Rush Limbaugh died last week. He was a man who had turned the sensibility and tactics of a grade-school bully into a job that paid eighty-five million dollars a year. His frequent targets were people of color, women, homosexuals, the transgendered, liberals, immigrants, Democrats of any stripe, Parkinson’s victims, and seekers of social justice.
If you were white, straight, male, and angry, he welcomed you into his circle of admirers. He told you that you were smarter than other people. But he said you were victimized by affirmative action and a general prejudice against the successful. You were among a hardworking, honest minority that kept our nation going, but your tax dollars went to support dishonest parasites who sold drugs, were whores or pimps, and spent all day drinking 40-oz. bottles of Old English 800.
Upon hearing of his death, I thought if there is an afterlife, and if happiness there exists in proportion to the amount of kindness, understanding, mercy, and charity you’ve shown toward your fellow creatures during your earthly existence, Rush Limbaugh is, right now, deeply, deeply unhappy.
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I never became one of Limbaugh’s admirers. For one thing, I’ve always been smart enough to distrust people who told me I was smarter than other people. For another, I have hated bullies since I was old enough to be bullied.
Bullies were a playground fixture at Ketchum Elementary School. Early on I learned to blend into the background so as not to attract their attention, all the while paying deep attention to them. I learned how to read the coded language of exclusion, that subcategory of English that designates some people in and some people out, and I got good at knowing when someone was about to get picked on. I tried to make sure it wasn’t me, but I hated bullies just the same.
The biggest bully at Ketchum Elementary—not counting the hot lunch cooks, who must be forgiven because they knew not what they did—was Mrs. Mac, our third-grade teacher. As a third grader, I was terrified of her, and with some reason, because her favorite mode of discipline was to stand behind a child and administer hard and repeated slaps between the shoulder blades. My memory still retains an image of Ricky Day, nine years old, mouth open and moaning in terror, head snapping back and arms going in the air with each slap, while Mrs. Mac screamed at him to stop talking when she was talking.
It took me years to realize that Mrs. Mac was mentally ill, and that she should never have been allowed to enter a room filled with people smaller than she was. It took me more years to understand that bullies forget the pain and humiliation they cause others, but their victims remember everything the bullies did, and every detail about who the bullies were.
Once, thirty years after I was a third-grader, a classmate told me a story that might have explained Mrs. Mac’s cruelty. My classmate’s mother had told her that Mrs. Mac had been a great beauty in her youth, with many admirers, and she could have married a number of men who were far more successful than the man she had married.
When I was a third-grader, Mrs. Mac was in her late fifties, going through what in retrospect must have been one of the all-time Guinness World Records horrible pre-replacement hormone menopauses, and suffering from depression, blind helpless rage, and nihilistic despair.
Much has been written about women disappearing from male consciousness after menopause, and how they find it a relief. For Mrs. Mac, though, in the time and the culture she was in, where female currency was counted in units of beauty, her mirror must have terrorized her like she terrorized her third graders. Her grey hair and wrinkles and jowls (and mad eyes, it must be said) must have convinced her she was being obliterated. Beating up little kids was reaching for another chance at existence, and it worked. Sixty-two years later, she’s still in this world, occupying a room in my brain.
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When I was in third grade, my father supplemented our family income by trapping mink, weasels, marten, otter, and coyotes. He supplemented our diet with wild game. Beef was a wasteful luxury, even in the form of hamburger.
He taught me to hunt and butcher elk and deer. I helped him check his trapline, and I watched as he killed the animals still alive in his traps. Early on, I made a fuss and wanted to take them home as pets, but my father spent a lot of time explaining the wild world to me, and how a predator made a living. “Humans are predators, too,” he said. “We all have to kill to live.”
Over the years, I learned how to trap and skin animals, and I suppose, if I had to, I could pull a box of traps from the attic of the garage and start up a trapline again. I don’t think that will happen, because if trapping is the only way Julie and I can stay alive, a bunch of other things will have happened that would make our continued existence dubious anyway.
In the meantime, I much prefer that my killing be indirect. I tell Julie, when she asks me if I’m ever going to apply for an elk permit, that I will the day Costco closes its meat department.
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If you’re eight years old and your father is teaching you to kill furry little animals that look a lot like teddy bears and Easter bunnies and acrylic puppies, you become, of necessity, a philosopher. Fortunately, my father understood the process, and helped out. “Never cause unnecessary suffering,” he told me. “There’s too much suffering in the world as it is.” It was sound advice, even coming from a man whose hands were covered in blood.
After a few years of trapping, I didn’t need to be convinced that there was more than enough suffering in the world. I had also hunted enough to know that hunting usually guarantees a crueler death for an animal than a slaughterhouse.
Every year I find the remains of elk and deer in the hills above our house, shot and left to rot by people who didn’t want to pack them out, or gut-shot and never found when they ran off and hid. Not causing unnecessary suffering takes skill and hard work, and there are better ways of not causing it than hunting or trapping. As soon as I got old enough to quit them both, I did.
