Category / Personal

by DrMabuse

Of Demagogues and Political Photo Ops

A remembrance of youth, triggered by a series of recent presidential photo ops

My memory is often hopeless beyond compare, but there are things I remember. Important things. Things that come back in the most unexpected of ways. Back in June 1994, I had the misfortune of listening regularly to Rush Limbaugh on the radio. I was working in a Sacramento copy shop, one of several jobs I was working to save up cash for my move to San Francisco that fall. The jobs had me working anywhere from 60-80 hours a week. I was a scrawny underfed kid, nineteen, just on the cusp of twenty, inexperienced. Despite my ability to type 100 wpm, I couldn’t seem to land so much as a lucrative data entry job. But I somehow talked my way into this morning copy shop job through a temp agency. (Some of my other jobs included doing filing for an insurance company, telemarketing funds for the Sacramento Symphony, working as a movie usher, working as a short-order cook — the job I probably liked the best and took the most pride in — and toiling at a Target snack bar. The latter was the worst job I have ever had. At Target, after you had spent the entire day immersed in grease, often without breaks, after cleaning the fryers and unleashing the remainder of your strength scrubbing the grill, they would literally lock you in the store and force you to restock before you could leave, which meant unpaid overtime and sometimes ten hours recorded as eight. And people wonder why I don’t shop at Target or Wal-Mart. But I digress.)

normandy.jpegThe shop was owned by a quiet, portly and agreeable man with thinning sandy hair, egg-shaped spectacles working wonders accentuating his two thin horizontal slats into an owl-like visage, and a bristling moustache. He was a friendly guy, fond of chatting with the post-teen, pre-college transfer hired help. He outsourced desperate young plebeians like me for low wages to perform mind-numbing tasks that he wouldn’t dare perform himself: in my case, collating thousands of high school newspapers and bland user documentation put out by fledgling startups.

Like many small business owners, he had a radio to get him through the day. On this radio, I was inducted into the world of Rush Limbaugh first-hand.

Limbaugh boomed and blustered like the strange charm of William Shatner gone horribly wrong. There was an element of McCarthyism in his voice. And there was no way to escape his DSM-IV cadences, even with the radio turned down. Perhaps because politicians had softened their voices for the tricky subtleties of television, Limbaugh compensated for radio by regurgitating the flamboyance of Winston Churchill and W.C. Fields. He talked as if he needed complete command of the entire AM radio bandwidth. So in performing my mundane job, concentration was of paramount consideration.

I tried to zone out by delving into the paperwork like a savant, thinking of things I was reading. Raskolnikov’s guilt or the exploits of the Pickwick Society, eagerly awaiting return to those pastures, magical places I had little time to wander through. But this was difficult, because I’d hear the word “liberal” every other minute, inscribed with the same hatred given to words like “cunt” or “nigger” or “motherfucker.” As far as I could tell, I was one of those “people,” even though my politics were rudimentary at best. (In my high school politics class, I was one of only two students to defend the right to burn the flag. The other person ended up as my brother-in-law. Go figure.)

One day, I had come in to the copy shop extremely tired. I had worked about sixteen hours the previous day, managing only about three hours of sleep. (My girlfriend at the time, whom I almost never saw, was exceptionally forgiving of my crabbiness.) Limbaugh came on. And I could no longer keep up the sanguine face, or control my sighs and dismay. The copy shop owner saw this, but was surprisingly forgiving. I confessed I wasn’t exactly a Dittohead, but I did ask him why he liked Limbaugh. He replied that he thought that Limbaugh was funny. Funny? Perhaps. Funny, if introducing terms like “Feminazi” was funny (although admittedly warranted in the cases of extremists like Valerie Solanas, whose legitimate points were undermined by the same hatred extant within the Moral Majority). Funny, if declaring anything even remotely left as Bolshevist was funny (on paper or in relaxed environs, yes; but with blathering audio while performing a mindless task, decidedly not).

Funny, yes. But with humor occluded by the dreariest of labor, possibly a bona-fide authority after years of a small business owner working long and hard for nothing.

clintoncairn.jpgBut one day, Limbaugh eventually revealed his colors. On June 6, 1994, Clinton was in Europe to recognize the 50th anniversary of Normandy. And like any President, he staged the predictable photo ops. Clinton gave a speech. He walked lone along the beach of Normandy, preparing a cairn. Hardly surprising. All politicians are forced to embrace artificiality at some point. It’s only the most gifted politician who can make every moment feel natural.

And it’s hardly the kind of thing that someone would use as backup material for the shameful liberal cabal. But that didn’t stop Limbaugh. He tore into Clinton as if the photo-op was the very embodiment of evil. He declared it an insult to the men who lost their lives. Clinton should be ashamed of himself. And why hadn’t “the mainstream media” picked up on this? To this very day, it is one of Limbaugh’s textbook examples of Clinton’s “phoniness,” ironically enough, standing comparatively against Bush’s honest and sterling nature.

It was then that I knew that Limbaugh was unquestionably an irrational chowderhead let loose on the airwaves.

bushthanks.jpgWhich makes the recent Washington Post news that Bush ‘s Baghdad turkey was decorative all the more hilarious.

