Your daily apocalypse
by Tom Sullivan
Rush Limbaugh's popularity during the Clinton administration prompted some restaurants to create "Rush Rooms" where you could listen to el Rushbo piped in over speakers while you washed down your burger and onion rings with iced tea. Two Minutes Hate that lasted for hours. A daily dose of outrage to get the juices flowing.
In an interview at Salon, historian Rick Perlstein looks at how other conservative hucksters such as Mike Huckabee and Glenn Beck peddle outrage and miracle cures. The practice has its roots in evangelical culture and in Richard Viguerie's mass marketing:
What he ended up mastering was a rhetorical style which is very familiar to viewers of Fox News, in which the apocalypse is right around the corner, and his innovation was to intimate that you could help stop it with a, y’know, $5, $10, $50 donation. His business model, as was very soon discovered, was taking 95 percent to sometimes even more than 100 percent of the take for his own purposes and profit and giving in only a minuscule percentage of the proceeds to the ostensible beneficiary, whether it was a fund that supposedly helped FBI officers injured in the line of duty or sending Bibles to Africa or supporting something like the National Conservative Political Action Committee.
Perlstein responds to Huckabee’s diabetes ad:
Let’s not forget 1988, when Pat Robertson won the New Hampshire primary. A lot of this stuff comes from Evangelical culture, which is a culture of witness, so the hawking of miracles is absolutely baked into the cake. Someone like Pat Robertson was followed by a figure like Pat Buchanan or any number of candidates in the last two or three Republican primary seasons, who make a lot of noise by doing decently well in early polls but then fade out once the seasoned pros take over and the money becomes preeminent.
If this historical pattern holds, Mike Huckabee, if he does well early, will flame out before the second or third inning but I see no impediment whatsoever for him to be disqualified by the conservative rank-and-file, simply because this stuff has been going on without much complaint since the 1970s. This is part of the hustle, right? If Huckabee can claim to have been victimized because of his activities, he can always claim it’s the conspiracy of the liberal elites… and then it’s off to the races.
Like Flannery O'Connor's bible salesman, except selling reverse mortgages and diet pills via multilevel marketing.
"Aren't you," she murmured, "aren't you good country people?"
What's infuriating is that now everybody's getting in on the daily apocalypse style. This DCCC appeal came in from Nancy Pelosi last night:
Thomas -- I don’t have much time:
The House is voting TOMORROW on the Republican budget.
Paul Ryan, blah, blah, blah ...
That’s why I’m coming to you. We need to raise $80,000 more before the vote tomorrow to show our Democratic strength.
Are you ready to fight back with me before it’s too late?
Hang on tight to your wooden legs.