Hearing and Talent, on Loan from God

By GREGORY J. RUMMO
FEBRUARY 4, 2002

I REMEMBER ONE DAY last year when I noticed a difference in the way Rush Limbaugh’s voice sounded on the air. It was as if he was trying to impersonate himself.

That was in mid-September. Almost two months later, ‘Ditto-heads’ got the shock of their lives when Mr. Limbaugh revealed he had become deaf. 

His hearing loss began suddenly in May and rapidly progressed to the point where he completely lost the ability to hear. I remember him saying during one show, “I have completely lost the sensation of my voice inside my own head.”

You could tell he was struggling. There was often a time delay between a caller ending his point and Mr. Limbaugh responding. Sometimes he would talk over a caller. And I really felt bad for him during the holidays, knowing that he couldn’t hear the music of Manheim Steamroller that he plays as “bumps” during the Christmas season.

But struggle as he did, Mr. Limbaugh is a resilient man. His willingness to continue, even when faced with the uncertainty of having his hearing restored demonstrated “the show must go on” and that deafness would not become a barrier even in a profession where the ability to communicate effectively is paramount in importance. 

Virtually everyone who regularly tunes into his daily 3-hour program, dubbed the “EIB Institute for Advanced Conservative Studies” is able to recall where they were the first time they heard him. It’s a similar phenomenon to JFK’s assassination. (Rush once did a show during which he asked callers to tell him where they were the first time they tuned in).

I was in the basement of our first home in Paterson in the middle of helping a carpenter friend of mine replace about ten feet of a termite-weakened ceiling joist when I attended my first class at the EIB Institute.

It was getting close to noon and Michael turned to me and said, “Do you have a radio?”

“What do you think?” I answered.

“You gotta hear this guy Rush Limbaugh,” Michael said.

It was before the 1991-1992 basketball season and Magic Johnson had just announced to the world that he was HIV positive. Rush started the show off with a monologue as he does on most days. Instead of falling in step with the other members of the mainstream media who had bequeathed hero status on the L.A. Laker guard, Rush told his listeners, that there was only one word to accurately characterize Magic Johnson’s actions: Promiscuity.

That was it-I was hooked.

It takes an agile mind to do talk radio and Rush is not just smart, he is also blessed with an incredible memory--a combination he credits to “talent on loan from God,” a phrase he uses to tweak liberals because they continue to misunderstand what he means by it. (It’s that God thing-liberals are always flummoxed by God).

On top of this he’s a perfectionist. I noticed this immediately the first time I met him years ago on the set of his TV show on New York’s West Side. I was standing in line, waiting for him to autographed my copy of “The Way Things Ought to Be,” Mr. Limbaugh’s first book. I commented that the word ‘Congress’ had been misspelled on one of the captions that appeared that evening during the taping of his show. “That wouldn’t surprise me,” he shot back in a tone of voice and with a facial expression that indicated he was fed up with the lack of attention to detail by some of his staff.

But the real secret to Limbaugh’s success is that he is a natural. It’s as if he sits down at the dinner table with his listeners every afternoon for three hours and talks to them like they are family members. I once explained this to him during a call to his show and he referred to himself as “Uncle Rush” during the next segment of the program.

Having a deaf son, and being acquainted with quite a number of deaf people, I am aware of the frustrations that accompany deafness. And for a person who makes his living by listening-talk radio does involve listening as well as talking-it must have been extremely difficult for Mr. Limbaugh late last year as he struggled with the sudden onset of deafness.

But the operation he had earlier this year to surgically imbed a cochlear implant into his skull has been nothing short of miraculous, astounding both Mr. Limbaugh as well as his doctors.  If you listen to him now, he sounds like the old Rush.

God has allowed the restoration of his hearing through modern medical technology. You might say now that his hearing and his talent are both on loan from God. n

E-mail the author at GregoryJRummo@aol.com