The news came this past Wednesday that conservative radio personality Rush Limbaugh has died after an extended battle with lung cancer. Rush Limbaugh was a boon to the talk radio industry,
but he was a bane to the community and a blight upon the broadcasting landscape. He tapped into our worst, most selfish actions and reactions and gave multitudes permission to abide in their hatred and bigotry. When his radio
program first came to the Birmingham area it aired on the most widely listened to talk
radio station, WERC. I would often listen in to find out what the brouhaha was all
about. This was in the day when one could hear informative interview programs
that were nationally broadcast, as well as local talk, of which Tim Lennox was
a favorite in the city. It didn’t take much listening to the spouting of Rush
and the fawning of the “ditto-heads” calling in to understand what was
happening. Nevertheless, I kept my car radio tuned to WERC Talk Radio because I felt it was important to hear what was being said what others were thinking.
The other part of my story was that
I had been a Baptist seminarian who was so dismayed by the fundamentalist
takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention that I had left the denomination 5 or 6 years earlier. I
guess I still had some lingering hope for “my people,” why else would I have
wandered into the Baptist Bookstore one day? As I entered the bookstore, which
at the time was still on University Boulevard near UAB, there on prominent
display was Rush Limbaugh’s newly published first book, The Way Things Ought to Be. I had listened to Rush enough to know that he made no claim
to any religious faith and had stated as much, yet here in the store that once
presented only what was considered to be aids for Bible study and Christian
living was a book by a man who made no attempt to hide his narrow-minded
bigotry and expressed no love at all for any faith practice.
That moment simply re-affirmed for me the rightness of my
decision to have parted company with the church of my childhood. Moreover, it
showed me that the core beliefs of the denomination rested not on the Bible, as
was publicly stated, but on bigotry, xenophobia, and hate. It also showed me
that you don’t have to be religious to be a racist bigot, but a racist bigot is
readily welcomed by many religious folks. I walked out that day with no further
desire to even look back, though I have carried the grief that good-hearted
people can be so easily led astray.
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Well written. I too had to escape (yes,escape) the So. Baptist church many years ago. I was a United Presbyterian who's now an Anglo-catholic Episcopalian. I much prefer hymns on crowning kings over plunging around in bloody fountains, anyday. In light of UAB's most recent attack on one of the world's renowned archeology professor's comments regarding the evil of a Rush Limbaugh it is clear that free speech has been replaced by, "political correctness." I remember a time when colleges and universities were the last bastions of free speech. The very idea that a UAB bookstore would have Mr. Limbaugh's book(s) is bad enough, but to reprimand a distinguished professor over her not so kind remarks on Limbaugh proves volumes about the state of our education and culture.
ReplyDeleteThanks for stopping by, Daniel. The bookstore in question was actually the local Baptist Bookstore. I probably made it confusing by mentioning that it was near UAB. But that was the clincher for me, that the Baptists were welcoming Limbaugh's hate-mongering.
ReplyDeleteI am glad you found a more suitable place for worship. There was indeed a Baptist diaspora around that time.
Charles! Thank you for the WERC comment, but.....in 1989 I accepted a job at a Jacksonville Florida Radio station that carried him. I called my former coworkers and said that limbaugh would be a big hit on WERC, They picked up his show after my recommendation. SO...you can blame me. From a strictly radio-audience standpoint I was right, but may I apologize now? He was a ratings winner, but....but...but. The Jacksonville job didn't work out and I was back in Birmingham and back on WERC almost exactly a year later where I had my own run in with limbaugh later on. Anyway, thank you again for the comment. (-: Tim
ReplyDeleteYes, Tim, I remembered most of that timeline, and I remember reading an op-ed you wrote for one of the weekly local publications back then telling of how you first hear Limbaugh down in Jacksonville (and the regret for recommending him to the Birmingham market). Here I mainly wanted to point out that back in those days of talk radio (before the internet, the blogosphere, etc.) programming like yours was what made radio such a lively medium. You had the local interviews, the gardening shows, the listener call-in time that made it a vital community. Thanks for stopping by to comment, and thank you for all the years you have contributed to local radio and television.
DeleteThanks for the memory, Charlie. I remember early Limbaugh as being less obnoxious. I also remember William Buckley and Pat Buchanan as having civil programs where a variety of opinions were expressed.
ReplyDeleteTim, you're forgiven, for sure. Your program was the best in town back then and not just because I usually agreed with you. I wish there were fewer echo chambers and more broadcasters who fostered more community-wide respectful dialogue (ok, some can be found on stations catering to the African American community).
For a while, around the end of the 90s, I tuned in to WSVN, 1210, then a union-supported station in Anniston that carried such personalities as Jim Hightower and Thom Hartman till, sadly, it was sold.
These days, dialogue, or argument, seems to be happening online and my radio dials are mostly frozen on Public Radio.