On January 10, 1776 Thomas Paine, a colonial American and British subject, published a pamphlet, “Common Sense.” In about three months it sold 100,000 copies. At the time there were about 2 million free inhabitants in colonial America. That’s one copy for every 20 Americans. In three months! I don’t know what literacy rates were back then, but it’s probably not an exaggeration to suggest that 1 out of every 4 adult, literate Americans owned a copy, and goodness knows how many read copies purchased by others. And this was before book store chains, and Amazon.com yet he sold that many copies in just three months! And, the book was likely treasonous, almost certainly against British law and a person stood a good chance of being imprisoned for carrying a copy in public.
This is such a great story with a lot of interesting facets, but I’d like to isolate one aspect of it to make a connection in our current society. Thomas Paine was a “pamphleteer.” Improvements in the technology of the printing press and the network of distribution to get raw materials; ink, paper, wood.. to printers and printed materials to private citizens, really hit their stride in the colonies in the 1700′s. Benjamin Franklin became exceedingly wealthy by skillfully building a print news network that was the Reuters or Associated Press of his era. Much of what Thomas Paine wrote in “Common Sense” had already appeared in print elsewhere, and there were other colonists espousing revolutionary ideas, but Thomas Paine was the artisan who expertly married the message to the media. Historians will debate over which founding father was most important to the Revolutionary cause; Adams, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin… and interesting arguments can be made for all, but almost no one will dispute that it was Thomas Paine’s pamphlet that made the movement possible. The reason the founding fathers were able to convince the country to go along with the extremely risky business of declaring independence from Britain is because so many Colonists had already been exposed to the logical arguments for independence through reading Paine’s “Common Sense.”
I am sometimes surprised by how much information is available to those of us who seek it. It’s not all true, and much of it is couched in bias, but almost all the facts are out there; available to those willing to spend a little time culling through the chafe. When I ponder how this came about in my lifetime I keep coming back to one man; Rush Limbaugh, that chubby, College drop-out from tiny Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
Although I rarely listen to his show, and really don’t have a strong opinion of him, or his show, I can’t help but recognize the enormous impact he has had on politics in my lifetime. For those of you younger than 40 you probably do not understand how dead AM radio was in the mid-80′s. I’ll bet 90% of the radios sold in the U.S., including automobiles, were never switched to the AM band, ever. Unless you lived somewhere where hog bellies and grain futures mattered, or you tuned in for 5 minutes to hear Paul Harvey, there was nothing on. Well, baseball and High School sports (which was very cool), but aside from that nothing. No Hannity. No Colmes. No Beck. No “Coast to Coast AM.” Not even Howard Stern. Nobody talked on the FM dial either. If a DJ had suggested an all talk show to management he would have been fired on the spot. It was all music, all day, with news, traffic and weather on the hour.
Ronald Reagan’s repeal of the “Fairness Doctrine” was the equivalent of Paine’s network of printing presses and pamphlet distributors Limbaugh needed. But, just as in Paine’s day, nobody else recognized that was how the network could be used. That “little ol’ fluffball” from Cape Girardeau, Missouri figured it out. If you weren’t alive back then you can’t appreciate how insane his idea was. Nobody, and I mean nobody, would have invested in a radio show or broadcaster whose show idea was 3 hours of daily talk about politics. Nobody thought there was any audience for that.
And, nobody talked politics 3 hours a day, five days a week. You also have to understand Rush Limbaugh invented the persona. If you’ve ever seen video footage of William Buckley’s “Firing Line” that was the level of political discussion on the airwaves; boring men in crumpled suits, slouching in chairs and droning on about agricultural tariffs. Politics was not mainstream. Politics was not interesting. Politics was not entertaining. There was nothing like O’Reilly, Olbermann, Beck, Maddow… Nothing. Rush Limbaugh invented it all out of whole cloth. He not only nailed the persona, he amassed the largest radio audience in the history of the medium. And, as if that’s not enough, he did it in a medium that had been declared dead decades earlier.
I don’t mean to foster a lot of debate about the merits of Rush’s show and his opinions (although your free to elnighten me in the comments). I recognize he is an immensely talented entertainer; it’s just that, for some reason, his show has never interested me much. If I was forced to pick a favorite political talk host right now I’d vote for Andrew Wilkow.
I sometimes wonder if all of this would have happened had there been no Rush Limbaugh. Would Sean Hannity or Alan Colmes have started the craze? Glenn Beck? I honestly doubt it. 3 hours of political talk a day is not a format that made any sense back then, and without the talent of Rush Limbaugh I’m not sure we would have ever seen the phenomenon grow roots and explode the way it has.
So, the next time you smile when you hear the lie of a politician brought to light, or see a politician with an out-sized ego brought down to Earth by a joke, or see a Congressperson laid low by scandal take a brief second to thank this guy. Whether you agree with his opinions, or completely disagree with everything he says, you have him to thank for the free-flowing, informed, open debate we see in our country today.
