| Rush on William Shatner's Raw Nerve |
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December 6, 2009 |
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BEGIN TRANSCRIPT |
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SHATNER VOICEOVER: Loud. Opinionated. Bombastic. Talented. Those are the words that come to mind when thinking of Rush Limbaugh. What you don't think of is: Soft.Gentle. Loving. Rush Limbaugh is about to expose his raw nerve.
SHATNER: I tell you, Rush, you are an extraordinary individual. I know you've written the books, and the magazine articles and all, but I would think that people don't know that your name is legendary, that indeed, in this case, grandfathers and fathers and uncles --
RUSH: Right.
SHATNER: -- all having the name. You carry with you a legacy. Was that told to you --
RUSH: Yeah.
SHATNER: -- when you were a kid?
RUSH: Grandfather was the mythological perfect patriarch. Never smoked, never drank, lawyer. And it was true in his case, he never smoked, never drank, integrity was never challenged. His dignity was intact at all times.
SHATNER: Wow.
RUSH: He was born in 1893. He was the first to get out of Bollinger County, Missouri, which is where they had the farm, and he got up four o'clock in the morning, milked the cows, did all that, whatever chores there were, went to school, came home, did the other farm chores. Then finally got away, went to school, went to college in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, this tiny little university there, then from there the University of Missouri law school.
SHATNER: Where does a man like that get his dignity? If he has nothing to look on except a dignified cow.
RUSH: His idol was Abraham Lincoln. He became a Lincoln scholar. Lincoln was his hero. Abraham Lincoln died 1865. My grandfather was born closer to the generation of Lincoln and, you know, succeeding generation from that -- than he was to the generation that his kids grew up in.
SHATNER: Right.
RUSH: He had a life that spanned -- I mean, there was no electricity. He and his wife, my grandmother, they wrote love letters to each other all the time. He published a book full of them.
SHATNER: No.
RUSH: Yeah. They took buggy rides on Sunday afternoon. We watch the NFL. We've got computers. We've got things to do that keep us away from people. All they had was coming together with each other.
SHATNER: Right.
RUSH: They had a profoundly deep, loving relationship through all their lives.
SHATNER: Wow.
RUSH: But who can tell why somebody goes through life with their dignity constantly intact and who doesn't. It's an ongoing effort. Some people care about it more. |
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 SHATNER: Well, let's examine that, I mean, because that's part of what you are or aren't. Are you dignified?
RUSH: Well, I try, but you know, I'm not as obsessed. I mean he wore a coat and tie all the time. He was very much obsessed with his presentation to people. His head was always up. He never uttered a profanity. I can't say any of those things. But we all are who we are. Now, in terms of honor and honesty and trying to do the right thing, I mean it was an incomparable influence that we had there, and we all tried to emulate it in our family.
SHATNER: So here is your grandfather looking to you to follow the family line?
RUSH: Well, not just me. He's got tons of grandchildren.
SHATNER: He's got tons.
RUSH: Tons of them.
SHATNER: And he's saying to every one of them: education, education.
RUSH: Education, education, education.
SHATNER: 'Cause you can't take the education away, and the people who lived in those poverty-stricken times, the one valuable thing you carried with you was your brain.
RUSH: He always thought, my grandfather, my whole family thought I was destined for failure because I started as a deejay, and they didn't see the possibilities of the future --
SHATNER: Deejay meant dumb jerk to them.
RUSH: Yeah, but no, they were insistent that I go to college. They all came out of the Great Depression. If you didn't have an education, you didn't have a job. You know, I'm rebellious: Well, look, you can tell me about the Depression all you want. I can try to understand it, but I've not lived through it. I know what I wanted to do. I've known since I was eight. I said, "Pop, I love this. I know I'm great at it. I'm going to get even better."
SHATNER: Did you try and validate your action to him like --
RUSH: Yeah, yeah. But he was not disapproving --
SHATNER: Right. I was going to ask that.
RUSH: -- to his grandkids. He was not disapproving to his grandkids. The way he raised his own kids, he was tough on them, tough on my dad, tough on my uncles. But with the grandkids he was a typical grandfather. We couldn't wrap him around our finger and get things out of him, but he was always supportive.
SHATNER: So now, are you torn, or you know and there's no question that Pop is fine, but you're going that way.
RUSH: No, I was not torn. Perhaps if there was a black sheep in our family, it was me, because I've never been a conformist.
SHATNER: Rebellion.
RUSH: Oh, I was hugely rebellious. I'm telling you, really, I'm not a conformist. I hated school because it's what everybody else had to do. I hated being locked up from the second grade on in a room --
SHATNER: Do you remember when this nonconformist happened to you?
