A Pilgrim’s Digression

Part One
Part Three
Part Four

On November 4th, I related the story of how while riding the train home, I stood next to a couple buttoned-down young Republicans. One young man wore khakis and a white shirt and tie and a brown tweed blazer. The other wore khakis and a white shirt and tie and a gray tweed blazer. Mr. Gray, as I called him, wore a Notre Dame pin in his lapel.

The two men held BushCheney signs, which led me to believe they were probably fresh from the President’s victory speech that had wrapped up less than an hour previously. From their conversation, which they did not mind sharing with the rest of the train, I gleaned that they had taken some abuse from someone who was anti-Bush. However, nothing could spoil their happy mood. The two men got off at the Catholic University of America Metro stop.

This was a moment of absolute victory for them. I can only imagine they must have felt a little like Truman’s supporters on the day after the election in 1948 when he discovered that far from losing his bid for the White House, he had in fact proved the mass media dead wrong and won the election.

Ironically, considering the part of my story I am about to relate, I found myself standing outside Mr. Gray and Mr. Brown’s conversation, unable to even feel a modicum of the happiness they must have felt.

In 1992, the Persian Gulf War finished, the Presidential campaign season began and for the first time, this was an election in which I would be able to vote. By the summer of ‘92, Todd and I had both completed our first year of college. It was perhaps a pivotal time for both of us. I remember one late night that summer, I lay on the hood of my car looking up at the night sky while Todd stood nearby. We were talking, as we did in those days, about all the important philosophical things that eighteen or nineteen year olds talk about. The first year of college is an intellecually exciting time, and sometime during his first year, Todd had taken a class that introduced Undergraduates to philosophy. Todd had been talking about the class all evening, and as we lounged there in the darkness, he told me I needed a coherent “world view.” The concept of a world view was something I had never heard of before. After he told me this, I felt the lack of a world view deeply, and to this day I wonder if I ever developed one. Probably I still don’t have one, at least not a coherent one of which I am fully conscious.

This was also the summer in which Todd introduced me to Rush Limbaugh, a decision he says he regrets. Todd and I were returning from a movie one afternoon that summer. The movie was Encino Man, hardly intellectual fare … but in our defense, perhaps that was not a good summer for movies. We were stopped at a stoplight across from what used to be the Long John Silvers in South Parkersburg, West Virginia (it has since gone out of business, like most everything in Parkersburg, and the building is now occupied by a Keno parlor; there used to be a Lady Godiva’s “gentleman’s club” beside the Long John’s, too, but it has since gone under as well). Todd turned on Rush Limbaugh, saying I needed to hear this guy he had discovered on the radio.

Thus we were in Todd’s old, red Chevy Chevette, sitting at a stop light across from a fast food restaurant and a strip bar, when I first heard The Voice. I was a mostly empty vessel waiting to be filled.

In those days, Limbaugh’s program was considerably different than it is today. His program was more humorous and more iconoclastic, for one thing. Today, his program has become mainstream in the sense that, like a dozen other programs on radio and cable news, the admittedly biased host presents a one-sided diatribe against the people he believes to be the incarnation of evil in America. Limbaugh also interviews guests more often than he did in the past. He used to say that the show was all about him and he did not need guests to fill in the three hours of the program. I’ve tuned in several times during the past year, and Limbaugh has had a special guest on the show, like Dick Cheney, whom he interviews. Actually, what Limbaugh does is not quite an interview. He becomes sycophantic around men of power like Cheney; his questions are more akin to the softballs Jon Stewart lobs at his liberal guests on “The Daily Show.”

Twelve years ago, however, Limbaugh’s show was more humorous and more on the edge of acceptability. The kinds of things Limbaugh did and said in 1992 have entered mainstream discourse and would not shock anyone. One example would be his use of “theme songs” to introduce news stories on which he was going to comment. He had a “feminazi update” theme song he would play when reading a story relating in some way to feminism or women’s concerns. This song consisted of a shrill feminist, whether real or an actress, I don’t know, screaming, “We’re fierce, we’re feminist, and we’re in your face!” while the song “Men” by the Forester sisters played in the background. The “Peace Update” theme song featured the seventies song “Una Paloma Blanca” set to the sound effects of war. It was really pretty clever stuff.

Politically, Rush was already in Election Year mode in the summer of 1992. Bill Clinton seemed a long-shot to Conservatives at that time. He must have seemed a long-shot to Democrats, too. There was almost a blinding pride in the Republican camp that year, as if there was absolutley no way this nobody Governor from Arkansas could beat the President of the United States, the man who had just last year seen us through our only (nominal) war since Vietnam.

For whatever reasons now mostly lost to time, I soon adopted the Republican philosophy as espoused by Limbaugh. Limbaugh always said that he was merely expressing what a silent majority of people thought and felt inside, but were afraid to express because of the “political correctness” (there’s a phrase hardly used anymore) in society. I would have said that was why I agreed with Limbaugh: he was expressing what I knew to be true, but had ben unable to acknowledge. In retrospect, I don’t believe any such thing. I think I merely fell into a trap lots of others have fallen into: I did not know what I believed, and so when a person with good rhetorical skills and a mocking sense of humor came along and made a case for his own ideas, I decided I would believe the same things. I probably believed what Limbaugh was saying, but I did not examine those beliefs; indeed, I felt so confident in the rightness of those beliefs that there was no need to examine them, now that I had decided to believe them.

