#6: A Rush of Blood to the Head

Don't push me, 'cause I'm close to the edge.
I'm tryin' not to lose my head.

‘The Message’, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious 5

Here’s the way it sounds in my head:

By the mid 90s, the financial torches were firing, carrying the balloon of the American economy up from record deficits. The stock market bubbled and frothed with life. Jobs were materializing as if from nowhere and average income was rising. With it also rose both personal and national fiscal optimism¹.

This was exactly the kind of Dantean hellscape we evangelicals had feared from Bill Clinton’s presidency.

Fortunately, I had someone willing to shepherd me through this valley of darkness. Someone conveniently located on both the radio and television dials! That good shepherd was Rush Limbaugh.

SOMEBODY WHO ‘GETS IT’

I first met him by eavesdropping on a conversation between my high school history teacher and two fellow students. These classmates gushed over some guy named Rush and his latest episode. My teacher appeared ambivalent, yet I was intrigued enough to tune in. And did I tune in! “Now here,” I said to myself, “is somebody who gets it.”

Rush understood the veritable imprisonment we suffered at the hands of the Clintons and their army of leftist cronies. He even counted down the days until our release. Until that day would come, I tracked – through Rush’s watchful gaze and with his hand of guidance – the various insidious machinations of the administration and its efforts to chip away at the nation we loved. Globalist policies. Rapprochement with China. Affirmative action. Handouts for the poor and destitute. And worse, proposed subsidized national health care reform. Was this still America, or some dystopian Scandinavian gulag all of the sudden?

In all this, Rush granted me his eyes with which to see. Yeah, he was a bitter and mean-spirited son of a bitch, who said the quiet parts out loud, but he was angry at all the same people I was. And his real expertise lay in stoking my anger (and the anger of many like me) until it was white hot. Then, he aimed that rage like a flame thrower directly at the President and the First Lady.

YOU GIVE ME FEVER

It was a talent, though not necessarily a gift, since anger at the Clintons was so easy to come by. It seethed in the conservatives around me. And it burned almost fever-like in my fellow Christians, a consuming sickness that seemed to take almost everyone. We fumed about Bill Clinton’s moral inadequacy, about his and Hillary’s support for abortion, about their soft stance on gay rights. America could never be pure, it could never be righteous, it could never enjoy God’s blessing as long as the Clintons remained in the seats of authority. So, of course, we saw every policy and decision through the fevered eyes of the grippe.

Today, the near-murderous fury that lies barely contained in many Christian nationalists almost beggars belief. You hear it in speeches, where things once hidden in the recesses of the mind are now said aloud. You see it at rallies and demonstrations. At any moment, you feel, it could detonate with a shock wave to decimate anything standing too close. Well, that kind of fury wasn’t born yesterday; it has roots. Over the years, its soil has been fertilized and its branches trained. But its seeds were planted and watered in those fiery days of the 90s (if not before), when the Clinton White House served as the focal point for all our outrage and fears.

Anger at the Clintons burned almost fever-like in my fellow Christians, a consuming sickness that seemed to take almost everyone… We saw every policy and decision through the fevered eyes of the grippe.

Adam Lee Benner

FOLLOW THE LEADER

Likewise, the uncritical way we find common cause with those who cut so much against the grain of classic Christianity. Rush Limbaugh certainly railed against Bill Clinton’s moral failings. He’d shoot at any target the Clintons exposed. And he decried any perceived injustice toward evangelical Christians, in typical Republican fashion. Limbaugh, however, never claimed to be a follower of Christ himself, and he certainly never spoke or acted like one. Ditto Sean Hannity. Ditto Tucker Carlson. Yet we so easily become their acolytes and allow them to feed our worst qualities with their own.

As I followed Rush’s lead, I could see nothing of the Clintons beyond my religious animosity. What shades of grey remained in my worldview were painted over with black and white, in sharp relief. We (I, my friends and family, the Christian right, the Republican party – and of course, Rush) stood squarely in the white. In the black slithered all liberals, Democrats, abortionists, feminists, globalists, and communists, with their preeminent high priest and priestess, Bill and Hillary Clinton. And the results of the 1996 election, in which (we said) a shallow and inattentive American public returned them to the Oval Office, didn’t make me or my fellow evangelicals any less angry.

AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER

Then, glorious Schadenfreude! God sent us an angel from heaven named Linda Tripp to manipulate and secretly record conversations with a young girl named Monica Lewinsky. It wasn’t the first time someone had manipulated Monica either. While she served as an aide in the Clinton White House, the President had seduced her and the two had begun a sexual relationship. Tripp turned over the tapes at the start of 1998 to save her own skin, and the story of the elicit affair broke, setting off a media shitstorm.

For us, it seemed like Christmas had carried over into January. This year’s gift? The right to say, “We told you so.” Didn’t we warn you about this man’s moral bankruptcy? Didn’t we tell you his character failings made him unfit for the position? Alas, you would not listen! Now, Bill Clinton had “turned the White House into a playpen for the sexual freedom of the poster child of the 1960s.”²

While the sublime sunshine of this sordid liaison continued to shine, Republicans and we, their faithful lapdogs of the Christian right, would make political hay. Conservative luminaries and politicians, evangelical leaders and, of course, pundits like Rush would go to the ‘Lewinsky-gate’ well again and again and again in the lead-up to the 2000 election. They sensed Clinton had delivered them a golden ticket to recapture the highest office in the land.

By the time that election rolled around, though, I would no longer be lending my anger to the cause.

Until next time…

God keep you from misdirected wrath,
From misguided voices,
And from misplaced loyalties.

God lead you into wisdom,
Into the grey,
And even into a holy anger at injustice.

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1. From Clinton White House archives, https://clintonwhitehouse5.archives.gov/WH/Accomplishments/eightyears-03.html
2. This evocative mouthful belongs to Pat Robertson, from a September 18, 1998 Christian Coalition rally. Reported in the Washington Post, https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/special/clinton/stories/coalition091998.htm