Bounderby Lives!

“He (Bounderby) was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man. A man with a great puffed head and forehead. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, a man who was always proclaiming, through his brassy speaking-trumpet of a voice, his old ignorance, a man who was the Bully of humility. He had not much hair. One might have fancied he had talked it off…”

- Charles Dickens, Hard Times Rush Limbaugh AKA Bounderby


Recently when I opened the front page of an American newspaper I was stunned. There before me in all of its glory was the face of Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Egad, I thought, how is it possible he has survived, has he somehow been channeled from the grave and is in a sense immortal? It wasn’t Dickens’ Bounderby, of course, but our own radio gadfly Rush Limbaugh.

The newspaper picture revealed he had grown old and stout. He had never been svelt or slender or sartorial, but I had never connected him to Bounderby. Dickens introduces Bounderby as a man of “seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again, without surprising anybody.” So it was with Limbaugh, his bulk belied his age. Despite his bulk and bluster I never paid much attention to the man. The appeal of cartoons left me with puberty for more serious matters of baseball and girls.

But a good chunk of America finds the appeal of cartoons extending far beyond puberty because now the same American newspaper has informed me that Mr. Limbaugh considers himself to be the spokesman, if not the head of, the Republican Party. The Republicans have only recently elected a new head, a Michael Steele, but when he recently voiced an opinion that Limbaugh took an exception to it wasn’t long before Steele turned up on Limbaugh’s radio show and recanted before the faithful, I have read. It seems the faithful are numbered several millions scattered across the American landscape, but mainly in the rural and southern habitats, where perhaps life is so slow that cartoons have a higher appeal than elsewhere. Much in the same way that in the age before television revival shows flourished. Now we have exchanged them for television preachers and mega-churches, once again centered in the same southern habitat of America.

It made me reflect that America has always been fertile ground for buncombe of all stripes and flavors. Huey Long can be considered the Bounderby of his age. Before him there was William Jennings Bryan, a Bounderby extraordinaire. H.L. Mencken immortalized Bryan this way: “He was a peasant come home to the barnyard….What animated him from end to end of his grotesque career was simply ambition – the ambition of a common man to get his hand upon the collar of his superiors, or, failing that, to get his thumb in his eyes. He was born with a roaring voice, and it had the trick of inflaming half-wits. His whole career was devoted to raising those half-wits against their betters that he himself might shine.”

So prickly old Mencken has forever identified what it is about the Josiah Bounderbys of every age in American history that fuels them and gives them appeal: “The ability to inflame and trick half-wits against their betters that he himself might shine.”

Like Dickens’ Boundery, they have to invent a history that is fictitious either about themselves or those they promote. Bounderby invented a history of himself as the self-made man who rose from the gutter after being abandoned by his mother to a position of power and wealth through his hard work and bulldog determination. At the end of Dickens’ tale it is revealed as pure fantasy: Bounderby was a fraud whose mother supported him from cradle to maturity.

The faithful of Limbaugh venerate Ronald Reagan, who like Limbaugh came from the rural middle west of America. And Reagan, like Limbaugh, got his start in radio; during the Depression he broadcast baseball games. He then immigrated to bigger things in Hollywood, where people got paid to either invent or act in fantasies. If Ronald Reagan, like Limbaugh, ever had a real job it is not revealed in his biography. And like Limbaugh he found a way of avoiding military service, unless one considers making more films for the Army active duty.

Late in life Reagan switched parties and became a Republican and a self-proclaimed conservation. When he won the office of President in 1980 he proclaimed, “it won’t be business as usual.” He was going to shrink the size of government and balance the budget. He did neither. The size of government when he left office was bloated larger and the size of the budget deficit had ballooned to triple what it had been when he walked into the office eight years before. Fittingly he embraced what came to be called by his vice president, George H. W. Bush, voodoo economics.

In voodoo economics the theory is that if you give the wealthy enough tax cuts this stimulus will trickle down to the average bloke so that his life becomes better. Like the biography of Josiah Bounderby it has been proven to be pure fantasy and fraud. But as recent as 2001 Bush 43’ dusted it off and proffered it up and amazingly that segment of Americans who find cartoons appealing bought it once more. The results were predictable: a staggering new debt and a resulting economic crash that the country might never recover from.

At the end of a Dickens tale there is usually redemption if not recovery for the weak and the abused and their tormentors are usually brought down by a measure of justice. But in real life we see that the opposite is true, as evidenced by America: the weak and the abused are not redeemed and their tormentors, the Bounderbys, escape with

golden parachutes. Thus Dante trumps Dickens.

If the American saga has reached its end its obituary might best be summed up: the inability to distinguish between that which is a cartoon and reality is not merely toxic but fatal.

Roger Burke

March 15, 2009