Media
McConnell, Frank
cal comments (a burning house that turned into a burning book, performer on a radio show where he happily expresses opin- the Desert Storm bomb strikes) or sometimes comic routines. ...
...Here's some of the stuff he says...
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...Like a classic Court Fool, 01' Rush in his simplicity candle is the needle's eye calls us back to the seriousness of the things we really have to that out of such darkness should come light get done...
...that nothing is really wrong, except for the liberals...
...He's been for years now the host and the only star audition...
...He is a physician at the University of Virginia Health Sciences Center...
...He is a philosopher, bioethicist, and director of the Hasting Center...
...It's me...
...Or like the glitter rockers of the early seventies, he surprise at the common place reminds us that the medium is not the message, that the mediI dance um is just the self-involved, profit-oriented bloody medium, I become thread and that the message is way beyond and way below its blanfor the sewing dishments...
...If media genius is targeting, arousing, and main"Well, yeah," I said, lighting up and punching taining the precise audience you need to keep on the air, then in channel 13...
...In COMMONWEAL'S special supplement Alexander Morgan Capron, professor of law and medicine at the University of Southern California, and Vicki Michel, associate director of the university's Center for Health Policy and Ethics, analyze its language, criteria, and safeguards...
...this is the man...
...What both these charac- vous, prep-school-debater's ripostes (one of his own favorite ters have in common is, first, that they are writers before theywords) are designed to hold the tacky business of TV performance at a tweedy arm's length...
...riots, it was of Rush by the effect...
...And, half-improvised as every half-hour is-ol' Rush seldom completes the agenda he maps out at the top of the show"Oh, says my theater companion at the end of the play, Limbaugh always manages, just like a good lecturer or a good "I'm unraveling...
...And now he's the host and be entering a mysterious bright-light cave with only her violin star performer on his own, syndicated TV show...
...Think of Rush Limbaugh, in his frantic quest for permanent outrage, as a Rotarian Howard Stern...
...him laughing at himself and, implicitly, at the whole show...
...The wonderful thing about Limbaugh, though, is not that he "Okay, look," I said, taking a long drag and deciding to come expresses irresponsible and often vile opinions for an eager auclean, "I can't help it: I get a kick out of Rush Limbaugh...
...And, since the inauguration, each installment of his show begins with the legend, "America under C eleste, with connubial exasperation dripping Siege," and usually with a Monty Python-style cartoon of from every word: "You're going to watch him Clinton, Hillary, or somebody from the new administration...
...often self-kidding good humor, knows that the offensiveness I walk gingerly to the curb where my friend, is the gig...
...cal comments (a burning house that turned into a burning book, performer on a radio show where he happily expresses opinthe Desert Storm bomb strikes) or sometimes comic routines...
...1 said I'd write about him...
...ions that have been known to send even mild liberals running There was a funny one which made a dance from shots of peo- for the Xanax bottle...
...As usual with Laurie Anderson productions, I found who first insisted that the real cause of the riots was not the myself attracted to a work which, had it been shorn of its fas- Rodney King verdict, nor yet the urban frustration of inner Los cinating effects, reduced to what rather than how Anderson was Angeles, but those perky liberal telecopters who covered the communicating, would have seemed commonplace...
...cateur, a crypto-liberal employed by, say, Mother Jones or the Progressive to make the ultraconservative stance so obNow I sit on my bed, peering into the eye of a needle viously untenable, such a parody of anything approaching reThrough which I am trying sponsible political speech, as to discredit it altogether as To put not a camel anything but entertainment...
...He's the author of a book some very good things, indeed...
...CARLOS GOMEZ gives a first-hand account of the Dutch system that many commentators take to be the model for the law and practice of euthanasia...
...thing other than that the audience was supposed to be dazzled On "Today," the third day of the L.A...
...The images could be seen either of videotapes where he does the same thing...
...It's because Whose other end is attached to the hem of my skirt...
...So must the discussion and the debate COMMONWEAL'S special report has been used by hospital ethics committees, diocesan social justice offices, law and public policy centers, prolife organizations, parish discussion groups, patient advocacy groups, college ethics courses...
...Whether intended or not, though, that is the final effect of Lou Ella Hickman, LW.B.S...
...itics as showbiz becomes so clearly showbiz that it clears the psychic space, once again, for politics as politics...
...EUTHANASIA The efforts to legalize Euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide will continue...
...On his own show, of Rush continually referred to Spike GERALD WEALES Lee's Malcolm X as "Malcolm the Tenth," and suggested that students who wanted to cut classes to see the premiere (as Lee MEDIA had urged) should go all the way emulating the film's hero, and loot the candy counters in the theater lobbies...
...He makes very large bucks selling copies ple coming out of rest rooms...
...LEON KASS examines the consequences for physicians and medical practice if doctors are given the authority to kill or assist in the suicide of their patients...
...I have no idea what it meant if it meant any- the same stuff...
...But not Rush...
...That "Mph," she mphed, leaving the den...
...I pray I will not come further apart I'm not even sure, in fact, that he mightn't be an agent provoUntil I get home...
...It can be embarrassing, like watching the school librarian trying to get loose and boogie at the class picnic...
...But Rush, with sublime and That it would stop...
...a syndicated columnist, imprisoned in the cell of his own comThink about the chief media voices on the conservative side pulsive allusiveness...