Ask yourself what is more artificial: (1) Standing in an admittedly staged position placing a stone upon a cairn, but with the process itself actually standing for some genuine expression of loss or (2) bringing a turkey to Baghdad, posing with reporters with it, but without anyone going to the trouble to eat the turkey! Shouldn’t Limbaugh be drawing upon the same duplicity here?

Personally, I’d rather see a President stumble a bit through a photo op than fall flat on his ass playing 52 Pickup with the flimsiest deck of cards in Washington.

[3/16/14 UPDATE: In addition to some corrected spelling errors, I was forced to update the links. An original version of this post directed to Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, as hosted at an MIT page run by Olin Shivers (dead original link). I haven’t looked at this little essay in ten years, but, today, I work much harder for a lot less, although I enjoy all the work. If anything, the terrible labor conditions that I experienced at Target have become much worse in American life. In the late 1990s, it was still possible to accrue any number of part-time jobs. But a visit to any drugstore or a grocery store now reveals an overextended staff working around many closed registers. Who knew that retail conditions would deteriorate further? I wonder whatever happened to the guy who ran the copy shop. I was far too hard on him. He was very kind to give a job to a cocky young loudmouth. One thing I didn’t mention in this piece was my stint at Rally’s, a burger joint in Sacramento that stood on the southeastern corner of Madison and Manzanita — now long gone — where I worked my way up to cashier. At the time, and this was when I was in high school, a few customers compared my theatrical delivery through the speaker system to Rush Limbaugh. Limbaugh was really peaking at the time. I had never listened to Limbaugh for an extended period of time until those weeks in the copy shop. Perhaps there was a part of me that feared turning into him.]

by DrMabuse

I Did Other Stuff

In which the blogger describes what he did in his life in the earlier months of 2003.

How This Post Originally Appeared (December 2, 2003):

The months passed along. I moved into a nice new place. The bad juju disappeared. Then I collided into reality. The Po Bronson question so popular months ago (now unseated by Ethan Watters generalizations) that only the inner self can answer. But I like to refer to it as: “The unlived life is not worth examining.”

I appeared in a play. The Man Who Came to Dinner to be precise. It was the first time I had appeared on stage in about seven years, not counting a one-time role in The Curse of the Starving Class. Community theatre. The first time I wasn’t nervous.

I wrote like a maniac. I sent out packages. I received rejections. I still write. And I will continue to write, even if I’m six or so years behind Kurt Andersen.* Gene Shalit doesn’t return my calls. But who’s counting?

I started a book club, of which more later. We’re on the third book right now. And if you’re a San Franciscan into discussing lit, drop me an email and I’ll be more than happy to add you to the list.

I met people. I auditioned for more plays. I got out of the house. I holed up with books. I went crazy in Vegas. And if things continue the way they’re going, I’ll have something very big to manage starting in January. We’ll see.

But I was still a bit antsy. The nightly journal and the hard early morning writing ritual weren’t enough. I needed another canvas. These things come in threes, do they not?

So much like Leonard Nimoy coming to realize late in life that he will always be known as Spock, I’m here to say that I Do Rant, even if ranting proper is not what I plan to do.

And for those just tuning in, welcome to the ballpark. We serve toasty frankfurters, but don’t crack our peanut shells on restaurant floors the way they do in Southern California. Crazy bastards.

[3/22/04 UPDATE: Now a little more than four months later, I find myself doing a lot of the same things. The difference now is that my desires have broadened. However, I have begun to understand the personal facets that prevent me from achieving everything. Life is not an easy path, but it is a path that one must walk every day, even if the gravel bruises the bottom of your feet. To live without vision, and regular progression, is to exist in a terrible vacuum that sucks away your soul a little each day.]

Addendum (May 20, 2013):

Nearly ten years after I posted this entry, I’m wincing at the language (which I haven’t altered), along with the way I awkwardly compared myself with Kurt Andersen. (I have also updated the link to a Web Archive version, as the folks at Folio appear to be embarrassed by the Andersen timeline or have otherwise allowed the article to fall into disarray.) As David Denby pointed out in Snark, I think many of the early bloggers were inspired by Andersen — largely, because many of us may have intuitively gathered that we were working in the tradition of Spy during the 1980s. I have not succeeded in my career (such as it is) anywhere close to Andersen, but I did end up moving to New York. In fact, I asked Andersen to be part of my somewhat successful documentary about Gary Shteyngart and his blurbing, and he was one of the few authors (out of perhaps forty I asked) who did not reply. He proved to be a remarkable bore during a November 2012 roast. It’s safe to say that, at the age of 38, I have no desire to be like Andersen at all. I don’t like his writing. I have no real desire to befriend him. I think he’s lost his touch. But like Andersen, I did end up pumping out 500 hours of radio interviews in the subsequent decade. I doubt very highly that Andersen will find this little footnote, but I include it nonetheless, with unapologetic candor, because I am an obsessive compleatist. I have also changed the “featured image” for this post (which did not exist in 2003) to Kurt Andersen, since it seems apposite.