“The Lost Way Home” (Killing Limbaugh, Chapter One)
Portland was sliding into the gathering darkness in my rearview mirror. It happened quick, much quicker than it had even five years ago.
Like cities across America (starting in the conservative Utopia of Colorado Springs, Colorado), the lights had been gradually doused as municipalities slowly went bankrupt, along with their residents. It happened in a bulls-eye pattern: Exurbs, then suburbs, then city centers, succumbing to darkness one by one. Now, barely ten minutes from the center of downtown Portland, there was little to cut the darkness but the dim flicker of a fireplace through a suburban window. Even the stoplights were dark, which wasn’t so bad. There wasn’t much traffic on the road these days.
None of this really registered with me, though. Like everyone else, I had gotten used to the new poverty of America. The reason for my melancholy lay elsewhere, still in my rearview, back in Portland, but also now years removed. The sadness just lingered on like slow tendrils of watery-smelling smoke rising from the ruins of a burned-out suburban home.
Headlights appeared, a driver headed to Portland, perhaps to a family, headed back to where I belonged. In the glare of the oncoming lights I caught sight of my own eyes in the mirror: Old, lined, haggard, surrounded by slightly red and puffed flesh, but no tears, no, not yet. The car passed with the familiar rubber-meets-road whoosh, and I was once again alone in the darkness, the taillights dwindling in the rearview.
I felt that familiar magnetic pull in my gut, the one that screams, turn around! Go back, go back! Not back to Portland, but back to the years before my world went to Hell, before everything I loved slowly evaporated from my life. Back to Cheri and Aiden, my home, my love, my warmth – my everything.
Now the tears began.
They’ll say I was deranged, I thought.
Of course they will, I answered myself, and it made me chuckle. I wiped a tear away, a slight smile still on my face. The media will say whatever it needs to say to make people believe that this just doesn’t happen with the rest of us normal folks. Just another lunatic.
Am; I?
Am I insane?
Sure, I’ll cop to that. Who wouldn’t be? But that isn’t why I was doing what I was on my way to do.
Ω
“Please God, please, please, please, make it stop,” Cheri had begged, her knees drawn up against her chest. She sat in a corner of an office in the abandoned warehouse we called home. Tears streaked her face, shining dully in the dank darkness.
“I’m so sorry, honey,” I said, again feeling that familiar punch to the belly that a man gets when he cannot protect his own family from pain.
She started sobbing then, the deep and mournful sound of hope utterly abandoned. I sat down beside her, held her against me, stroking my fingers through her hair. The college professor’s pretty young wife –
– met me at the door with mint chocolate chip ice cream in one hand, and a six pack of Munich Spatzen in the other.
“Who’s my smart guy?” she smiled, wrapping her arms around me as the ice cream and beer bumped together behind my back. Her lips found mine, but I was smiling too broadly to properly return the kiss
She released her embrace, set the items down on a table, took my hands and looked at me mischievously for just a moment – that ‘cat that ate the canary’ look she got from time to time, blue eyes sparkling. It could mean that she had serious sex on the mind, or …
“I’ve got another surprise for you,” she said, and started pulling me towards the den. Now that I’d seen the look, I was hoping she was indeed thinking sex. In fact, it occurred to me to seal the deal, straddling her over the ottoman –
“TA-DA!” she said with a flourish, framing an object on the wall with her hands like a pro Price Is Right model.
The glass case on the wall contained an artful mounting of Newsweek’s current cover. The background was mostly red, emblazoned with the headline, VENEZUELA: IS THE CASE FOR WAR (ANOTHER) CON? The artwork was a sideways-tilted ceramic map of South America. Brazil was in the foreground. Blurred around the edges were Guyana, and Colombia on the far edge. In the center lay Venezuela, a knife’s blade cracking her into crumbling pieces. I’d had nothing to do with that artwork, of course, but I was proud of it anyway.
To the right of the cover, occupying the other half of the glass case, was the article – my article. Just the first two paragraphs. Most of the page was a tight close-up of my face, looking down, wearing large, wire-framed reading glasses. I had the classic, fuzzy-headed, fuzzy-faced professor look. My mouth was in the process of forming a word – what, I don’t recall. Reflected from both lenses of the glasses was another map of Venezuela, this one paper.
On this page, the headline read: WHY THE CASE FOR WAR IS A LIE.
I took it all in at once: the shadow box, a small victory mounted on the wall (I knew it wouldn’t stop the war); Cheri, her radiant face, my home, my life, my wife, my child upstairs asleep safely in his crib, and, to top it all off, an all-too-rare, radiantly beautiful, cloudless day in Portland. A warm breeze rustled the curtains in the open windows, carrying the scent of pine and wildflowers. It was one of those moments in life where you feel like this is it, you’ve made it, everything – at least in my little world – was as perfect as it could ever be.