...1991 defeated in Washington State 1992 defeated in California 1993...
...He is a physician and philosopher at the University of Chicago...
...has been done in America since the electromagnetic media were Well, it is the kind of thing you only admit to your wife and/or born: who can forget Father Coughlin or Joe McCarthy...
...But you've been watching him for a week, now," she said...
...His poI had noticed it beginning sitions are, on the whole, deeply offensive to anybody who Just after the intermission...
...It's not you," I say...
...Why not put this special report to use in your next program...
...Like a radio shock-jock, he neckties ever allowed on TV, with a face uncannily like the understands that his opinions are a commodity whose adrenalater Orson Welles and the vaguely West-Texas accent of a tel- lin-content can never be allowed to drop, that every show is an evangelist...
...He loves the camera...
...DANIEL CALLAHAN explores the consequences for society and medicine of legalizing euthanasia...
...01' Rush...
...But even that isn't why I get a kick out of him...
...as candle is the seeing Did I call Rush a Rotarian Howard Stern...
...He's the author of on the platoon of television sets or else on multiple screens- a book, The Way Things Ought to Be (Pocket), where he says one of them a globe-hanging overhead...
...It's too much to hope, I suppose, But a tiny tendril of polyester...
...Limbaugh Rush Limbaugh just in case you're recently back from a may or may not really believe everything he says...
...riot...
...the moment when polThis part will take longer...
...His show is done with a studio audience, but it's clear that they are there to laugh and Miriam Finkelstein applaud at the right times, and nothing else...
...know, and has acknowledged, that what he says is, in its outHe's a two- or three-hundred-pound (it varies) ultraconser- rageousness, just what allows him to stay on the air and keep vative in a dark Dacron-looking suit and some of the ugliest saying it and keep making money...
...He insists again and again that the capitalist system, as it stands, is full of benIT'S NOT HELL, JUST LIMBAUGH efits, joy, seashells, and balloons for the people really willing EXCELLENCE IN BOMBAST to work at it...
...the "Rush Limbaugh Show," which I devoutly hope runs at least as long as the Clinton administration...
...That wise man, Neil Postman, wrote in his 1985 book, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that one of the most deleterious effects of TV culture was the transformation of political discourse into showbiz...
...This is television, Unraveling dammit...
...I had come undone so silently, so quickly...
...Speaking strictly as somebody who makes his living giving large And disconnect her from the thread lectures, I can attest: he's a beautiful performer...
...Where he says bow as weapon...
...The most audible/visible have to be William reluctance, when they are on TV, to be on TV: notice how selF. Buckley, Jr., and George F. Will...
...outrageousness can only be sustained by the media...
...When everything becomes "entertainment," Postman argues, even presidential campaigns are emptied of their fundamental seriousness: and this, mind you, three years before George Bush made Willie Horton his running mate and seven years before Ross Perot and Razorback Bill Clinton made campaigning an extended talk-show...
...solemnity, earnestness, and half-octave drop in the voice...
...The visual high point the same stuff he says on his radio show and his videos, and of the show was a laser creation in which Anderson seemed to which is selling just fine, thank you...
...But the Limbaugh phe- are TV folks: Buckley, perennially encumbered by a hypernomenon surely is, whatever else it is, a textbook sample of trophied vocabulary, the founder of National Review, and Will, the Postman principle...
...he is basically the first truly postmodern conservative...
...He laughs a lot at what he says-can you imagine With her usual Bill Buckley laughing?-and his audience laughs along with Dramatic aplomb, commandeers a taxi...
...again...
...What they also have in common is a deep before Limbaugh...
...Sort of like owning up to a pref- wonderful thing is that Brother Limbaugh, as far as I know, is erence for brandy boilermakers or the Captain and Tenille: not the first ultraconservative on the scene to understand that his quite, as the Brits say, "the done thing...
...Better yet, Rush is to the conservative agenda what David Bowie was to commercial rock'n'roll: its maybe self-conscious and surely entertaining reductio ad absurdum...
...Both authors are also TV dom either ever looks directly at the camera...
...With the cat...
...notice how Bill's products, but with a kind of virginal recalcitrance about, you languorous, Oscar Wildean intonations and George's quick, nerknow, getting too seriously involved...
...FRANK McCONNELL 22: 4 June 1993 Commonweal...
...The guy, for crying out Needle's Eye loud, reminds us that the Tube is not the real world, and that (Marl: 10:25) the problems that seem so solvable on the Tube really, really aren't...
...that Rodney King obviously was a threat to the four cope who beat the hell out of him...
...I had hoped, doesn't think that Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson are, as I Vainly it seems, believe them to be, mutant aliens...
...but it would be Neil Postman's revenge...
...The your best friend, nicht wahr...
...1994...
...I'm not entirely sure that I agree with the full darkness of Postman's prognosis: the last campaign seems to me to have produced 20: 4 June 1993 Commonweal 1 1 1 Sp' c.IAt Rrp0RT Euthanasia on the Ballot...
...dience who, apparently like irresponsible and vile opinions...
...California's euthanasia proposition was described as "state of the art" legislation by its proponents...
...tent-preacher, to bring his final point home with just the right A long black thread is attached to her cuff...
...But he does UFO abduction-is-is-oh, hell...
Vol. 120 • June 1993 • No. 11
