipresent activity in the post-Revolutionary Soviet Union. Intended to inculcate and promote "appropriate" social values among the masses, its many forms (press, radio, film, music, sculptures, paintings, poster campaigns, and the countless agitation centers, or 'agitpunkts', among others) served as a powerful means of politically educating the population at large. And when agit-prop failed, a bullet in the back of the head of each nonbeliever or gulag usually did the job.

Faux News is a national agitpunkt of today. Just like the telescreens in 1984, Faux News is omnipresent in hotel lobbies, restaurants, bars, and airports.  Often it is the first channel after the start up menu on the hotel TV networks.  A coincidence?  Hardly.  The U.S. proles (a newspeak term for the proletariat, the poor and uneducated classes in the Oceania that included North America) need to get their daily fixes of hate and cheap distractions, and Faux News is here to serve ample doses of both.

In this context, Rush or Bill are simply delivering a daily "Two Minutes of Hate." In 1984 (the book of course), the purpose of the Hate moments was to channel the citizens' foggy feelings of angst and hatred from leading a wretched, gray, and controlled existence. The citizens' feelings had to be foggy, because all words to express human feelings were eliminated from the language they were taught at school.  Imagine describing anything with up to 140 characters and not all letters. Or think of the current high school students drilled to take the endless debilitating tests that leave no time for independent thinking and learning.

By re-directing the suppressed feelings of the population away from the Oceanian government and toward external enemies (who never existed and were pure propaganda inventions), the Two Minutes of Hate minimized subversive thought and behavior.  Does this ring a bell? Please recall my words when you watch the daily propaganda installments on Faux News.

In case you think that I exaggerate, here is a quote from William Casey, an ex-CIA Director:
We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false.
From first staff meeting in 1981
I guess, Mr. Casey had a deadline in mind: 1984.

I grew up in Poland soaked in a similarly crude propaganda and hating every minute of it.  My respite was to go to the BBC, or Radio Free Europe, or the Voice of America that provided me with antidotes for the low doses of the slowly working venom injected into my veins each day by the local mass media.  It did not work then, and it does not work now.  Or does it?  So many of the Polish immigrants I know, many with advanced academic degrees, revert to the propaganda they grew up with, and are enthusiastic consumers of Rush Limbaugh and Faux News.  Now, that's really scary!

P.S. Kurt Vonnegut, one of my most favorite writers, came up with this helpful quote:
"If you go back through history, you'll find people who have been most eager to rule, to make laws and to tell everybody exactly how God Almighty wants things here on Earth - those people have forgiven themselves and their friends for anything and everything.  But they have been absolutely disgusted and terrified by the natural sexuality of common men and women."
Billy the Poet talking to Nancy McLuhan after deflowering her.  As all hostesses of death, Nancy was a beautiful frigid virgin schooled in martial arts for self-protection.  Welcome to the Monkey House, p.49.

Comments

  1. Remember that we've been talking about these arrogant "haters," as the teenagers call them, since the beginning of human time. William Shakespeare put it well: "the empty vessel makes the loudest sound." So let's just put that vessel of Rush away in a dark cupboard and forget about it until it's ready to hold some flowers and look pretty again.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I share your take on this. I see the consumption of Fox TV, et al as akin to the diet of PopTarts, Whoppers, Doritos, etc. It's easy, cheap, a quick junk-jolt of energy, but, of course, there are serious long-term consequences. Point that out to someone who loves nothing better than coming home with a bag of Jack-in-the-Box and a Coke and flipping on the Boobtube to watch Fox, or the latest sexy-actresses-murder show (interspersed with ads for Whoppers and Viagara), however... one gets as far as telling an alcoholic they have a problem, they are ruining their life, and ought to go to an AA meeting. Why can't they see the obvious, that this is all achieved by high-octane marketing to marks!! By consuming junk, whether from Fox et al or the nearest fry-pit, people are wasting the precious hours, days, years of their lives. Thank you for blogging, your blog is a light.

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