Rush is deaf

By Lawrence Henry
web posted November 5, 2001

A few years back, we had a substitute priest at our church. She
was typical of the contemporary Episcopal pastorate: female,
overweight, with a bee in her bonnet. Her bee: "the hearing
impaired community." When we sang hymns, she used to come
forward and sign the words for deaf members of the
congregation, never mind that we didn't have any deaf members
in our congregation.

There it is, liberalism in a nutshell: An arrogant display of
irrelevant virtue.

Rush Limbaugh, the most famous and effective talker of our day,
has gone deaf in a matter of five months, apparently from a rare
autoimmune disorder. He had been making the best of it with
ever-louder hearing aids, soldiering on, until the deafness grew
so profound he could no longer compensate for it. At that point,
he announced it to his audience, without rancor or self-pity, and
proclaimed his intention of carrying on with his national radio
show, which reaches an audience of 20 million.

Everyone knows Rush's voice. That voice is a schooled,
stentorian, wide-ranging instrument of unsurpassed flexibility and
expression, part disc jockey, part carney pitchman, part
throwback to the glory days of 1940s radio. There has been
nothing like it since W.C. Fields, and no radio personality so
influential since Will Rogers.

Liberals hate that voice. They hate it because of its authoritative
sound. Liberals hate authority, unless they themselves are
wielding it. Liberals hate anyone, particularly a man, who sounds
like he knows something, and is sure of himself. Liberals love
doubt. Liberals love fuzziness. Liberals love process, as they call
it.

We are daily inundated with the voices of liberalism: National
Public Radio's Noah Adams, with his edgeless therapy-speak on
All Things Considered (and his vocal disciple, Senator Tom
Daschle - "Puff" Daschle, as Rush calls him); Tom Hanks' Toy
Story sneer, Ira Glass's snarky, knowing smirk. Commercial
voiceovers nowadays feature announcers who sound either
patently, self-mockingly phony, or snottily adolescent. It is the
audio embodiment of postmodernism, never really believing
anything.

Along comes Rush nationwide in the past decade, reviving the
triumphal certainties of H.V. Kaltenborn, and he becomes the
biggest thing on radio, changes the cultural landscape, and in the
process ridicules liberals and liberalism - well, of course, this
man is going to be hated.

I made a slow-motion, long-term conversion to conservatism
over the past decade. The first time I turned on Rush's show, I
did so with a (for lack of a better word) transgressive thrill - kind
of like sneaking out behind the barn with a stolen copy of
Playboy. Because, you see, I "knew" about Rush.

I "knew" all the things that my liberal cohort knew about him: he
was hateful, splenetic, rude, and hostile. Imagine my surprise
when I actually heard Rush and found him courteous, funny,
witty, and intelligent.

In recent months, the Internet has been a-buzz with speculation:
What's wrong with Rush? He sounds different.

What was going on, of course, was that Rush couldn't hear
himself. Few people really know what their own voices sound
like. Professional performers like Rush do. Hearing themselves
accurately, they alter their voices bit by bit, making the most of
what they have, much as athletes use videotape to improve their
performance. Now, as Rush could no longer hear, he could no
longer explore all the tonal reaches of his voice, especially the
lower tones. He would sometimes quack. And at times it was
obvious he was no longer as quick as he used to be, no longer
sensitive to the sudden shifts of conversation.

In the weeks since his announcement, Rush has gotten better -
better at using voice-activated print technology to "listen" to his
callers, and better at using his voice. With occasional absences
for doctor visits, Rush has shown up, gone to work, and done a
good job. He occasionally jokes about being deaf. He has been
the very picture of a class act.

Rush has said he will consider getting a cochlear implant, an
inner-ear device that can restore hearing after a fashion. It's not
real, nuanced hearing, but it's hearing.

I remember talking to our substitute priest about cochlear
implants. She hated them with a passion. The deaf community,
she insisted, was actually superior to the hearing community. It
amounted to a kind of "cultural genocide" to encourage deaf
people to make use of a technology that would enable them to
hear.

Which is just the kind of idiocy Rush has blistered on nationwide
air for more than a decade now. Rush will regain his full strength,
one way or another, in short order, without being a poster child
for anybody, and without being a victim of anything or anyone.

Lawrence Henry is a senior writer for Enter Stage Right and a
confirmed Dittohead.

Enter Stage Right - http://www.enterstageright.com