Currently on stage at Second City is a show entitled Rush Limbaugh: The Musical. It's a satire from a explicitly liberal point of view. I think anyone reading the material about the show would understand that.
Zev Valancy is a friend of mine, and a member of the ensemble at Stage Left with me. He very much likes this show. Betty Mohr, of the Southtown Star, very much does not.
Let me make this clear...I'm a very liberal guy on social issues, and more conservative on fiscal matters. I believe, very strongly, in things like universal health care, The National Endowment for the Arts, and equal treatment for all citizens, with no difference for race, sex, or sexual orientation. However, I also believe in a balanced budget, a strong military and personal responsibility. I, personally, see no conflict in those views, but some people around me do. I've made people uncomfortable, and they've done the same to me.
I will never see Rush Limbaugh: The Musical.
It's not because I disagree with it's stance. I find Limbaugh loathsome, as I do with Beck, and Olberman, the entire political talk radio industry is disgusting to me. They are doing absolutely nothing to help this country, they are all screeching harpies in a contest over who can express themselves in a louder and more condescending way to those who don't agree with them. I can't watch the guys on the right, and the Lefties like Olberman just make me uncomfortable by playing in to the over-educated, condescending, elitist image the Right has slapped on us. Keith has almost become a parody of it.
The fact is, this show simply strikes me as more of the same. In mocking Limbaugh, they simply become him. Making up facts, and twisting truths to make those they abhor look as bad as possible. Just like Limbaugh and Beck do. I don't need to see that. I get enough of ugly, political hate speech in my own life without paying a theatre company to give me more of it.
Where's Edward R. Murrow when we need him?
Oh, I would never dispute that it's angry and completely unfair. For me it works as satire--and I found that kind of vitriol cathartic and hilarious. I don't know that it has any particular good effect on American political discourse, except in that it functions as a pressure-relief valve for angry liberals, helping them to rejoin the fight less prone to bursting a blood vessel in the head. But I'd never put it up as an example of what we need more of in this country.
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