Abstract

Rush Limbaugh's Inner Black Child

The author draws a connection between the attitudes of conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh and the themes of racism and self-rejection in Philip Roth's novel "The Human Stain." Roth's book has been made into a movie starring Anthony Hopkins as Coleman Silk, son of a Pullman porter, who, when he goes off to college, makes a chilly, clear-eyed, rational-economic decision that being black costs much too much. The film opens when Silk is an old man, at the end of a long and illustrious career as a classics professor. Amid accusations of racism he quits, his wife has a stroke and dies, and he retreats to a brooding, bitter semiretirement. "The Human Stain" begins its run against a complicated real-world backdrop of Rush Limbaugh losing his job at ESPN for saying that black football players are promoted to quarterback as a sop to guilty liberals and politically correct media forces. I worry that "The Human Stain" seems to accept the Limbaugh-like premise that a conspiracy of political correctness killed Silk's wife and his career--rather than his own inner demons, to say nothing of the highhanded condescension he brings to bear in dealing with the complaint. Limbaugh, who persistently positions himself as far as possible from anything black, is, ironically, very much like the socially invisible legions of once-black people who spend theft lives passing but remain hounded by fear of being outed, giddily and anxiously distancing themselves from all things On The Other Side. I wish this movie had focused more on this deeper dimension-on passing's cost not just to Silk himself but to family, friends and to society itself.