Print
Digg
StumbleUpon
del.icio.us
Facebook
Yahoo! Buzz
Twitter
Google Bookmarks
Google Buzz
LinkedIn
MSN Reporter
MySpace
Orkut
Ping.fm
Reddit
RSS
Slashdot
Technorati
Tumblr
Webnews.de
So true. A giant in national discourse. A hero, too. No one intimidates or shuts Rush down. He is a truly amazing man. And a good man, too. He does so much for people that he doesn’t get recognized for.
Very well written and some excellent points. Our founding fathers were the perfect group at the perfect time; in Adams and Franklin you had your polished statesmen, in Jefferson you had your uncompromising revolutionary, and in Washington you had a man of almost unimaginable integrity who inspired men by action. I am of the opinion that the founding of our country could not have been done without all of those pieces.
As for your Paine and Limbaugh comparison one has to wonder rather Limbaugh and other’s words might also inspire revolution in our age.
Veruckt,
Maybe Limbaugh and others already have. For at least a decade I have contended that cheap, pervasive, instantaneous, world-wide communication may greatly limit the likelihood of massive armed conflict on the scale of WWI and WWII. Even a complete, maniacal whack job like Kim Jong Il can’t keep the truth from all of his subjects. Maybe we’re in the middle of a revolution right now, but don’t recognize it because it’s not what we’re accustomed to seeing.
If the founders had radio and the internet could they have won their independence without war? There have been several colonies since that have.
Rufus,
There can be quiet revolutions but they are always more at a cultural level similar to the emergence of Leftism in the 60s, though it wasn’t entirely free of blood shed. However when you are talking about a true upheaval or forcing governments to relinquish power I have trouble imagining that can be done without blood being spilled. In theory our’s can be done by simply getting better people in office but we have allowed the government to set their own rules and seem to only be able to get them out when they die off and their handpicked successor takes their place. No true change can be achieved until we at the very least get term limits.
Veruckt,
The 10th Amendment may be a key, revolutionary concept. For decades (a century?) the Federal government has been walking on the rights guaranteed the states in the Constitution. Now the Federal government is threatening to over-reach so greatly that many States are not likely to sit idly by. Let’s say a mandatory health bill passes the Congress and the State Legislature of Texas says they find the law a violation of the 10th Amendment and will not enforce it within their borders. Do you think Obama will call out troops? I don’t. It will go to the Supreme Court. If Texas wins that victory it could be a domino effect against all the other areas the Fed has over-stepped; education, property, environmental regulation…
I’m not a regular listener to Rush’s show (mainly because here in Seattle he’s on at the same time as Dennis Miller is on a different station, and I loves me some Dennis Miller, platonically speaking). However, he’s had an undeniable impact on my political education.
Growing up in California in the 80s and early 90s, I wasn’t very politically aware, but I knew that whenever someone told me a joke about stupidity or greed, the punchline was usually “Republicans” or “Rush Limbaugh”. So at first I mindlessly accepted this attitude, but that started to bother me and as I entered my teen years, I started to think independently about it.
When I was about 13, one of my friends made an offhand comment about what an arrogant jerk Limbaugh was. He had obviously never listened to Limbaugh’s show, so I asked him, “what exactly has he said or done that you don’t like about him?” My friend couldn’t answer that question, so instead he exploded at me. “I don’t have to know something specific about him! He’s just that way!”
Of course, none of us really knew anything about politics at that age, but that didn’t matter. It was simply accepted fact in that time and place that Rush Limbaugh was a jerk and needed to be made fun of, period. No one gave it a second thought.
I didn’t realize it at the time, but my friends and I were brain-dead liberals-in-training, and I had just questioned the liberal programming, which is something you don’t do in a place like California.
JimmyC,
I can’t imagine how many times that same scenario has played out across the fruited plain in the past two decades, and there was Rush’s voice, every day, educating one new listener at a time.
Love him. He’s funny as hell, and joys in poking fun at himself– a fact his critics from both sides overlook.
p.s. He’s not chubby anymore.
Wankette,
I agree that he’s got a very good sense of humor. When I encounter folks who loathe him I always stress what a great entertainer he is. No one can deny that. At the end of the day he works his *ss off to entertain, and he’s a natural. As I wrote in the post, it’s much more impressive when you take into account that the very medium he has dominated did not even exist until he came along. For some reason I just don’t find his show a good fit for what I’m looking for (Wilkow’s the man, these days!), but I cannot help but notice his talent as an entertainer.
Anybody remember “Rush Rooms”? We used to look for lunch spots that specifically advertized themselves as Rush Rooms.