I donated enough money to the GOP that year to get a bumper sticker and some other paraphrenalia. In the Fall, after Todd returned to college in Indiana and I had returned to school in West Virginia, I plastered Bush/Quayle stickers on my notebooks, especially notebooks I had to turn in to teachers for grades. I took delight in the thought that the stickers might irritate these professors who were trying to indoctrinate me with their liberal garbage.

In my first Presidential election, I voted Republican. And the Republicans lost.

The disappointment was not quite as great as I felt this year, voting for John Kerry only to have him lose, but the alarmism in the Republican party was similar to what we see today with the Democrats. Republicans did not engage in the kind of public self-eviceration that the Democrats seem to have perfected, but there was a bitterness, anger, and even a certain amount of soul-searching (inasmuch as Republicans have real souls) that would be recognizable to today’s Democrats.

Soon after Clinton’s election, Rush Limbaugh began opening his program with theme music that sounded like the opening to a “breaking news” story on cable news, with an announcer saying, “America Held Hostage: Day 34,” or whatever day of the Clinton presidency it happened to be. The “America Held Hostage” theme of Limbaugh’s program was modelled after the way the Iran hostage crisis dominated the nightly news back in 1979.

Limbaugh continued the “America Held Hostage” theme of his program until Clinton won again in 1996. By that time, America had been “held hostage” (no one but Republicans seemed to mind) for something like 1,460 days. I guess Limbaugh decided that rhetorically, it had served its purpose.

The hostility to the Clinton administration characterized Republican politics in the nineties to the point that almost nothing else mattered. Republicans today decry “Bush hatred,” and yet the “Clinton hatred” of the nineties was far nastier. Has there ever been a President more investigated in the history of the Republic? And in the end, the best the Republicans could turn up was a series of knob jobs by a chubby intern in the Oval Office.

The Democrats, for all their paranoia concerning Bush, have not tried to destroy him through extra-electoral means the way the Republicans tried to destroy Clinton. I have to say, I bought into the Republican propaganda on Clinton, and it has been difficult to rid myself of its after-effects. One day, if Hillary Clinton runs for President, I will have to attempt to cure myself of the poison of Clinton hatred. Depending on whom the Republicans run against her, I may have to decide whether to vote for her. I cannot just say any longer, as I used to say emphatically, “I will never under any circumstances vote for a Clinton.”

It will be difficult to find an antidote for eight years of poisonous rhetoric, however.

I attended college from 1991 thru 1998, first as an Undergraduate, then as a Graduate student. In 1996, I voted for Bob Dole, a man whose campaign felt to me more like a funeral procession than a Presidential campaign. Dole was a token offering to the electoral Gods to spare the Republicans until 2000.

I did not much question my conservative politics through the nineties. Republicans were the opposition party, or at least they portrayed themselves as such, and so that gave them greater credibility in my eyes. I’ve always been attracted to a perceived underdog.

By 1996, I had read just about everything Ayn Rand had written, and that, too, solidified my Conservative leanings. I found it a little disconcerting, though, that before she died in 1980 she had denounced Ronald Reagan as not conservative enough. Many aspects of Rand’s life should have been disconcerting to a Conservative. Her philosophy of individualism, though in some ways it lined up with traditional conservative values, actually lined up more with libertinism than conservatism. Rand put no great stock in what would become known as “family values.” In fact, in the nineteen-fifties, she had an affair with a much younger, married man simply because she felt like it. While a script-writer for Hollywood, she denounced fellow screen writers as communists before HUAC. Indeed, if one reads transcripts of her testimony, she is the most eloquent of all the people who testified before that committee, no matter what one thinks of the morality of her testifying.

Rand was a refugee from the Bolshevik revolution, so her condemnation of communism and what she termed “collectivism” generally (I suppose “collectivism” translates as “liberalism” today) had a basis in personal experience. In her most famous novel, Atlas Shrugged all of the people whom she considers producers and providers, inventors, creators, leaders, decide to “go on strike” and force the rest of the world, who are little more than parasites, to fend for themselves. Leaders of industry give up their leadership posts and flee to Argentina, or some such remote place, while the world falls apart without them. It’s a turgid novel, especially during the long harangue by the main character, John Galt, in which he explains Rand’s philosophy to a rapt world via radio.

Indeed Rand’s novels, from the beginning with We the Living, all become successively more turgid as philosophy subsumes Rand’s creativity. We the Living, which is her autobiographical novel, is actually her best novel in my opinion. It is set in Russia just after the Revolution and has more art in it than anything else she wrote. She never wrote another novel after Atlas Shrugged in the fifties,but she did appear on the Donahue show shortly before she died, a program I would love to see sometime. One of her “students” from the fifties is now Chairman of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Greenspan is probably the most famous, and maybe the last, of Rand’s followers still in the public eye.

All this is to say that besides Limbaugh, next in importance to the development of my “world view,” to use Todd’s phrase, was Ayn Rand.

This weird mixture hardened throughout the nineties, then began to soften in the late nineties. In 1998, I married a Democrat, for one thing, a factor which cannot be discounted. Love has a greater power to change a person than anger or hatred, which is about all the Republican party or the conservative philosophy had to offer in those years.

By 1999, at the end of the Clinton years and at the beginning of the campaign for the Presidency in 2000, I did not know it but I was on the cusp of a fundamental realignment of my thinking. Clinton was impeached in 1999; 1999 also happened to be the year of the war between NATO and Kosovo. 1999 was the year George W. Bush first came to be considered for the Presidency. All these events would influence me in different directions, none more so than the impeachment of Bill Clinton.

Continue to [Part Three]