Jack of Harts

I was young when Rush Limbaugh was new to national talk radio. AM radio was a dying format back then. All you heard on it was classical music and weather, since real music had abandoned those airwaves in favor of FM radio. But here came this man out of fumbuck Egypt, with talent on loan from God, talking about politics and entertainment and humor and whatever came to his mind for three hours a day. He changed the world.

I listened to Rush Limbaugh and his mad guitar licks were a welcoming friend. He spoke with a voice no one else on the national media did. They were liberal. They didn’t understand Middle America. He was conservative, he saw the forgotten men and women in Fly Over Country and he made talking to us fun. He boiled the important parts of what would normally be a rather boring conservative viewpoint, with half his brain tied behind his back, just to make it fair, and made them entertaining and fun. You could listen to him for three hours and feel it ended too soon. He was the voice a teenager greatly in need of a father figure listened to for over a decade. I was a Rush baby, a dittohead, and his example shaped the man I would become. I am not too afraid to say what I believe because of him.

I haven’t listened to Rush Limbaugh regularly for well over a decade now. I have changed. I have grown. I moderated enough that his brand of trollish but optimistic conservatism no longer represented me enough to want to listen to it for three hours a day. But Rush changed national radio, he was the most dangerous man in America, and his many imitators today owe their positions in the media to him. He and his excellence in broadcasting network trailblazed talk radio in all its modern streaming and broadcast formats, and his voice was ubiquitous in media. Even not listening to him anymore, I always knew the answer to the question, what would Rush say?

Rush Limbaugh loved America, and he loved conservatism. He wanted all of us to succeed, no matter the color of our skin or the creed we followed. His voice spoke for a people who had no voice in the national media, and we consumed his words with a rabid intensity that could be scary. We are a different country today than we would have been without all the words that flowed from his golden EIB microphone for over three decades. He made us want to be better than we would have ever realized we could be if we only listened to the mainstream media. Thanks to his example and those who have followed in his wake, I am still living the dream today.

We just got done celebrating Presidents Day, though celebrating may be too strong a word. I remember when I was a kid, we celebrated Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays separately, but then modified the holiday schedule to add Martin Luther King day and then have a generic Presidents Day. Now of course, there is little mention of the holiday at all.

Today we have to go looking to learn about the Presidents that came before us, unless we are talking about which recent President we plan to impeach next. Or which jobs the current President plans on erasing with his next Executive Order.

When I was a kid, we learned how George Washington could not lie about cutting down some tree, and how he led the Continental Army that helped liberate our nation, and later served as the first President under our second Constitution. We knew Jackson fought the Bloody British at the Battle of New Orleans by firing cannons until the barrels melted down. Then he grabbed an alligator and fought another round. We learned about how Lincoln and his famous Stove Pipe Hat held the nation together after the Democrats touched off a Civil War because they didn’t think the Republicans would let them keep their slaves. They ended up being right on that point. We learned how Teddy Roosevelt charged up some hill during an old war with Spain or something and conquered Cuba. We read about Wilson bringing us into World War I and FDR pulling us through the Great Depression and World War II. We knew Truman Dropped The Bomb on Japan, and that Everybody Liked Ike.

Not everything we learned was accurate, of course. But that was the thing. We were celebrating the Presidents of the past, and sometime telling tall tales about them while we were at it. We celebrated our country, and all the great things we did.

That is not fashionable today, so it is up to those of us who love our nation to remember what we were taught. How the Presidents have sometimes saved and sometimes changed our nation. Cherish the good ones and remember the bad ones.

It’s Presidents Day. A good day to remember and celebrate the Presidents who have represented our nation.