Rufus,
To quote Ken Watanabi from The Last Samuri “this is a good conversation”. You make a valid point about the 10th amendment and also make the counterpoint as well, there is scant reinforcement of our own constitution at this point. I believe 33 states have passed amendments reaffirming the state’s right since Obama took office but it has done nothing to slow the feds march to Totalitarianism. At some point the law of conflict says someone; rather it be a state or the federal government has to draw the line in the sand and take a forcible stand rather than shallow signing statements. That is where conflict is likely to arise so the question is who blinks first?
On a side note as I was driving home Dave Ramsey made the comment that “this current mess seems determined to turn us into communist”. That is easily the strongest statement I’ve ever heard from him.
Veruckt,
It’s hard to know what’s in any of these politicians’ hearts (or, if any, in fact have hearts), but I do believe many of them make these huge mistakes based on good intentions. No matter how much one loves the Constitution, when elected to serve, and receiving a daily barrage of mail from constituents begging for one’s help, it’s very tempting to take those incremental steps. Everyday some of our fellow citizens get their clocks cleaned by the current system, no matter what it is. Some petition Congress. In some ways I think empathy is what we should fear more than anything.
Most all of us will likely despise (or at least dislike) our elected politicians no matter what the system. But the closer we are to those politicians, the less likely we are to be really disgusted. I think the founding fathers understood that and that’s why they gave so much power to local governments. A representative who lives in my neighborhood is more likely to act in my best interests than one who is 2,000 miles away, and serving 1,000 times as many constituents. I tend to doubt we can go backwards, it’s awfully hard to shrink any bureaucracy, but this State’s rights movement has some potential.
I think Ramsey’s been on Hannity. Or Beck. Now, HE’S a guy we should recruit for TV political ads.
It might seem a bit simplistic but why can’t our government function more off of his financial principles. I’m a Ramsey disciple.
I’m not a regular Rush guy either – not because I disagree with him, but because I tend to use my auto time listening to books on tape – but I concur in your conclusions here Ruf, and I’m glad he’s around.
I remember first taking notice of Rush before the first Gulf War. The MSM was predicting doom and gloom. The Republican Guard was too well-equipped, too numerous. Saddam’s fire-pits would wreak havoc. Our troops, they assured us, we’re doomed to a long, bloody fight that they would be lucky to survive, let alone win.
Rush was the one guy who predicted the actual outcome. We would, he said, go through the Iraqi army like a hot knife through butter. And he said that, not out of patriotic fervor, but because he took the time to talk to the real military experts, rather than finding some bitter, incompetent ex-General who would obediently parrot conventional wisdom.
It was an impressive, and courageous performance. Had he been wrong, he would have lost a ton of credibility. But, as Churchill could tell you, it’s more important to be true to yourself than it is to court popularity.
Rich,
I remember exactly what you were talking about. At the time CNN was the only 24/7 news game in town. I was rather anxious about the war; nothing like it had ever happened in my adult life. I remember several times seeing the same military “expert” interviewed in depth on CNN. He was a retired somethingorother, and spoke in great detail about American military capacity and weaponry, and gave brilliant, detailed analysis on how all of it would fail. Our tanks would get bogged down in the sand, etc.
I was astounded when, about ten years later I turned on CNN and saw the same guy giving predictions about the outcome in Iraq! Don’t you lose the right to put “Military Expert” on your business card if everything you predict does not correspond with actual outcomes?
What’s most amazing about Rush is that, at the top of his game, he went deaf. Deaf! He’s a radio broadcaster who lost his hearing … and didn’t lose a step after returning to the airwaves. I’ve written about cochlear implants in the past … they can work wonders but not with every recipient. But Rush endures … incredible.
Great point, Christian. It is remarkable!
Christian,
I forgot! great, great point. Another reason he inspires.
Everything you wrote is very true, Rufus. Except you have to specify that Rush was the first national political talk show host on the radio.
Growing up in the greater NYC area, we all listened to Bob Grant, Barry Farber, and others doing three or four hours of political talk every day.
I listened to Rush when he first started off at WABC in New York in 1988. He worked out a deal with them. He’d do a one-hour show focusing on New York for WABC—for free—in exchange for the free use of the studio to do his national radio show (which WABC didn’t air).
The other hosts thought he was nuts. They thought people cared most about local issues, not what was happening in Washington. Of course, with New Yorkers, that might be true.
I remember one time last year I was driving to do some shopping and Rush had a lady on his show and she was talking about how since the economy was tanking she couldn’t afford to get a vehicle for her husband’s business. They needed a truck or something. She wasn’t begging, she was just stating a fact. Rush out of the blue said I want to buy you car or a truck. Whatever she wanted from GM (before it became Government Motors). I believe she chose a truck for her husband. Rush just decided to buy her a vehicle because he could help. She never asked him. That is the measure of the man. He does what he does because he can afford it and he never asks for credit. A great man.