He finally succumbed to the lung cancer that had menaced him for some tine but did not deter him from his life's calling, right up to the very end.
The son and grandson of lawyers in the small river city of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, he dismayed his family by dropping out of college after a year to plunge without looking back into a radio career, first as a spinner of platters in Pittsburgh and elsewhere under the name Jeff Christy. Career advancement was eluding him, though, so he took a hiatus and went to work in a marketing position for the Kansas City Chiefs. Then he got an opportunity at a Sacramento station, where management gave him the one-sentence guideline that catapulted him to legend status: Be yourself.
He combined the elements of schtick he'd developed earlier with utter conviction about the core principles of conservatism. His regular features such as the Environmental Update, the Feminist Update, the Homeless Update and the Peace Update shone the unsparing light of common sense on various leftist presumptions, creating space for an alternative viewpoint even as those presumptions, which, in sum, came to be known as political correctness, ever-increasingly permeated our culture.
Millions of regular Americans who had a vague sense that their outlooks were informed by this worldview called conservatism were thrilled to hear him articulate their principles daily, forthrightly and entertainingly. Suddenly one could come right out and say these things!
He was also a man of great generosity, giving his time and money to a number of charitable causes.
There was something kind of lonely about him, though, and part of that was his own doing. The combination of self-isolation and huge ego manifested itself in such ways as decking out his home and means of transportation so that he could enjoy mundane activities as going to the movies or watching sporting events in person in a way that kept his personal contact with the general public to a bare minimum. He took care to brand himself as being in a sphere separate from other practitioners of the talk-radio genre. It took him the fourth of his marriages to make a successful go of that institution.
Ultimately, part of being a talk-radio pioneer meant that he made manifest the genre's limitations. Bombast was central to his persona, and in his wake came a number of imitators who could not pull that off with anything like his palpable humanity.
And I daresay that that is how he succumbed to the Trumpist fever. He could identify with the Very Stable Genius's bombast, and it caused Rush to lose sight of the self-deprecation ("I'm just a harmless little fuzzball.") and commitment to consistency of principle that had made him the Big Voice On The Right. He'd been feted by big-shot celebrities in just about every field since he went national, and was impressed by how Trump had done likewise.
For that reason, I quit listening to him years ago, but I've never lost sight of the essence of the contribution he made to American life.
He said it was okay to point out that some things are right, some things are wrong, some things make sense and some things are utter hooey. In the years when he was on top of his game, he did it with utter hilarity, self-confidence and an ease of comportment that created a space on our society's ideological spectrum that conservatism had never enjoyed before.
A true American original.
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