What I couldn’t have known, at that moment, is that it was as perfect as it ever would be – and that it would never be perfect again.
Once again, her eyes lowered just slightly, that blue and sparklingly devious expression, her smile, brilliant, expectant, hungry … and this time it was the animal she wanted to feed, and we devoured each other.
Ω
“Marcus, have a seat,” said Chancellor William Reddick, overseer of all that is right and holy at Oregon State. He wore a sleeveless maroon sweater vest over a Gray dress shirt, the muted light from the returned overcast shining slightly through the window behind him.
I’d gotten a call from the Chancellor’s secretary the previous afternoon – the afternoon of sex and sunshine and Newsweek – informing me that I was scheduled for an appointment with Reddick at 9AM sharp. I was a little annoyed; my World History class wouldn’t start until 1PM, and I usually didn’t arrive at OSU on Tuesday until eleven or so. Today we’d be looking at the Roman Empire – one of my favorite lessons to teach. Completely in line with the times.
“Morning, Bill,” I said casually, taking a seat. Bill Reddick and I went back a long way. We were colleagues more than we were friends, but I still considered him a friend. “What’s on your mind this fine AM?”
He sighed. Just that – sighed, his head slightly tilted downward, his eyes on some random point on the mostly-empty oak desktop. He was silent for a moment – a beat too long for a casual conversation, even about significant budget cuts.
This was serious.
“Marcus,” he said, and then cleared his throat. He finished in a lower voice, almost too low to hear, as though he thought that if I couldn’t hear it, it wouldn’t have been said. “Your course has been cancelled for the remainder of the semester. I’m sorry.” He cleared his throat again, and when he resumed, his voice was ragged, “You’ve been suspended from OSU.”
I wanted to shout what? but I was so stunned I could only sit there, staring, my mouth agape. My ears rang with shock in the silence.
Finally, I managed words.
“What … what happened? Why, Bill? What – my God. What –?” I couldn’t finish the thought, and just sat shaking my head in bewildered disbelief.
“They drummed you out,” he said simply.
“What? Who?”
He sighed again. “The powers that be.”
“Wh – you’re not making any sense.”
“Oh for God’s sake, Marcus,” he said, exasperated. “Them. The people who control our purse strings. They didn’t appreciate your piece in Newsweek. They have very strong influences here at OSU.”
“Like who?” I blurted, though the pieces were already snapping together.
“Like Marcy Talbot. She’s married to the RNC, for Christ’s sake.” He leaned forward to emphasize the last line, like he was explaining something to an incredibly slow child.
Of course I knew that. She was married to Frank Talbot, head of the Republican National Committee.
“But I … That’s politics, Bill. This is a university. And my article wasn’t political – it was the truth!”
I stopped. What more needed to be said? In an academic setting the truth is the truth. That’s what we teach. It didn’t seem to me that I needed to be more obvious. You said what was true, and taught what was true – that was the job.
“Academia is not what it used to be,” he answered. “Back when – even all the way into the 1990’s – we could teach …” I could hear him almost say the truth, but he stopped himself. “We could teach what we wanted, and if it was within the curriculum, you were fine. It’s not that way anymore.”
“But this had nothing to do with the curriculum! I wrote that article on my own time –”
“And the by-line said Marcus Gray is a professor of World History at Oregon State University,” he interrupted.
“What does-”
“Marcus, this university cannot afford to be seen as a liberal bastion,” he said. “They threatened my job!”
Facts tend to have a liberal bias, Stephen Colbert once said.
“Have you paid attention to who else is paying attention to you?” he asked.
I shook my head, slowly, still in shock.
“Rush Limbaugh, for starters,” he said, disgorging the name from his mouth like so much rotten egg one wants to get rid of as quickly as possible, and with maximum disgust.
Pwah, I breathed. One of those sickening punches to the gut.
“His entire show yesterday revolved around you. You didn’t know that?”
Some distant part of my mind wanted to say, Oddly, I spent yesterday afternoon making love to my wife, rather than listening to Rush Limbaugh.
“We all make enemies from time to time, but that jackass has the ear of the President. Hell, he practically is president – has been since at least the mid-nineties. Nothing goes without his finger in it somehow – and if you piss that idiot off …” He raised his hands, palms up, and thrust them forward, at me. This – you – are what happens when you piss him off, his wide-eyed expression said.
“I—” I started, and then lost all words. “Oh, no,” I finally muttered, covering my eyes with both hands, elbows resting on my knees. It’s the most basic posture known to man, begun early in childhood when you accidently break mommy’s favorite vase: Please make this go away. I’m going to cover my eyes, and when I look again, it will all be better. But it never was.
When I uncovered my eyes, he was still leaning forward, palms up, same expression. Nothing was better.
“If there’s anything I can do– ” he started.
