Poetry
Hickman, Miriam Finkelstein, Lou Ella
some very good things, indeed. But the Limbaugh phe- are TV folks: Buckley, perennially encumbered by a hyper- nomenon surely is, whatever else it is, a textbook sample of trophied...
...often self-kidding good humor, knows that the offensiveness I walk gingerly to the curb where my friend, is the gig...
...It's too much to hope, I suppose, But a tiny tendril of polyester...
...It's me," 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...
...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...
...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...
...FRANK McCONNELL 22: 4 June 1993 Commonweal...
...as long as the Clinton administration...
...he is basically the first truly postmodern conservative...
...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...
...But not Rush...
...Both authors are also TV dom either ever looks directly at the camera...
...solemnity, earnestness, and half-octave drop in the voice...
...itics as showbiz becomes so clearly showbiz that it clears the This part will take longer...
...This is television, Unraveling dammit...
...He loves the camera...
...It's not you," I say...
...The guy, for crying out Needle's Eye loud, reminds us that the Tube is not the real world, and that (Mark, 10:25) the problems that seem so solvable on the Tube really, really aren't...
...What they also have in common is a deep before Limbaugh...
...tent-preacher, to bring his final point home with just the right A long black thread is attached to her cuff...
...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...
...but it would be Neil Postman's revenge...
...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...
...It's because Whose other end is attached to the hem of my skirt...
...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...
...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...
...But even that isn't why I get a kick out of him...
...him laughing at himself and, implicitly, at the whole show...
...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...
...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...
...But Rush, with sublime and That it would stop...
...His poI had noticed it beginning sitions are, on the whole, deeply offensive to anybody who Just after the intermission...
...as candle is the seeing Did I call Rush a Rotarian Howard Stern...
...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...
...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...
...a syndicated columnist, imprisoned in the cell of his own comThink about the chief media voices on the conservative side pulsive allusiveness...
...I had hoped, doesn't think that Pat Buchanan and Pat Robertson are, as I Vainly it seems, believe them to be, mutant aliens...
...Whether intended or not, though, that is the final effect of the "Rush Limbaugh Show," which I devoutly hope runs at least Lou Ella Hickman, LW.B.S...
...psychic space, once again, for politics as politics...
...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...
...the moment when polI had come undone so silently, so quickly...
...It can be embarrassing, like watching the school librarian trying to get loose and boogie at the class picnic...
Vol. 120 • June 1993 • No. 11
