I was a teenage girl in the 1990s, and my father was deep in Rush Limbaugh’s sway. Dad would pick me up from school with the Buick’s AM signal crackling and buzzing, Rush pounding home a point about the Gulf War.
Dad was a “Dittohead.” He wasn’t a reader, but he bought Limbaugh’s “The Way Things Ought to Be” in hardcover, where it sat — displayed but untouched — on a living room end table until I could write my initials in the dust on top. He rarely cried but did, in devastation, the November night in 1992 when Democrat Bill Clinton was elected president, claiming the next weeks would bring “the very end of the world.”
One Saturday when I was 14 years old, our whole family trekked to an antiabortion protest, where I was given an aqua T-shirt to wear with a picture of a fetus on it. I grimaced, and Dad wasn’t angry but looked at me, his brown eyes open wide with deepest disappointment as he asked, “You’re not going to end up one of these ‘feminazis,’ are you?”
Advertisement
I ended up a much different kind of adult than the adults who raised me, and I give partial credit for that to Limbaugh, who was effectively one of those adults. Like many teenagers, I grasped at various ideas I suspected would dismay my parents, such as swearing off TV entirely from 1995 to 1998 and wearing the same pair of electric-blue Dr. Martens shoes every single day of my senior year in high school.
I wrote insufferable poetry, read Walt Whitman, snuck out to late-night concerts and generally flirted with rebellion for its own sake. These were simple gestures at defining myself at a time when 15 million listeners per week — including my dad — were in thrall to a vivid, personified version of an ideology I was growing to reject.
From his hateful views to the odd way he captured my father’s attention, Limbaugh taught me more about myself than almost anyone else did. His years of great influence were the years when I was figuring out how I wanted to conduct myself in the world. He taught me how not to be.
Advertisement
The Limbaugh influence was so deeply interwoven into our family culture that I still have trouble pulling apart the threads. My parents loved me fiercely while embedding deeply problematic ideals about how we lived and how we should plan for my future. Did my parents exult in Limbaugh’s bombastic diatribes because he embodied their beliefs, validating them by shouting his message into radio waves with historically massive listenership? Or did those diatribes shape my parents’ beliefs and the way they raised their kids?
My little brother needed orthodontia more than I did, objectively, but we could afford only one set of braces. I got them, for reasons later explained to be related to marriageability, as though we were living in an era of dowries instead of early 1990s Midwestern suburbia. This was not long after Limbaugh proclaimed that “feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women access to the mainstream of society.”
Share this articleShareMy brother and I could both conclude that the braces were a kind of insurance for my future. Much later, in 2009, when I was signing my daughter up for day care, my parents blanched at my blasphemy. “How many mass shooters went to day care?” Limbaugh once asked his listeners.
Advertisement
It wasn’t always easy to tell when a comment my father made was his own. Once, during a semester when I was taking a ceramics class, he became very concerned about my fingernails, which he said men would like better if they were longer and filed into half-moons. There is a razor-sharp righteous indignation specific to 17-year-olds, which I unleashed mercilessly on my father that afternoon. He was surprised. “I was trying to help you,” he said, in a meeker voice than he had used to deliver the grooming advice.
Twenty-first century teenagers’ rebellion and indignation, which I celebrate, are justified by the many wrongs in our world, some of which I couldn’t even imagine 25 years ago. The courageous teens orchestrating climate and racial-justice protests now often have mentors, sometimes slightly older activists who have cut their own path toward justice and who are committed to doing their own work while raising up a new generation of change-makers.
As a White girl growing up in the Detroit suburbs in the late ’90s, I didn’t see such revolutionary thinking in my community. It filtered in through my Sonic Youth and Fugazi tapes, and through the occasional overheard conversation at the coffeehouse where I waitressed. A much more powerful force was Limbaugh, whose program ran three hours each weekday. I hated everything I heard him say. I wanted the world to be different from the one he painted for his listeners. I may not have had a discernible leader to follow, but I did have a crystal-clear antagonist, a night to my day, a right to my left. My values came to be defined from an up-close look at Limbaugh and an insistent voice in my teenage brain: “Hell, no. I don’t belong to this.”
Advertisement
Neither of my parents lived to see former president Donald Trump’s rise and the near-immolation of our government that followed, for which Limbaugh laid the fuel. I often wondered when or if they might have had their own “Hell, no” moment, standing up for their Christian values or just plain humanity, which was notably scarce in both Limbaugh’s and Trump’s rhetoric. They did live to see me become a vegetarian, feminist, working-mother Democrat, a living iteration of their darkest fears. I’m not happy I disappointed them, but a few decades on, I have to give Rush Limbaugh a little credit.
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7uK3SoaCnn6Sku7G70q1lnKedZLy2wMuopqRnYmV%2FcnuPa2ZqcF%2Bbsq61zaKqrWWUnsG1u4yhnJqcXafCtLSMpaCmmpGqtKl7