Limbaugh

Death came to Mr. Rush Limbaugh yesterday.  If you're anywhere near any kind of a screen you cannot avoid seeing his moon face. 

One of these photos is familiar to me. This fellow was loud and uncompromising and so very full of himself. I'm not writing about Mr. Limbaugh now, but rather about a man I worked with who had a large framed portrait of Rush Limbaugh in a prominent place on his desk. It was carefully arranged so people coming into his office for a meeting would be greeted by Rush's shit-eating grin and if you cared to look closely, you'd see that Rush had used a Sharpie to scrawl a personal message to the fellow on the other side of that desk.

The Limbaugh photo was far cry from the inspirational workplace posters in the vogue then. It's the opposite of the framed diplomas used to add authority.

That photograph was a signal – both to the men and to the women – that there was no even playing field in this office. It was a dangerous place for women, for the man behind the desk let you know that he viewed you as either a "feminazi" or a sex object. He emulated Limbaugh's entire demeanor – the bluster, the bravado, the snide comments spewing out of his mouth with a contemptuous jokiness.

I had learned the lessons of getting along long before mandatory sexual harassment training so this was just one more of the familiar experiences of a woman in the workplace. I just turned my attention to working around the big-mouth and there came a day when the fellow packed up his prized possession and moved along on his career path.

Limbaugh's giant megaphone has been silenced by death. But somewhere, this other fellow has likely pulled his hero's photo out of its frame and posted the screen shot on his facebook page.