These days I still see young men who try to make a living outside of the culture by trapping or guiding hunters. But it’s brutal work, hard on the spirit over time, and pays less than working in a Burger King. Nobody I know has made a career of it. Even my father had to drive ski bus in the winter and work on road construction in the summer to make enough money to feed, clothe, and educate his kids. Fur prices have gotten worse since he was a trapper.
Without survival as a rationale, trapping becomes a cruel hobby. Cruelty shouldn’t be a hobby.
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I won’t allow Rush Limbaugh to occupy a room in my brain. It’s already crowded in there, and if I believe the gerontologists, it’s getting smaller and smaller. At some point you have to go through your hippocampus and throw out the squatters, the junkies, and the criminals. Limbaugh qualifies for eviction on all three counts.
I do have some sympathy for him. I’ve learned enough about the human psyche over the years to know that sadism is a part of everybody. I’ve also learned that if you’re hurting somebody, they have to acknowledge that you exist. Somewhere in Limbaugh’s past, the self he was constructing got damaged enough that he quit trying to build on it and started trying to protect what was left of it. Other people could be enlisted in the effort, even against their will.
Over time, it became a habit, and then a career. It was no doubt a process that involved one logical but cruel business decision after another. When his sadism got grotesque, as sadism always does, it was too late to change.
That he had so many fans suggests that plenty of people enjoyed his cruelty, and they used it to validate their own existences. If his fans weren’t bullies themselves, they were at least akin to the kids who stand around a fight on the playground, chanting, “Hit him again. Hit him again.”
I watched the ceremony where Limbaugh was given the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump. Limbaugh was in the advanced stages of lung cancer by that time, and he must have known that he wasn’t going to live long. He teared up. He might have been thinking of his own mortality. He might have been overcome by the honor of the occasion. He might have realized he was going to miss this world, maybe a lot.
But I don’t think so. I got the distinct impression that he thought he had made the world a better place and was being rewarded for it. He was someone, finally—made so by order of the president. Those were tears of relief.
You cannot have your father tell you, “Never cause unnecessary suffering,” and think that Rush Limbaugh has made the world a better place. You cannot think that Limbaugh’s father ever told him that the world has enough suffering as it is.
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I can remember every bully I have ever encountered. I can tell you their names, and, in most cases, where they live.
It’s amazing what you can find out on the Internet these days, and it’s amazing how much comfort you can derive from a little personal information. It’s amazing how much you can remember about people once you put your mind to it, and it’s amazing what you remember about them that they cannot remember about themselves.
It’s amazing how much information you can find between the paragraphs of an obituary.
I’m describing an utter waste of time, especially considering I’m not going to track down a bunch of third-rate people, one by one, and confront them with what they did, decades ago, to other people and to me. It would be about as useful as confronting Rush Limbaugh, if he were still alive, because old bullies are well defended against remembering themselves as young bullies, or for that matter the bullies they were yesterday. You can’t appeal to their consciences. You can’t tell them they hurt you and expect them to feel guilty.
You can’t call the cops on someone who sucker-punched you in a high school locker-room. You can’t confront the tattered little old lady who made fun of your clothes when you were twelve and she was thirteen and a foot taller than you and dating a ski instructor. You can’t call out the guy who made his girlfriend wait in the car while he visited a whorehouse in Burley, Idaho in April of 1967.
It would be stupid and pointless and would increase the amount of suffering in the world. It might set off an exhumation of my own memories, ones where I hurt people weaker than me, and it might make me remember my father’s voice, saying, “Humans are predators, too.”
It might make me, God forbid, forgive bullies, just so I could forgive myself. I like to think my own sins were far less serious than any of the ones I’ve listed above, but I haven’t consulted with the people I committed them against. They might convince me I’m not as forgivable as I think.
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Mrs. Mac, long retired from teaching, died in a snowstorm, walking home from the grocery store to her home in Hailey. She slipped and fell down and was covered up with snow, and, I heard, buried by a snowplow whose driver didn’t see her. It was a day before somebody noticed her leg sticking out of a snowbank.
When I found out about it, my first thought was, “Good. Serves her right.” I was old enough to know better than to think that, but I thought it anyway.
By then I had been a teacher myself. Even though I had tried to be a nurturer, not a predator, I had made mistakes. I had made people cry when I gave them bad grades or showed them where their essays and stories contradicted themselves. I had made them angry when I caught them lying or cheating, and I had really made them angry when I stopped them from being bullies. I had a reputation for being sadistic to sadists, or at least to people I had decided were sadists. I was a shepherd protecting my flock from wolves, never thinking about where the flock was headed at the end of the summer.
No doubt there are people out there who will cheer if I’m ever found frozen solid in a snowbank, and who will say that if there is an afterlife, I’ll soon be warm enough.