So I was watching a couple of video shorts the other day from Laurel and Hardy that date to the 1930s.
One of them, “Busy Bodies” had them operating a saw mill with dangerous and disastrous results.
The second was “Hog Wild,” in which they were putting up a radio antennae to dangerous and disastrous results.
Now were Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy that inept in real life? No. It was an act. It was Hollywood. But it was fun to watch then and it is fun to watch now.
Today, there are more “acts” than ever, in TV, in the movies. But those aren't the only places we have acts.
Take Rush Limbaugh and the array of other right-wing talk show hosts. Now maybe they have some convictions, some beliefs, but the goal is to be as outspoken and outrageous enough that you score a big audience and land a cushy contract and make lots of money.
Limbaugh, speaking in the safe haven of FOX News from his Palm Beach, Fla., home, said a week ago the country had “never seen this kind of radical leadership at such a high level of power” in referring to President Barack Obama. He said the administration is bent on destroying the private sector on purpose, amounting to “a denial of liberty, an attack on freedom.” He called Obama a “man-child president.”
Now Limbaugh's comments are pretty outrageous, but it is easy to see why he said it. He stands to make as much as $400 million over the next eight years. All he has to do is attract the most gullible listeners as possible and keep the radio affiliates happy. If you think what I'm saying isn't fair or true and Limbaugh is merely voicing his core beliefs, check out what else he said on FOX.
“I'm out to get the highest ratings I can get every day. I'm going to attract the largest audience I can every week, regardless of the news. It's my — it's my talent that draws the crowd. The news is incidental to it,” Limbaugh said.
As far as his contract, Limbaugh said, “I'm a - guy who earns a percentage of what I generate every year. There are some guarantees, but the $400 million is not guaranteed. I have to earn that. So far…I'm ahead of schedule, in fact.”
He earns that amount with an act, making outrageous statements. I'm certain Laurel and Hardy made decent money for their time. I know Charlie Chaplin did. But they didn't earn it sitting around acting civil and normal. That is boring. They got knocked in the head. They fell off roofs. They were almost decapitated in a saw mill.
At one point, it looks like Chaplin in one film almost had his head whacked off with an ax. (Until modern technology allowed archivists to look more closely at some footage and learned the scene was performed backward, with the ax going up from his head. It was then reversed for the film.)
Trouble is, nobody thought Laurel and Hardy were really trying to put up an antennae. They knew it was an act.
Limbaugh's act has gullible people believing him, even though Limbaugh’s so-called beliefs service people in his financial class far, far more than the average person.
Take for example, his comments that Obama may have the most radical administration ever.
Rush needs to go back 80 years to the great stock market crash and the presidency of Herbert Hoover. Now Hoover was a compassionate guy. He probably would have been considered a centrist, if not a liberal, compared to the Republican Party today. Some Democrats wanted him to run in their party.
During World War I, Hoover was given the daunting task of feeding the starving people of Belgium. The German army had seized Belgian food supplies. Hoover made it his personal crusade to help these people. Over four years, the group he formed fed 11 million people in Belgium and northern France.
So the idea he didn't care about people impacted by the stock market just doesn't wash. The problem was, the federal government never interfered with private enterprise before. It never set regulations or tried to help people directly. It was a totally foreign concept.
People who never truly worked, who didn't produce a product, became billionaires in the unregulated stock market of the 1920s by getting together and artificially making stock more valuable. Eventually, despite unbridled optimism, the system could not sustain itself and America was plunged into the Great Depression.
Franklin Roosevelt defeated Hoover and thumbed his nose at past precedents. He got legislation passed to get people to work though the Civilian Conservation Corps (for young men,) the National Recovery Act, the Works Progress Administration and more. He got reforms through Congress regulating business. He got federally backed insurance in place so people would never lose their life savings in a bank again.
Now that is radical change. I don't make $400 million like Limbaugh. But then, I don't write or say fiction. Anyone with any sense of history knows his comments are downright absurd.
Terms like “socialism” and “communism” were bandied about in the 1930s too. But we look back on the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. and Social Security as positive reforms.
The same can be said about Medicare.
So as we look at government-guaranteed health care, the multi-millionaire Limbaugh, who can afford a heart transplant a day, says things like, “And when they get this health care bill, if they do, that's the easiest, fastest way for them to be able to regulate every aspect of human behavior, because it will all have some related cost to health care…
“It's going to be the biggest snatch of freedom and liberty that has yet occurred in this country.”
Come now, Rush. England has had universal health care since right after World War II. Are you saying English people have lost their freedom and liberty?
No, places like England, France and Canada all have far better health statistics than we do here. People in those countries don’t go bankrupt for getting sick. Nobody has to host chicken dinners for them to help pay their bills.
Private insurance companies have blown it. They got too greedy. People can work hard, harder than Limbaugh, and not have any insurance because their employers don't provide it. Or the person can work hard, pay premiums each month and still have a private insurance company refuse to pay claims or only parts of them.
When Laurel and Hardy fell off that roof, we could all laugh. We knew it was false. We might watch Leonard Nimoy play Mr. Spock, but we know the ears are plastic and he wasn't born on another planet.
The problem with Limbaugh and his ilk is people believe it and agree with his comments to their own detriment, well, except for those who make six figures as well.
In some ways, I'm better off than Rush. I don't have to keep coming up with crazy, wild statements. My comments aren't meant to be off the wall or outrageous or even liberal or conservative. I am just trying to tell the truth and put it in proper perspective. I am reminded of that every time I look at my paycheck.
Lebzelter is special sections editor. E-mail him at bobleb@starbeacon.com.
