President Obama’s re-election gave many Americans a
good reason to cheer. The uninsured who would finally have access to health
care, women who were safe from yet another Republican attack on their rights,
students struggling to pay the ballooning costs of college tuition and loans.
Yes, it was a fine day for many Americans. But the sun shined even brighter
that day for the vanguard of talk radio, for whom President Obama has been a
continuous source of material since before his first campaign even took off.
Health care, women’s rights, debt relief – and tons and tons and tons of cash
for the people who make their living on the airwaves.
Ever
since I learned to drive, I have been a steady listener to talk radio of all
kinds. I listen to NPR on my way into campus, sermons on Sunday mornings, and
the nightly news while I cook and do other household chores. Rarely, if ever,
do I actually use the radio to listen to music. Every so often I will get bored
with the standard, sane fare of NPR and other conventional news outlets. That’s
when I turn the dial to the man who ought to be happier than anyone else that
President Obama was re-elected. That man is Rush Limbaugh, and in the course of
any one of his three hour shows one can experience both a complete range of
emotions and a rhetorical style that mixes smugness, paranoia, race, religion,
and the impending doom of America into a show that is extremely difficult to
turn off. If circulation is an important aspect of rhetoric, these men who
demand millions of listeners and dollars each day on the radio demand that we
pay attention to them.
About
a week after the election, I was driving home from camping and turned on my old
pal Rush. After a familiar tirade about how once-great America had reached the
point of no return, he decided to debut a song that he had composed about the
President. In what he calls a satire of the President and the Americans who
voted for him, he hoped to expose the truth about where America was going, just
in time for the coming Christmas holiday. The result, which I have linked to in
this post, is the awkwardly named song “Baraka Clause is Comin’ to Town.”
Released
the same week that the defeated Mitt Romney noted that the President had
promised people “extraordinary gifts” to win re-election, the song continues
that note from its opening line. “You better not work, you better not try,”
proclaims a singer in a poor but recognizable impersonation of the President.
For those of you with the wherewithal to listen to the link, you’ll notice that
the song makes one argument and one argument only: the people who voted for the
President are lazy bums and whose votes have been bought with handouts.
The
lyrics, of course, suggest that it is only due to the laziness and duplicity of
these Americans that the President was re-elected. But even more interesting to
me, I think, is the campy impersonation of Obama used to sing the song. It is
gleeful, cynical, and it suggests that anyone who would listen to such a person
must either be stupid or seriously lacking in moral fiber.
It
is hard to imagine who would find this genuinely funny, but it is clearly an
attempt to fit into that category of “funny because true.” Rush himself even notes
at the end of this clip, “it’s hysterical because it’s true.” I don’t find it
especially funny, but as an open-minded rhetorician I have to ask: what kind of
values would one have to have to think that it’s funny? Who, exactly, is the
intended audience?
If you look at the
comments below the video on YouTube, you’ll find an extended discussion of race
and “people on welfare.” What is interesting to me is that the song does not
mention race or the word welfare, but that seems to be what it makes people
think about. And that, I think, is the point. Material like this allows for
Rush to talk about race without talking about race. That’s why it’s interesting
and that’s why, whether you share my fascination with talk radio as such or
not, you should pay attention to people like this as they make millions and
millions of dollars circulating this material across the airwaves.
I want to piggy-back off of what you mentioned, which I think is a fantastic point about intended audience and rhetorical situation as well, Josh, by pointing out the rhetoric one can find in various places in commentary throughout the Internet. I find myself, sometimes, fascinated by commentary that people leave, from discharging the question in a sarcastic manner to misinterpreting the intent of the question, like you pointed out was happening on YouTube. But really, if all are talking about it, perhaps there was a hidden intent about welfare in this video? Or, more interestingly, perhaps if the person who initiated the welfare/race conversation initiated it in a way that was rhetorically sound to the audience, perhaps it was a way of transitioning the conversation to another rhetorical situation. Maybe if that initiation was done with a grammatically incorrect way, or in a way that did not resound with the audience who read it, the conversation would not have been carried along as far it has!
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