RUSH: Brooksville, Kentucky. Vickie, you’re next. Make it count on the EIB Network.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. This is indeed an honor and a pleasure.
RUSH: Thank you.
CALLER: I’ve listened to you for years and years, and you are the greatest teacher. Absolutely. I wanted to tell you that I have never in my life heard anything so concisely, so precisely, and so honestly put together a synopsis of exactly the way that the people out here in the flyover land feel. I am so sick of the elitism and the condescension and the bull crap that is coming out of their mouths, and I’m scared to death for my children, for my grandchildren. They’re not going to have the country that I grew up in, and it’s scaring me to death. That’s why we’re going to do something.
RUSH: This really is what’s driving a lot of this.
CALLER: Yes, it is. It absolutely is. And that’s why we are exactly the way that we are. It’s because we believe in what our mothers and our fathers taught us, what we learned in school before they stopped teaching, and we really are (garbled).
RUSH: It’s not just that. It’s — it’s not just that, Vickie. All of you understand the exceptionalism of this country. You understand the blessing of this country, the blessing it is to be an American. And you see people who don’t, who don’t look at it as special, exceptional, or even a blessing. They look at it as a problem, and it ticks you off because America is not the problem in the world. America is the solution to the world’s problems. Anybody who thinks of America as exceptional, thinks of themselves as blessed to be an American, certainly wants their children and grandchildren to have the same place, the same opportunities that they had. And they’re living through a period of time where there are people who don’t think this country is any good, not even exceptional, don’t feel blessed, who are trying to tear that to shreds.
And they’re saying, ‘It ain’t going to happen on my watch.’ I’ll never forget something. I was a kid. I don’t know what year it was. But I couldn’t have been older than 12 or 13. The day Ernie Banks retired from the Chicago Cubs. They televised it, the ceremony from Wrigley Field. It was in black and white. Ernie Banks at the microphone, the first thing he said: ‘I want to thank God for making me an American.’ I have never forgotten that. Ernie Banks, an African-American in the late fifties-early sixties, ‘I want to thank God for making me an American.’ I don’t want to get in the metaphysical or religious aspects of it. I’m talking about the realization it’s a special place and that it was a blessing (act of good fortune, what have you) to be born here. On the contrary I also remember Phil Donahue on his show regretting that he had been born in America.
I remember him wringing his hands, walking through his audience with his wireless microphone, talking about the accident of his birth and how unfair it was; that if he had been born 50 miles to the south in Mexico, what a rotten life he would have had. And how is it fair that people born mere miles from the US border are consigned to rotten lives and we, born in this country, are not. He felt guilty about it. And I’m shouting at the TV, ‘Hey, Phil? You can’t change it, so why don’t you try to be proud of what this country is and spread it around the world so that being born in the world is a blessing? Why do you want to tear this country down and make it like the rest of the hellholes in the world to make it fair? Why?’ I’ve never understood this about people. Well, I do understand it, but it’s still sick. They want to equalize people by lowering everybody rather than by elevating people. So you have two contrasts: Ernie Banks, ‘I want to thank God for making me an American.’
Phil Donahue, wringing his hands on television, lamenting the accident of his birth. And of course who is considered brilliant and compassionate and caring? Donahue. He’s a man who had a lot but he understood he shouldn’t have had it. It was unfair that he had it while people living 50 miles south in Tijuana didn’t have it, except Phil never gave away his to the people in Tijuana. He always voted for people who would take yours away from you and redistribute what you have. Ernie Banks retired as a player December 1st, 1971, and so whatever I saw was during baseball season. I remember he was in uniform, so it might have been the following season when they had a ceremony for him that I saw. It was 1971, so I would have been…20? Well, that’s how time flies. Anyway, his nickname, of course, Mr. Sunshine. ‘Hey, let’s play two.’ Ernie Banks. Always wanting to play a double-header.