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Lost in the Dithos

I like to imagine an alternative universe where the mouthpiece for movement conservatism possesses a keen intellect and a mordant wit, instead of being a cretin like Rush Limbaugh (and I’m pulling my punches here for H‘s benefit). My alt-universe Limbaugh would have eschewed schoolyard taunts and instead of relied on the Sage of Bogue […]

I like to imagine an alternative universe where the mouthpiece for movement conservatism possesses a keen intellect and a mordant wit, instead of being a cretin like Rush Limbaugh (and I’m pulling my punches here for H‘s benefit).

My alt-universe Limbaugh would have eschewed schoolyard taunts and instead of relied on the Sage of Bogue Falaya whose Lost in the Cosmos anticipated Sandra Fluke‘s testimony. Walker Percy wrote,

Western Man is promiscuous because something unprecedented has happened. As a consequence of the scientific and technological revolution, there has occurred a displacement of the real as a consequence of which genital sexuality has come to be seen as the substratum of all human relationships, of friendship, love, and the rest. This displacement has come to pass as a consequence of  a lay misperception of the physicist’s quest for establishing a molecular or energic basis for all interactions and of what is perceived as Freud’s identification of genital sexuality as the ground of all human relationships.

A letter to Dear Abby:
I am a twenty-three-year-old liberated woman who has been on the pill for two years. It’s getting pretty expensive and I think my boyfriend should share half the cost, but I don’t know him well enough to discuss money with him. (emphasis added)

If  Limbaugh had cited Percy instead of channeling any random, dull-witted high school sophomore; then rightwingers like Dana Loesch and William Jacobson wouldn’t have had to waste their energy on lame attempts at damage control.

Update: I edited out an extraneous word that I put in the Percy quote.

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