Calling Rush Listeners -- A Question of Culture

[derannimer]

<rubs hands>

Well, now that we've gotten onto Rush, I'm going to take this opportunity to ask a 
question that has always puzzled me about Rush Limbaugh. This is something I 
genuinely have wondered about for a while -- I'm not simply trying to bash the man 
or something -- and I would appreciate elucidation from any Rush-listeners who 
happen to be, er, sorry, tuning in.

See, my grandmother is a die-hard Republican. She's a Christian, and *very* socially 
conservative, and -- being, apart from everything else, about 85 -- also very 
culturally old-fashioned. She doesn't much approve of various sorts of crassness in 
modern life, and if you just knew her socially, you would probably think that she 
would be just the sort of decline-of-civility-lamenting person who would *hate* rude 
talk radio. And I hope we can all agree that Rush, bless his little heart, whatever else 
he is, is pretty rude. (Quotage: "The media is going into orgasm after orgasm after 
orgasm about John McCain.")

So, my question is, why does my grandmother regularly listen to, and like, Rush 
Limbaugh?

Or rather, more broadly, why do cultural conservatives and family-values folks -- I'm 
one myself, btw -- find the extraordinary crassness of many ostensibly conservative 
insititutions acceptable?

Because it's not just radio; if you look at CNN or MSNBC and then at Fox, Fox -- the 
*conservative* channel -- is the one with the sleazy electric guitar music on the 
intros, and right-leaning Bill O'Reilly is cruder than your average, equally prominent 
left-leaning talk show host is. When's the last time you heard Bill Press tell someone 
to "shut up?"

See, some people (liberals, for obvious reasons) would explain this by saying that 
those social/culutural conservatives don't really mean what they're saying -- that 
values and civility and the decline of Western civilization and whatnot is just a handy 
club to hit the Democrats with, and the fact that they like institutions like talk radio 
simply proves this. But I know for a fact that this is not the case; there are many 
people who are *very* sincere about this, and a lot of those people listen to Rush. So 
there's just got to be something else going on here, some reason why cultural 
conservatives seem so attracted to institutions that, in form, apparently diss 
everything that said conservatives believe in content.

What gives?




Derannimer, who has a few opinions about the football thing too, but who *really* 
wants an answer to this question