No bully left behind

Rush Limbaugh and the conservative hacks who savaged and defamed Sandra Fluke for urging Congress to protect contraception coverage in The Affordable Care Act, deserve our pity; just as any other bully does.

All the smoke and sparks about sponsors, free speech, and religious freedom veil what Rush and all other agents of torment are telling the world about themselves. As well, all the PSA talk about bullies as a social menace, how to survive them, or about how "it gets better" (though that's a crucial message)--misses the message conveyed by their acts of cruelty. What they illustrate are the lengths (or depths) bullies are willing to go to forget or smother the memory of their own suffering (always endured as children).

Most certainly not one member of Rush Limbaugh's radio audience (numbered in the tens of millions) was present at any moment of humiliation or deprivation he experienced as a child. Yet his massive appeal owes to the bond he shares with listeners as individuals who rile up over any reminder of their own pain or vulnerability; summoning a pox upon anyone who might dare let their difference from prevailing norms, show.

Anyone who might scoff at this reality have no other way to account for how a grown adult could recklessly and repeatedly speculate on the sexual habits of a woman he knows nothing about. Oh, but Rush is an entertainer--a provocateur--wanting to reach the widest audience possible, his defenders explain away.

Indeed, leave it to Rush and his drones to 'give away the goods' as it concerns their own sexual hangups or unexplored psyches: sexual pleasure and self-empowered women rank as intolerable aspects of our culture that must--must!--be ridiculed, debased, caricatured.

The struggle against bullies demands another, mostly unexplored front--that is the threshold of their psyches. All responses to hostility should point out that the bully is just as wounded as the victim he attempts to afflict. Instead of allowing the brute imagine his actions come from a place of strength, the social menace should endure a gauntlet of reminders that the victim's greatest offense was reminding the agressor of his own weakness.

Rush Limbaugh and petty tyrants of his ilk may not reform their behavior as a result of being thus confronted; this approach at the very least reframes the prevailing conversation about bullies--that they share a deep kinship with the victims they torment to forget.