By OcJim

A culture that produces a Rush Limbaugh and his millions of “ditto-head” followers is not healthy. In too many realms of American society, rewards are for the wrong personal attributes, the wrong attitudes, and are distorted toward the wrong results.

The most productive, the smartest, the most ethical, and the most nurturing are not sufficiently rewarded. Rewards seem to be reserved for the most obnoxious, the most flamboyant, the most insulting, the best able to exploit, or simply, the greediest.

It is not necessarily what Limbaugh and media mutts like him say. It is rather the system of rewards our culture promotes.

Politics and politicians are a special case with the lowest common denominator ruling the political discussions. Republicans have defined the political game in terms of outrage, deceit, and misinformation. They do get the attention, this to the exclusion of the reasonable and productive.

For example, the more despicable and outrageous a politician is, the more attention he gets. Therefore, Santorum strains his limited acumen for a way to get attention by calling Obama’s hope for everyone to advance their education, with a syllogistic half truth, “Obama wants everyone to go to college, so Obama is a snob.”

Michigan voters tolerate a man whose views change like Midwest weather and whose stated political solutions are pre-empted by his views of perfect medium-sized Michigan trees, and, where cars are bread and butter, the two fat Cadillacs his wife owns. These dominate his limited speech skills, not solutions to American problems. Our values, festooned by the media, including our inattentiveness, allow this to happen.

Corporations also set distorted standards. Monolithic corporations have established obscene pay for top executives because power and control can dictate this system. Accordingly, performance is of lesser importance.

Bob Lutz, former GM top executive, was exorbitantly rewarded by GM, even though GM was near bankruptcy, but our society allows a man with his talents and education to be completely ignorant or delusional about climate change. Regarding one of his delusions, he thinks that Al Gore or the IPCC predicted that a house he bought in the Florida Keys should be under water. In our culture, it is allowable for him, due to his moneyed success, to spit in the eyes of fact and reason, saying no evidence points to global climate change.

War is a business that Republicans and conservatives have pushed so much that the trillions we wasted for Iraq and Afghanistan gutted our lead in technology, ravaged our crumbling infrastructure, and took food out of the mouths of the middle class and poor.

China, India, and Europe are busily racing around us in space exploration, alternative energy spending, and advanced communications. Plutocrats, sleeping Democrats, and feckless Republicans are still invested in helping mega-corporations export jobs and make billions for profits. Investment that only the government can do is forgotten. As a result we will be paying another country – China or the Europeans – for use of a new GPS system. We will pay Russia or China for access to the space station. Economic power in the form of technology will be more important than our military power, indeed it is needed to maintain a military.

Emotion, greed, and even re-written history govern our science, technology, religion, and entertainment – realms of culture that benefit right-wing interests which have their own slant. Most important is propagandizing the populace, indicated by the right’s influence on books and media – Fox News and Limbaugh’s Clear Channel radio for media, and think-tank-subsidized books by the likes of Ann Coulter. Her titles tell all – for example, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America.

So, in our entertainment culture of shallow talk, mediocre, puppet leaders, demonization of facts, vilification of knowledge, and subjugation of reason, we can suspend fact for simple lies that support the plutocratic order. Truth is immaterial. Agenda is all and fills our world pervasively, like inane commercials

Rush’s hateful tirade against 30-year-old Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke, calling her a “slut” and a “prostitute,” is what our culture has come to expect. Rush is paid millions to promote hate, spite and loathing. Somebody’s got to do it.

America is a marketplace for everything short term. Investment in the future should come from the government, but the right wing has spent decades demonizing and hamstringing government, rendering it unable to keep up with the rest of the world, except in terms of destructive wars and military. Unfortunately, a strong economic climate will become more important, something the right-wing is gutting in favor of corporate profits.

Unfeeling and ruthless individualism can give us the puke and pulp that can help tear apart a society, one that exists for greed, voyeurism and spectacle rather than more humane undertakings, like investment in our country and people — endeavors like free public education, infrastructure, free health care, the technology of space, and public security.

But the superficial, the short term, is pushed by the right, and our continued poverty of investment will surely be the end of American supremacy. Rush Limbaugh is only a symptom of that.