It’s True. She loved him! This isn’t a joke, she had the superintendent at her apartment complex (in the mid ’90s) rig her front door light switch to her little “boom box” so that when she got home from work, the “current” taped episode of Limbaugh would project throughout her tiny apartment. Hear me: She would come home from a 10-hour shift where she worked fitting prosthetic bras for breast cancer patients (for peanut wages), and she would throw her keys down, light up a cigarette, and flip the Limbaugh switch. That was my mom. My dad had abandoned her in 1987, literally. She was alone.
The soundtrack of my mom’s life from 1987 to when she died in 2001, was … Rush Limbaugh. Yeah, I know — wow. I think we all have soundtracks to sections of our lives. For me and my wife (married in 1985) the soundtrack of our early marriage was “Boys of Summer” (Don Henley), which was the most played radio song the summer we got hitched. I like that about us.
As I grew up in the ’60s and ’70s, my mom’s soundtrack was a mixture of The Sound of Music and all of Johnny Cash’s vinyl records, with some Tom Jones and some Kingston Trio sprinkled in. Those dusty vinyl records thus became the soundtrack of my early years. My mom had one of those cool turntables that could hold five records in the chamber and could drop one of them automatically! That was super cool to me. I knew when The Sound of Music soundtrack ended and when it was going to transition to the vinyl drop of “Hang Down Your Head Tom Dooley” on the Kingston Trio’s Greatest Hits record. I anticipated it every time.
My mom adored her dad, his love of baseball, conservative politics, and all the stuff that comes with all of that. She and I used to argue about Rush Limbaugh a lot. It wasn’t so much about Limbaugh’s message to me (back then, I was pretty malleable, so I didn’t dislike him). It was more the “man.” I’d say, “Mom, he’s kind of full of himself, don’t you think?” She would say, “Yes, but he speaks of the things I have grown up to believe, and he has a sense of humor about it, which my father would have liked.” I had a hard time arguing with her about that, even long after I took Limbaugh off my car’s AM radio preset.
My mom died of lung cancer on January 10, 2001 (our daughter’s 9th birthday), at the age of 63. Rush Limbaugh died of the same thing, this week. I watched my mom die. Dying of lung cancer is no fun. Also no fun today is watching a lot of friends on social media saying “good riddance” (and that’s the people being “kind”) about Limbaugh’s passing. The triumphal vulgarity of it all makes me sad. But it’s probably a little much to expect charity nowadays when mercy is in such short supply (though Limbaugh wasn’t exactly a paragon of charity either). I’m not sad about him dying; I knew he was sick with the same disease my mom had. My mom lasted three months after diagnosis. Limbaugh held on for about three years. Tobacco played a role, for sure, in both lives being cut short.
I’m sad because when my my mom flipped on her rigged-up light switch to the *sultry tones* of Rush Limbaugh, it gave her peace. Those moments gave her respite for her soul. Also in the ’90s, during the Limbaugh years, my mom came to faith in Christ — not because of Rush Limbaugh, but because she heard the Gospel of Christ presented to her clearly (for her understanding) at my sister’s church in Georgia. My mom loved Rush Limbaugh in the ’90s and beyond. She also came to love Jesus in the ’90s and beyond.
Rush Limbaugh was a controversialist and standard bearer for conservative politics. He said things he knew to be inflammatory and did not hesitate to pass on rumors as facts. But I appreciate Rush Limbaugh and am thankful for him. Call it imputation if you want, but at a time when my mom had no one, Limbaugh’s daily radio program became her nightly company. He was an unlikely agent of comfort in her life. He wouldn’t have been the one I had chosen, but that’s often how grace works. When her children were grown and her husband gone, it was Limbaugh’s voice that filled an empty house. Some people listen to music to get them through the hard times. My mom tuned into Rush Limbaugh. He certainly wasn’t preaching the Gospel, but it made life that little bit easier for her and kept her from withdrawing from the world entirely.
My mom’s silly (and awesome) soundtracks resonated with me a lot, and didn’t sometimes, but I can’t help but think that her path to glory is pretty “Tom Jones Cool.” I am coming to believe that the Spirit of God puts soundtracks in our heads “for such times as these.” Such soundtracks accompany us through the ups and downs of life, singing when we feel like dancing or carrying us when we can’t put one foot in front of the other. These small graces sometimes come through songs, or in my Mom’s case, through a radio host.
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4 responses to “My Mom Adored Rush Limbaugh”
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Beautiful tribute to your mom and to Rush. I hope his family will get to read it.
No matter the politics his life had meaning and made a difference in her life.
Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for this reflection, Howie. It’s a very hard time to be gracious towards Limbaugh when, as you note, there is much public celebration of his death. I appreciate that Mockingbird shows no partiality when it comes to reminding us of the abundance of God’s grace for all of his children, because if it’s not for Rush Limbaugh too, then I have no hope.
For whatever it’s worth, in a moment like this I think it can be helpful to remember why so many people are “celebrating.” It’s not to take anything away from what you’ve shared, only to remember that such a reaction comes (I believe) from a place of hurt and powerlessness. So many people felt so hurt and victimized by Limbaugh and his megaphone, and unable to do anything about it while he was alive, that the only control over the situation they may have is to celebrate now.
I can’t blame them either. I’m a gay man, and while I’m too young to remember Limbaugh’s zenith, I know that his grotesque public hatred and mockery of gay people (including a short-lived segment on his radio show celebrating the deaths of AIDS victims with music) contributed to the wave of anti-gay policies that swept the nation in the 90s and early 00s. That materially harmed my young psyche and sense of self-worth. I would visit my mom’s office and some of her coworkers were regular Limbaugh listeners. I figured if they knew I was gay they would hate me. Limbaugh gleefully poisoned millions of people to viscerally loathe gays, feminists, environmentalists, immigrants, and anyone who stood in the way of his revanchist conservative nihilism, and he enriched himself spectacularly in doing so.
I won’t say that celebrating anyone’s death is right. And truly, I’m grateful for your reflection, because it reminds me why that is. But for millions of us, we desperately want catharsis, and this may be the only way to express it. Call it sinfully unavoidable.
I hear you, Pierre, and it’s hard for me too. I’m a Native American, and his simply idiotic assertion that there are more Indians now than there were at the time of Columbus (“How is that a genocide??”) has reinforced the sinful stupidity of many folks I’ve known and made it easier for them to ignore the very real ills afflicting us. I’m not glad that he’s dead, but I simultaneously can’t pretend the world has lost a champion of truth and justice, either.
Thanks Pierre …. I hope my words didn’t make you think I was a Rush fan…. my gag reflex at about 1998 got to a place where I couldn’t keep car clean while driving when he was talking. I couldn’t even it do it for nostalgia purposes. To take this a different direction, my issues with him became “lame sense of humor” and “lame propensity to invoke emotional response”. As a political commentator, I never thought he had much credibility, so I shrugged that off early on, and continue to. He was perhaps the first “political shock jock”. His shtick was new at the time – and it memorized a lot of believers in Christ for a long time (including my mom) which is sad to me. All that said …. when someone trumpets “good riddance” to someone who they didn’t know personally (unless it’s Hitler or Manson, etc., I suppose) I take offense – especially when I have close relational connection to someone who found solace in that (to us) heinous space.