RUSH: Eight years old is when I knew I wanted to go into radio because I'm sitting there getting ready for breakfast, go to school I don't want to go to, my mother's fixing breakfast, she's got the radio on, the guy on the radio is having fun. And I know at nine or ten o'clock he's finished, and he's not going to some room having to learn to paste. All my childhood was spent in duress and in silent protest and every year I wanted to be older. When I was 10, I wanted to be 20. When I was 20, I wanted to be 25. Twenty-five, 30. 'Cause I knew it was going to get better; I was going to have more freedom. I was going to have more opportunity. I was going to be treated different because I was an adult. And, damn it, it's been true. Every year of my life has been better.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) |
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 SHATNER: What is a conservative? What does that mean?
RUSH: Well, a conservative believes in principles of the founding of the country: individual liberty --
SHATNER: Yep.
RUSH: -- individual responsibility --
SHATNER: Yep.
RUSH: -- life, liberty, pursuit of happiness.
SHATNER: I believe that.
RUSH: We believe that people, if left alone, will be free to pursue their excellence to the degree they wish.
SHATNER: There is a point where -- you know, you can't drive on the left side of the road, you need some regulation.
RUSH: Not saying that. Conservatives are not opposed to regulation, but regulation has to be based on the fact that the individual is best left alone to take care of himself in the pursuit of daily aspects of life: education, job or whatever. We don't make the assumption, we look at some people because of their race, sex, creed, we don't say, "That person can't do it, that person needs us, that person needs a government program, that person needs somebody helping them," because that's not really what those people are after. They're after power and control over those people's lives, making them as dependent as possible. The reason why this matters to me is I want a greater country. The country is made up of great people, pursuing excellence, doing the best they can. It is the people who make the country work, not government programs, and not people doing things --
SHATNER: So far you haven't said anything that alienates anybody, as far as I'm concerned. I mean everybody wants the principles you're espousing.
RUSH: No, they don't.
SHATNER: Well, but they do.
RUSH: No, they don't. No, they don't. If, for example, the current administration wanted what I was saying, they wouldn't be proposing anything they are proposing. They're proposing programs to make people --
SHATNER: Name a program that -- you want to take the health program?
RUSH: Health care reform --
SHATNER: Okay, health care reform.
RUSH: -- is based totally on regulating as many aspects of life as possible.
SHATNER: Here's my premise, and you agree with it or not, that if you have money, you're going to get health care. If you don't have money, it's more difficult.
RUSH: If you have money, you're gonna get a house on the beach. If you don't have money, you're gonna live in a bungalow somewhere.
SHATNER: Right, but we're talking about health care.
RUSH: What's the difference?
SHATNER: The difference is we're talking about health care.
RUSH: No.
SHATNER: Not a house and a bungalow.
RUSH: You're assuming that there's some morally superior aspect to health care than there is --
SHATNER: No.
RUSH: -- to a house.
SHATNER: I'm not moral at all. I want to keep the subject, for the moment, on the health care thing.
RUSH: All right.
SHATNER: All right. So now it's the health care --
RUSH: I'm talking about health care.
SHATNER: Okay. So talk about health care. So isn't the premise, isn't this valid, that the health care system today is breaking the country?
RUSH: No.
SHATNER: It's not?
RUSH: I don't believe it is. And if it is --
SHATNER: But we're told that it is.
RUSH: Of course we're told that, because that's the way to get us to act like sheep and go along with this --
SHATNER: Well, but how do you know that? You know, the sum total of what I want to ask you politically is how do you know?
RUSH: It's my job, it's my life, it's my career, it's my passion. I've studied this stuff. I want the best country we can have and this is not the way to get it. We're going backwards. We need people free, with liberty. We need people pursuing excellence --
SHATNER: Well, wait a minute.
RUSH: -- provide it for themselves.
SHATNER: All right. Okay. I understand all that. Why can't this argument be presented in a muted, logical fashion where you say, see that statistic, 35th --
RUSH: I do that on the radio. You just weren't listening then.
SHATNER: No, no. No, no. If you do it with this kind of passion because you're upset by it, that somebody would go ahead and make a statistic like that and run this country down to be 35th, 34th, surely the muting of the passions will get people to listen more than, "Well, wait a minute, wait a minute."
RUSH: Just the opposite. It's just the opposite. I think passion is the magnet.
