Although he disgusted me so much I took it upon myself to stake a claim to being the Fat Man on the Left, from which I wrote a book by the same name as well as a newspaper article, I felt a strange kinship with Limbaugh. The kinship was based on both of us being too fat. I was and remain easily as hefty as Limbaugh was and is becoming so again. 

In the 1990s, I was driving around Sacramento with my then-wife Nigey Lennon, wheeling through the tree-lined streets of California’s capitol city. Limbaugh was doing a kind of local shock jock show where people would call him up and he would insult them, and they would insult him in turn. There was none of the phony gentility he uses on occasion on his syndicated radio show––a gentility that really is the sarcasm of a demagogue and bully. It was definitely the same guy, but along the way it seemed Limbaugh had acquired a cause.

I listened with a strange kind of fascination to this odd kind of circus radio, a kind of audible gladiators and lions spectacle. Although Limbaugh was only a provincial Sacramento radio bully, I sensed something afoot, and was not all that surprised when he became a nationally known radio commentator and political philosopher and in the first months of the Obama presidency, the anointed leader of the Republican Party.

During Bush Junior’s first term, Limbaugh parlayed his rehashed Republicanism mostly of the kind that used be used against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal in the '30s, into an army of true believers called Dittoheads. From the ranks of the Dittoheads, came the Republican congress, which so tormented Bill Clinton in that decade. They were a curious lot indeed, but they and their creator had pulled off an admirable trick of impeccable timing.

In the meanwhile, I have survived Bush and Limbaugh, and survived the last couple of anorexic decades intact as a fat man. A hundred years ago, being fat meant you were healthy, wealthy, respected and perhaps even wise. But with Dachau Chic more the rage, no one has accused me of being a fashion plate.

Like Limbaugh, there's nothing ecumenical about my politics, normally, but yes I felt that momentary kinship with Rush Limbaugh because of our respective obesities. Both of us must know how hard it is to be dignified and fat anymore. Limbaugh isn't. He might want to be, but he's not. He's just the right thing for his times. He's a fat bully. But I would argue that he need not be fat to be a bully. Limbaugh's pal Newt Gingrich isn't particularly fat, but his style speaks proudly of his being a bully as well. It’s something that seems to run among conservative fanatics.

I also know that Limbaugh is not a force of nature, although surely he would tell you he is. The wave of right-wing ideology in which America has been drowning for the past decade or so is most likely nothing more than the swing of the pendulum. Another sign, if you will, of the imminent collapse of capitalism as we know it.

At the end of the Bush years, all bets were off. The implosion began with a vengeance. But for nearly two decades, Limbaugh had made me want to shout and holler from the rooftops. Everywhere Limbaugh's voice goes, I wanted mine to go as well. I think of what were once the big influences on our culture and politics; Mark Twain, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair––even H.L. Mencken for God's sake. In their place we now have Rush Limbaugh. Now can you tell me something hasn't gone very wrong?

Call me an anomaly. I could pass for an eccentric, rotund Tory, except I'm really the Fat Man on the Left, because I think we do need some economic democracy in our society as well as political democracy, and undeniably, I'm not skinny.

I agree that capitalism is not a bad thing if you let it run the restaurants, clothing stores, publishing trades, and to some extent writing, music and art, but when it comes to the things all people really need like education, medicine, transportation, housing and the like, we at least need some sort of mixed economy. And what capitalism I would allow in my most perfect of worlds? I would not include the gigantic monopoly kind, which is all there seems to be anymore.

Perhaps my critics are correct. I may think I'm a political leftist, but I'm a cultural Tory. They say that because most of my friends know that I don't like rock `n' roll—although I do like boogie woogie. My first love is Beethoven and Bartok, and also Gershwin and Djano Reinhardt. Besides, as I remember, the Workers' Paradise was most proud of its Oistrakhs, Rostropoviches, Prokofieffs, and Eisensteins––and with good reason. They were great.

And in the '30s and '40s and even '50s this country produced the likes of John Steinbeck, Sinclair Lewis, Woody Guthrie, Paul Robeson, Phil Ochs and others who captured the state of our soul. But in recent decades, since the "music industry" was born out of rock `n' roll we have lost the people that speak for the best in us. Now our heroes are the late Kurt Cobain and Madonna. Our films are nothing but Roman circuses. Our culture and politics are in a terrible decline.

For the last several years, I was sure that the cultural decline reflected the collapse of capitalism. In my view, the economy was bound to follow close at hand to the disintegration of its culture.

I'm sorry, but I do not believe that everything a society does, certainly not in her literature, music, pure science, or art, must be guided by the bottom line; or that allocation of resources and energies in other matters must always be expended toward the bottom line. As I've said, too much bottom line, and you're imploding. Your whole society will end up a hollow superstructure. And old Rush Limbaugh will end up looking like a deflated windbag.

By the way, have you heard the one that was in the Doonesbury comic strip where someone asks, “Do you know the difference between Rush Limbaugh and the Hindenburg? The answer: one is a flaming Nazi gasbag, and the other is just a dirigible.

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Lionel Rolfe is the author of several books, including “The Fat Man on the Left,” “Literary L.A.” and “The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin and Willa Cather,” which will be available on Amazon's Kindle.