Posted on 11/05/2001 8:42:41 AM PST by MoralSense
A few years back, we had a substitute priest at our church. She was typical of the contemporary Episcopal pastorate: female, overweight, with a bee in her bonnet. Her bee: "the hearing impaired community." When we sang hymns, she used to come forward and sign the words for deaf members of the congregation, never mind that we didn't have any deaf members in our congregation.
There it is, liberalism in a nutshell: An arrogant display of irrelevant virtue.
Rush Limbaugh, the most famous and effective talker of our day, has gone deaf in a matter of five months, apparently from a rare autoimmune disorder. He had been making the best of it with ever-louder hearing aids, soldiering on, until the deafness grew so profound he could no longer compensate for it. At that point, he announced it to his audience, without rancor or self-pity, and proclaimed his intention of carrying on with his national radio show, which reaches an audience of 20 million.
Everyone knows Rush's voice. That voice is a schooled, stentorian, wide-ranging instrument of unsurpassed flexibility and expression, part disc jockey, part carney pitchman, part throwback to the glory days of 1940s radio. There has been nothing like it since W.C. Fields, and no radio personality so influential since Will Rogers.
Liberals hate that voice. They hate it because of its authoritative sound. Liberals hate authority, unless they themselves are wielding it. Liberals hate anyone, particularly a man, who sounds like he knows something, and is sure of himself. Liberals love doubt. Liberals love fuzziness. Liberals love process, as they call it.
We are daily inundated with the voices of liberalism: National Public Radio's Noah Adams, with his edgeless therapy-speak on All Things Considered (and his vocal disciple, Senator Tom Daschle - "Puff" Daschle, as Rush calls him); Tom Hanks' Toy Story sneer, Ira Glass's snarky, knowing smirk. Commercial voiceovers nowadays feature announcers who sound either patently, self-mockingly phony, or snottily adolescent. It is the audio embodiment of postmodernism, never really believing anything.
Along comes Rush nationwide in the past decade, reviving the triumphal certainties of H.V. Kaltenborn, and he becomes the biggest thing on radio, changes the cultural landscape, and in the process ridicules liberals and liberalism - well, of course, this man is going to be hated.
I made a slow-motion, long-term conversion to conservatism over the past decade. The first time I turned on Rush's show, I did so with a (for lack of a better word) transgressive thrill - kind of like sneaking out behind the barn with a stolen copy of Playboy. Because, you see, I "knew" about Rush.
I "knew" all the things that my liberal cohort knew about him: he was hateful, splenetic, rude, and hostile. Imagine my surprise when I actually heard Rush and found him courteous, funny, witty, and intelligent.
In recent months, the Internet has been a-buzz with speculation: What's wrong with Rush? He sounds different.
What was going on, of course, was that Rush couldn't hear himself. Few people really know what their own voices sound like. Professional performers like Rush do. Hearing themselves accurately, they alter their voices bit by bit, making the most of what they have, much as athletes use videotape to improve their performance. Now, as Rush could no longer hear, he could no longer explore all the tonal reaches of his voice, especially the lower tones. He would sometimes quack. And at times it was obvious he was no longer as quick as he used to be, no longer sensitive to the sudden shifts of conversation.
In the weeks since his announcement, Rush has gotten better - better at using voice-activated print technology to "listen" to his callers, and better at using his voice. With occasional absences for doctor visits, Rush has shown up, gone to work, and done a good job. He occasionally jokes about being deaf. He has been the very picture of a class act.
Rush has said he will consider getting a cochlear implant, an inner-ear device that can restore hearing after a fashion. It's not real, nuanced hearing, but it's hearing.
I remember talking to our substitute priest about cochlear implants. She hated them with a passion. The deaf community, she insisted, was actually superior to the hearing community. It amounted to a kind of "cultural genocide" to encourage deaf people to make use of a technology that would enable them to hear.
Which is just the kind of idiocy Rush has blistered on nationwide air for more than a decade now. Rush will regain his full strength, one way or another, in short order, without being a poster child for anybody, and without being a victim of anything or anyone.
Lawrence Henry is a senior writer for Enter Stage Right and a confirmed Dittohead.
Why? Because then, a hearing impaired (deaf) person regains control of their own life.
And the person who has compassion for the deaf no longer has a cause, no longer wields power.
What a pitiable pathetic shame that is...
Smug liberals make me want to puke. I think it's safe to say that Rush feels the same way about them.
That was a plotline on Law & Order. Some deaf girl wanted to get a cochlear implant, but the guy she was with didn't dig that, so he killed her. Well something like that :)
If there were deaf, why would they want the hymns to be signed? It won't help them sing...since you need to know the words ahead of time to sing...and churches that take singing seriously provide hymnals with the words - and post the hymn numbers before the ceremony.
Signing the sermons would make more sense....though printing the sermons ahead of time would make more sense.
"...priest at our church. She..."Well, there's your problem. Priests should:
1. Be male,
2. Be older than I am, and
3. Speak with an Irish accent.
Good thing he's not left-handed!
This is not universal, but it is an attitude present within the deaf community. There are, however, more serious problems. My wife used to teach deaf kids and one problem is that many parents simply don't want to learn to sign. Perhaps they are in denial. But one thing to think about: with the success of some minority groups in getting preferential treatment (e.g. affirmative action) can you really blame others for trying to get on the bandwagon? Disability rights groups, gays, and anyone with an ax to grind want to get their free piece of the pie.
Yeah, this seems like some sort of PC overkill. On the other hand, there really is a "deaf culture" and most deaf people most certainly do feel "in charge of their lives," some certainly to the point they have no desire ever to hear.
My sister (who has normal hearing) worked for several years at Gallaudet University in D.C. (web site Gallaudet). Gallaudet is a fully accredited university with students from kindergarten through graduate degrees. I visited it a few times while my sister was there. Here's some observations:
It's spooky watching a playground full of kids playing boisterously, but without any noise. Then you realize that one kid is having a lively "conversation" with another who's plumb on the other side of the yard. Then you realize that they're all doing that!!! If you can see somebody you can talk to him -- distance and noise don't make any difference.
I once took a trip with my sister and several of her deaf friends. We were in several cars, but that was no impediment to communication. There was a prolonged inter-car argument about where we were going to stop for lunch. (I didn't have much say.)
Opportunities for punning in sign seem to be much more common than in ordinary speech, and seem to be an enjoyable part of everyday experience. Many word signs, for example, consist of minor variations on the manual alphabet. Slip those word signs in while you are finger spelling and you can have an entirely new dimension in communication.
Deaf people generally resent being perceived as dim-witted, and that happens a lot! Hearing people will often speak slowly to them, smile patronizingly, and make these huge, slow, comical gestures. I know it may be well intended, but it gets old fast. I saw it all over the place on that trip.
It seems likely that the priest had worked with a deaf community, had picked up on these sorts of things, and was perhaps overreacting. Maybe she's settled down by now.
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