SHATNER: You know, we have something else in common besides passion and cigars and planes and things like that. I was on the beach one year, walking along the beach, and I thought I heard the hiss of the waves crashing on the -- coming on the sand and then that hiss that the wave makes when it goes back out to sea 'til I realized it was a calm day and there was no hiss. The hiss was in my head, and it got louder. And I thought, "This is horrible." I went looking for help, couldn't find any help, and I became close to suicidal. I had tinnitus. I went searching everywhere. I went to the House Institute, the old man, Dr. House --
RUSH: John House.
SHATNER: -- John, and we sat and cried, tears were in our eyes, because he had tinnitus, too, and I had tinnitus, and we were talking about never hearing a quiet night again. Then I thought about you. One day you can't hear. What was going on in your head?
RUSH: Well, it first started out without fear because I just started losing my hearing in my left ear first. So I went to a doctor, ear, nose, and throat, took my history, and said, "Ah, you got hearing loss in your family. Not total deafness, but you've got hearing loss in your family. Ah, this is normal. It's starting a little early for you, but we got it handled." Every week 10% more would be lost --
SHATNER: Every week?
RUSH: Every week I was losing 10% more hearing in this left ear, and then the right ear started soon after that.
SHATNER: Did you have a ringing at all?
RUSH: Yeah, I've got tinnitus in both ears --
SHATNER: How bad?
RUSH: It's not constant. It comes and goes. The tinnitus in my right ear, when it's bad, I think I'm listening to a bunch of monks doing a Gregorian chant, and it's as clear as a bell. The tinnitus in this ear, which the inner ear has been removed for my cochlear implant, is just a low hum, which has the effect of making people sound like this. It takes all the highs out and adds a bunch of bass. But that, again, it's cyclical. I don't have any of that right now in either ear. I'm not experiencing it. It comes and goes. But the hearing loss, they tried everything to save it. It was an autoimmune attack, autoimmune inner ear disease. And so they gave me a bunch of chemotherapy drugs to slow down the immune system, and I was getting scared because this is my career, and it's the end of it. I had never heard of a cochlear implant. They told me about an implant, how it works, and they were very supportive: "Your career will be saved. We'll at least be able to get you where you can talk to somebody. You'll never recognize music that you haven't heard before, and you're going to have difficulty hearing in multi-voice, loud environments. But you're going to be able to be in contact with your environment. You're going to hear the waves on the ocean. It's going to sound like static to you on a radio, but you're going to hear it." The worst part was I had to wait for a month after I totally became deaf for the surgery because I had an infection, a viral infection. They couldn't do the surgery while that happened. So I did my radio show with a court reporter doing stenography on the phone callers for a month, just trying to manage my voice by the memory of the way it felt --
SHATNER: I was going to say, could you hear yourself?
RUSH: No, I could not hear myself.
SHATNER: Wait a minute. You can only feel this vibrating and --
RUSH: I could only feel it.
SHATNER: -- you couldn't hear yourself?
RUSH: No, a hundred percent totally deaf. And everybody, it was noticeable. I was doing my best to speak normally, but they assured me you cannot.
SHATNER: Were you terrified in the moment you realized you were going to go deaf?
RUSH: I didn't think so, but the doctors at House told me I was scared to death. They told me. One of my character traits, as I perceive myself, is I'm a profound literalist. What is, is. And feeling bad about it and getting scared wasn't going to change it. I'm sure I went through shock, and I'm sure I went through fear 'til I learned about the implant. Once I learned about the implant, I was strangely confident. I mean I looked at it as a challenge.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK) |
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 SHATNER: If you can share a tragedy it mitigates the tragedy.
RUSH: I was raised that that was weakness. You didn't portray your weaknesses. You didn't burden other people with things that were wrong with you, whether a loved one or not.
SHATNER: What a dichotomy in you, who shares the weaknesses of the country and the strength. You know, you're in there with the sickness of the country and sharing and trying, you know, doing the whole --
RUSH: Right.
SHATNER: -- doctoring-of-the-country bit, and yet on a personal level unable to do that.
RUSH: That was then; this is now. I got addicted to prescription medicine, pain pills.
SHATNER: I have a relative that did that.
RUSH: It turns out to have been one of the things in life I'm most thankful for.
SHATNER: What do you mean?
RUSH: Because overcoming it and learning partly why it happens made me a better person.
SHATNER: Ah.
RUSH: I no longer keep everything inside. If another tragedy came along I've learned that real intimacy, not just sexual intimacy, but intimacy with people and relationships comes from being able to let 'em know who you are and having the freedom to trust them that you can tell 'em about yourself, whatever it is, without fear that they're going to not like you, and if they do, if what you tell them, you know, "Okay, this is not right."
SHATNER: That's wisdom, you know.
