Tuesday, May 8, 2007

* RADIO RANT: Metaphors Are a "Rush"

Readers of this blog (BOTH of you, and both related by blood or marriage, I'm sure) may be surprised that a certain R. Limbaugh has hardly come up in my frequent "Radio Rants." Well, he's been on the radio so long that his shtick has lost all its shock value; moreover, he's so obviously a shill & "water carrier" for the Republican party line that he seems passé to even some other conservative talk-show hosts. (Savage, for instance, irreverently calls him "Lush Limbo," or something of the sort.)

But, busy on the computer the other day, I endured his opening for a few minutes before changing the station. And I was taken back to the late '80's, when I first heard him, and when I first wondered, "How can people who are fairly articulate actually think this way?" But his shtick hasn't changed a bit, as he still rehearses his formulaic intros: here I am, the Great Limbaugh, with "talent on loan from God"; and—by God, I can stick it to you godless liberals with "half my brain tied behind my back." Now, I admit that the refrain "talent on loan from God" is semi-tongue-in-cheek hyperbole, as is the in-your-face egoism of the "half my brain" phrase. And I won't even rail, for once, against the current "Sea of Faith" that, to my deep chagrin, inundates my daily consciousness. But I will get to my point, then: "half my brain tied behind my back" is an utterly ridiculous, botched figure of speech that reminds me of Joyce Kilmer's "Trees" poem, and Cleanth Brooks' marvelous critique of its awful series of mixed metaphors. The point of a metaphor is to make more "real" & concrete & sensual a more abstract concept. But just try to visualize half your brain bound behind your back. Rush, you better get that other half of your brain back in your "head"—the right half, I assume, which more righteously handles analogous thinking—and start using it, rather than letting it remain an idle appendage dangling somewhere down your backside. . . . (Maybe then you can feel some empathy for others who aren't cigar-chomping white male capitalists.)

2 comments:

Michelle Rogge Gannon said...

Thank you for beating up Rush. He deserves it weekly . . . no, daily . . . no, on the hour.

Tom Gannon said...

"Thanks (oh, family member)"!

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