Don’t Rush Me

If I’m a “FemiNazi”, then Limbaugh was the ultimate “Ditto Head”

The first time (I can’t believe there was more than one) a student called me a “FemiNazi”, I stared him down, stood what I thought was a lot taller than my 5-foot, 9-inch self, and raised my left arm, with my hand pointing toward the open classroom door. Let’s just say it was a gesture of anger, not reconciliation.

“What did he say?” I asked rhetorically. I looked at the class for confirmation that I’d just been dissed, in the most patriarchal, pusillanimous way.

“That’s what Rush calls women who have opinions. Ones who stand up for themselves,” a young woman sitting down front explained.

Rush? Never heard of him.

This was the mid-aughts, and I guess I was the only person on God’s Green Earth who’d never heard of Rush Limbaugh. The young man stood, and started to amble toward the door and, I’m sure he assumed, toward the principal’s office.

“No wait a sec,” I said in a rather clipped fashion. “Sit down. We’ll talk about this later.” I arranged to meet my antagonist after school.

I didn’t want to have a conversation about Rush Limbaugh without reading up on the guy first.

A quick glance at Limbaugh’s Wikipedia page at the time told me more than I needed to know about this particular “shock-jock” and the student who’d slung one of his sophomoric slurs my way.

A native of the Missouri boondocks — OK, Cape Girardeau, near the Tennessee border — Limbaugh started his radio career at the age of 16. He dropped out of college — no surprise there — and launched his storied “talk personality” schtick in Sacramento, then New York, then on to syndication in the late-80s. He made his millions — he’s rumored to be worth more than a cool $600 mil-plus — on putting other people down. Specifically, Bill and Hillary Clinton, then Barack and Michelle Obama, and those who favored their way of thinking. He was adored by the part of the electorate who scorned racial justice; those who didn’t believe in gender equality, and those who wanted to lock up every kid caught rolling a doobie under the cafeteria table at lunch.

Funny, but later in his life, Limbaugh got hooked on Oxy. He was busted for prescription fraud. Good riddance to swell people, and all that.

That’s all I needed to know. When my detractor from earlier in the day dropped by Room 215 after school, I had an earful to tell him. But I wanted him to tell me something, first.

“FemiNazi. Interesting label,” I started. “Where did you pick that up?”

“My Dad.” The kid shrugged like it was no biggie. “He calls my sister that when she gets mouthy.”

“What does you Mom think about that? Or your sister?”

“Mom’s fine with it. She listens to Rush, too. My sister just shrieks a lot, slams the door on the way out, and is always mumbling stuff about my Pops being a ‘fascist’.”

“What do you think the term means — FemiNazi?” Couldn’t wait for this response.

“Well, women do mouth off a lot. And you have a lot of opinions. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have called you names in class.”

A backassward apology, as my Nana would say. Key words here? “Women do mouth off a lot.” Oh, and “I shouldn’t have called you names in class.” I guess anywhere else would have been fine.

Another thing my Nana would say? “The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.”

I let that one go, for the moment. As a high school teacher, one has to learn when to pick a battle and when to just leave it the hell alone. Which is why I dropped it. And filed that Limbaugh creep I’d just read up on under the Scarlett O’Hara “I’ll think about it tomorrow” tab. I had too many pressing subjects crowding my brain —what with AP English Lang and all those papers to grade, I didn’t have enough room to cram in even one ounce of Rush Limbaugh and all his hateful crap.

I seemed to be in the minority, though. Limbaugh — for much of his talk radio career — commanded among the highest audiences on the airways. With a weekly audience of more than 15 million, this creepy cretin — who compared one president to “Curious George” and called a young college student a “slut” and “prostitute” because of her opinions about birth control — held a mirror up to the American psyche long before Trumplethinskin found that he liked that reflection just fine.

And in one of his most tasteless on-air daily segments in the 1980s, this empathetic soul read from a list of names of Americans who had died of AIDs that day — to the backing track of “I’ll Never Love This Way Again,” by Dionne Warwick, an early activist in the fight against the disease. He performed this tragedy for an entire month. What a guy.

A couple years after my introduction to El Rushbo, as he was sometimes known, my AP Lang juniors and I were discussing strong female characters in the works of author Maya Angelou. In her classic I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Angelou recounts the story of her grandmother, who stood her ground in the front yard when ridiculed by the little white girls, and went back to sweeping when they were gone.

“She’s strong, Mrs. Nelson,” said one kid in the back. “She’s like you.”

Trying to get the conversation turned away from me and back to the author and her work, I asked him to explain himself and then tie it back to Angelou’s characters.

“She’s a FemiNazi,” he said. “Like you are. And I’ll bet Dr. Angelou is one, too.”

I once considered sending an email to old Mr. Ditto Head (he often called his listeners “Dittos” for agreeing with him and he — and they — have been referred to as “Ditto Heads”.) and telling him about my classroom encounters. But I decided that even if I put a great deal of thought into the missive he would dismiss it — and me. As, you know, one does with a FemiNazi.

During that second encounter with the same Limbaugh “superlative”, I again refrained from opening the classroom door and ordering the student to take a seat down the hall with the Man in Charge. Instead, I invited him to “have a chat” with me after school.

The kid came by. Took a seat. And gave me an earful. A lot, I’m sure, he learned at home, but this guy told me he listened to Mr. Limbaugh himself — when he had the time.

El Rushbo died today, of advanced lung cancer. He loved his cigars, I hear, and also made fun — for years — of the effort to ban tobacco products. Much like last November’s presidential election, he thought it was all just a “hoax”. Wonder where he got that word from.

My last encounter with all things Limbaugh involved borrowing a truck to help move my daughter into the college dorm.

This was a newish model, and had one of those radio consoles that were operated from the steering wheel. And I — always just slightly behind the times — wasn’t cool with the new technology that day.

I got in the truck and started her up. A grating, LOUD, basso profundo voice leapt into the space between the dashboard and the driver’s seat. Rush Limbaugh in all his glory. And I didn’t know how in the hell to shut the stupid moron up.

We drove to campus in relative silence — meaning my daughter and I didn’t speak because Rush was doing all the talking — er, yelling in an alarming, extreme manner. I didn’t know how to turn him off, so he kept us company all the way to the dorm and stayed with me on the ride back to drop the truck off.

After I’d pulled into the driveway and parked the truck, I asked the gal I borrowed the vehicle from about the radio. She reached into the cab and showed me the controls on the steering wheel. I told her that Rush had helped move my kid into college.

“Oh, sorry about that.” She giggled, a tad sheepishly. Turns out her son had driven the truck the past week, and her 20-year-old was an extreme Rush Limbaugh groupie.

I hate to say what goes around comes around, but you know what? It does. And that’s sad.