Happy Birthday Rush now 71 years-old. Rush was the oral Fox News, a storyteller of radio, whose right-wing message went directly into the bloodstream of America bypassing the defense mechanisms of rational thinking. Our co-pilot while driving, Rush steered us into the world we now live in that is polarized into male and female political parties. In the world according to Rush. Liberals are like women, emotional, fickle, and unable to govern because in their secret heart the long for a strong Republican man to lean on. Rush was that no BS American man.

Rush is the John Wayne of radio, the confident voice that cuts through the confusion and messiness of democracy.  Rush is that true compass to follow in the traffic jams of modern life. Rush led us to Trump, leaving us has his voice fades from the radio in a rubble of tribal infighting and the ruins of the principled Republican party. 

Rush was Trump before Trump was Trump, a true political entertainer. When in doubt or confused, caught between conflicting ideas, Rush would rush in to tell you what to think and sort things out. Rush would put your car on auto-pilot and take you where he wanted you to go. Rush is a radio cult. 

A radio cult is more powerful than a visual cult, like Trump. Trump is a visual performer on TV. You see him in action. But you don’t see Rush. You hear Rush in your heart which is a sound organ. The eye is a visual organ, but it puts distance between you and your object. There is no distance between the hearer and the sound. 

Rush doesn’t have to say “let my voice by your voice,” like Trump. The mere sound of his voice makes him your voice while driving through the traffic of modern life. Like a GPS Rush takes you to a simpler world where Liberals are always wrong, and you, if you follow Rush, are always right.

As I meditate on Rush this morning, I always remember him as the bombing voice that breaks through the static of the car’s radio on the long drive. He was always there on some station, cutting through the fog of the modern world. Rush told us who was to blame for our feeling of being lost, off course, or using the wrong map. Like a GPS navigator Rush was in the center and his intention was logged into our navigator was always taking us home. That was the power of Rush. 

Rush as at the radio was in his spot, just like Sheldon Cooper. He didn’t need a script or a prompter. When you find your Spot, your Word just flows out of you. Your word liberates you from the mind’s Liberalism. 

You see what I’m working with here? Rush liberated Rush from his own mind’s confusion, weighing, comparing, indecision, or his own Liberalism. That is what our art does when we discover our Spot. 

But Rush needed a foil for his Rush Word, his Rush Man, and that was Liberalism, the messiness and confusion of democracy. Rush as a radio art brought peace and certainty to his own mind, and ours as his listeners. Listening to Rush our compass didn’t wobble. 

But as all art is a drama of some sort, the conflict Rush created so Rush could cut through it was the demonizing of Liberalism. By making Liberalism the enemy, Rush always had bones to throw his dogs because modern democracies are liberal scientific materialism which is based on the fundamental belief that man and nature is basically rational. Rush offered no solutions, no policy, nor way out; Rush just offered a finger pointing to the problem which was our government itself. 

This creates a mythic solution to liberal democracy. Just say NO to liberalism and government. Just dismantle the Government and you will be free like Rush. The Rush to dismantle the very administrative and institutional framework that holds our society together is on with Trump. Trump is the vision of Rush.

We are coming to the end of the Age of Rush and the Moral Majority, Pat Robinson, and the policial televangelists. The Cultural Cold war that replaced the cold war between the USSR and the US is dying of exhaustion and dysfunction. Trump is its Last Stand of the heroic white man who holds the line against the tribal minorities. Rush was its voice.  Podcasts are replacing him.

The World according to Rush is a subjective world view. You are his voice, his voice is you, and that is subjective. You are not able to check what he says with objective facts or context. There is just the One Rush View, and this gives you the sense, the feeling that you are at the center of the world, with Rush. You are not alone since Rush is there as the tent pole is a big subjective tent of ME.