RUSH: That's a good way to put it. I wish I'd been told this, learned this, to be this way back in my twenties.
SHATNER: I've never been addicted, but I have associated with a loved one who was addicted. And I tried to understand what it was. Why couldn't love or personal strength overcome addiction?
RUSH: It's a brain chemistry thing, and once it happens to you, your whole life becomes, "How do I not run out of this?"
SHATNER: Uh-huh.
RUSH: The great fear is running out of it, especially, once you're so far gone that withdrawal is a possibility, most opiate addicts from heroin, to pain pills, to whatever it is, after a time the euphoria vanishes, it's about --
SHATNER: Right, like smoking.
RUSH: -- feeling normal, but it's about not going through withdrawal. That's hell on earth.
SHATNER: Did you try going through withdrawal?
RUSH: Yeah.
SHATNER: Describe that.
RUSH: It's the flu times ten.
SHATNER: But so what?
RUSH: Nervousness. I couldn't work on it, it's sweating, fever, 103 degree fever.
SHATNER: But don't you come off it then?
RUSH: It takes ten days. That's what requires force of will. Some people are able to do that. But withdrawal terrified me. I know people do it all the time, and then people are incarcerated and jailed that are high, they go through it. But if you're really far gone, it's best to have it supervised.
SHATNER: So how did you do it?
RUSH: Well, I tried it on my own a couple of times with what they call rapid detox, which they put you out, and they pumped, via IV, a drug called naltrexone, which is more powerful to the opiate receptors in the brain than the opiate is. So it separates the opiate. And in four hours, the theory is you'll go through the first five or six days of withdrawal unconscious. You come out of it, you're over the hump, still feel like a truck hit you, but it's only for two or three days.
SHATNER: Is that what happened? |
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RUSH: The first time. The second time it was disastrous. I was in the hospital for six days as a result of it. Finally I said, "I've gotta do this the right way. I need help. I can't do this on my own. I need professionals to do this." And I went to a great place in Arizona. And those five weeks there, that's where the rehab took place.
SHATNER: Where do you go from here? What do you want to do?
RUSH: I'm doing what I love. I think I'm doing what I was born to do. I have no specific goals from this point forward. I never have had specific goals. I know genuinely what I want to do. I want to be in media, want to be in radio. It's what I love; it's what I do best. And I'm open to all opportunities that come my way.
SHATNER: You brought something to discuss.
RUSH: I did. My parents, despite what I told you earlier about being frightened of my being on the radio, gave me this for Christmas when I was nine years old. This is a Remco Caravelle, and it actually transmits --
SHATNER: It transmits?
RUSH: It transmits on an AM frequency of your choice for 500 feet. And I would take this up to my bedroom and play records and play deejay --
SHATNER: To the house.
RUSH: -- to the house, and my mother and dad would sit down and listen to me. It sounded like -- the quality was horrible, but I was on the radio.
SHATNER: And did they indulge you?
RUSH: They gave me this for Christmas.
SHATNER: Isn't that something. Let's give little Rushie a prize which he'll grow out of and go on to college. We know that he will.
RUSH: I had quit the Boy Scouts and the Cub Scouts. I was a quitter. I'd quit everything I was supposed to do. This is the one thing I didn't quit, radio, so they indulged me, "At least he's showing some stick-to-itiveness."
SHATNER: Right. Or were you afraid of disappointing them? And yet in a way --
RUSH: Yeah.
SHATNER: And yet in a way you engineered it.
RUSH: Yeah. (laughing) That's deep. That's deep. That's exactly right.
SHATNER: I've enjoyed this.
RUSH: Thank you, Bill, very much.
SHATNER: Very much.
RUSH: A pleasure to meet you, be on your show. Thank you for asking me.
SHATNER: You're a gem.
(ending credits)
RUSH: The mistakes of the past eight years, you'd have to define them for me.
SHATNER: Well, we're at war, and we had a depression. How that's for two mistakes?
RUSH: The war, that's not something the generation has to create, or fix. Those things, you win them or you lose them.
SHATNER: Right. But it's a mistake. We shouldn't have gone, or if we shoulda gone, we shoulda gone in differently.
RUSH: See, even that's a matter of opinion.
SHATNER: Well, we should have gone differently. You gotta agree with that?
RUSH: No, I'm not gonna agree with any stipulation. I don't like that argument, "I'm sure you'll agree with me that..." No.
SHATNER: Well --
RUSH: Don't be sure I would agree with you.
SHATNER: Well --
RUSH: "I'm sure you'll understand this."
SHATNER: No, I didn't say, "I'm sure." |
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| END TRANSCRIPT |
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