“Oh shit,” I said, losing all semblance of professionalism. What was the point now?
“ – I’d be happy to Marcus, anything at all.”
I looked at him incredulously.
“Do you know where I can find an $40,000 a year job in the midst of 30% unemployment?” I asked. My salary had been halved over the years.
Bill Reddick laughed – he actually laughed right in my face. I thought to be offended for a second, and then realized that this was just as stressful for him – almost – as it was for me. Sometimes laughter is just as common as sadness or anger when dealing with stress.
“Sorry Marcus,” he said, catching himself.
“Oh my God,” I continued “My mortgage – our health insurance!”
The Chancellor pushed back from the desk, looking again at the desktop now, shuffling a few random papers – preparing to get on with the rest of his day. No matter if we had a professional friendship, my mortgage problem was none of his concern. He was right, of course; he had his own struggling relatives to support and worry over. It was the way of the time.
There is a smell associated with certain rooms in universities: It is the slight must that emanates from old books long upon a bookcase shelf. The Chancellor had many in his office, oak cases rising from floor to ceiling. Had I thought about it, I would have inhaled deeply that day, savoring that smell.
It would be a long time before I’d encounter that smell anywhere again.
Ω
My battered Tacoma sank deep into a depression in the highway, and then rose again, headed east out of Portland. Here were the exurbs, subdivision upon vacant subdivision. The tract houses were nearly all in darkness, mile after mile. Some had once been million dollar homes; many had never seen a human inhabitant. They were planned during the boom, built during the bubble, abandoned to the banks after the bust. The empty windows seemed to hold the forlorn shadows of faces – ghosts of families who would have lived there, had the Second Great Depression not murdered the American dream.
Just beyond the last of these, clouds of haze appeared in my headlights, and quickly thickened. Even with the windows closed, I could smell the acrid smoke from the forested hills along the highway. The flicker of campfires shone through the trees, the occasional blue glow of a generator-powered television in a wooded clearing.
Many of these were the former occupants of the homes I’d just passed. There were thousands of people living in these hills. Like me, they had remained nearby the ruins of their former lives. Such is human psychology: We keep returning to the graves of our past, hoping that maybe, one day, the bones will puzzle themselves together and make us whole – that our lives will make sense again.
I would pass thousands of such camps in the next week.
My God, can you believe it’s really come to this? I turned to ask Cheri.
But of course, my passenger seat sat vacant in the gloom, because there is no Cheri, not anymore.
Never again.
It’s stunning how quickly things can change: One second you’re riding high on top of the world; the next you’re so much broken rubbish along a lonely desert highway.
We’d barely absorbed the news of my unemployment when some zombie wandered out of Radioland and took my son.
Ω
“These people want your family dead!” shouted radio commentator Glenn Beck into the microphone. “No – worse! They want this country incinerated beyond recognition! They will not be satisfied until you, your family – your kids! – are bleeding in the streets. Professor Marcus Gray, God will send your blood pouring through the streets before He allows this to happen! Marxist! Marxist?” He chuckled bitterly. “Marx was a harmless clown compared to you! This man, ‘Professor’ Gray, has been sucking the life’s blood out of your children – your children! – for a decade now, day in, day out, teaching them to hate your country!“Americans, Americans – please! – for the love of God … for the love of God, don’t let this happen. This man is vile – he is the poisoned fruit of liberal madness. BUT WE WILL FIGHT! AS GOD’S OWN ARMY, we will see you TORN, and DEFEATED, SHREDDED AND DESTROYED, with GOD AS MY WITNESS, we will NOT ALLOW IT! Pull ON the full armor of God, Americans! Fight this evil – ERADICATE IT from our land! The clock is ticking! The hour is upon you! Will you allow this? Will you allow this … SCUM! … to take everything from you – your country, your freedom, your children’s future? Faith without action is meaningless! ACT, American!”
“Stochastic terrorism” is the use of mass communications to stir up random lone wolves to carry out violent or terrorist acts that are statistically predictable but individually unpredictable.
I was unaware of this term at the time, every bit as much as I was unaware of Beck’s rant against me that day. I knew the stories of the Lone Wolves, of course: Jim David Adkisson, fan of Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, shooting nine in Tennessee in a rage against “Democrats, liberals, niggers and faggots;” Richard Poplawski, who shot five police officers in fear of FEMA concentration camps promised by Beck himself; Scott Roeder, murderer of Dr. George Tiller, who was relentlessly demonized by O’Reilly for providing abortions; Byron Williams, another fan of Beck’s, who shot two officers with the intent of “starting a revolution.”
“Beck would never advocate violence,” Williams later said. “But he’ll give you every ounce of evidence you’ll ever need.”
Add to the list of victims: Professor Marcus Gray, wife Cheri, and son Aidan, aged just six months.
killinglimbaugh 