Bye-Bye Limbaugh and Beck?

Forty years ago, a line of actors and actresses came out on a Manhattan stage and dropped their robes to face the audience naked. My reaction then was "That's interesting, now what else have you got?"

As it turned out, very little. Despite sketches by Samuel Beckett, John Lennon and other literati, "Oh Calcutta" was deemed "sophomoric and soporific" by a New York Times critic and remains memorable only for crossing a cultural threshold of public nudity.

It comes to mind now as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, two figures who strip their psyches bare in a new era, seem to be imploding after showing us everything they've got and bumping up against possible boredom with their act.

After a disastrous (in his own word, wasted) hour of bear-baiting Democratic pariah Eric Massa (akin to shooting fish in a barrel and missing), Beck now finds himself under fire from evangelical leaders for equating Christian social justice with Nazism and Communism.

"When Glenn Beck is asking Christians to leave their churches, the Catholic Church, the black churches, Hispanic, evangelical, to leave all our churches," says the head of Sojourners, a Christian networking group, "I'm saying it's time for Christians to leave the Glenn Beck show."

Beck's desperation is echoed in Limbaugh's promise to leave the country if health care reform is passed. With his huge audience and contract, El Rushbo won't be going anywhere soon but his threat is symptomatic of the pressure felt by extreme figures to keep pushing the boundaries of expression.

Their plight brings up another image from the last century. In the early days of TV, a civil-rights leader described a dilemma:

"At dimly-lit open-air rallies each night, the speaker's face lights up in the glare of photofloods during those passages a cameraman thinks most likely to win ten seconds of network time. The lights go off abruptly when the cameraman's interest flags, leaving the speaker blinking in the dark, and fishing for another, even more startling statement to bring the lights back on."

Beck and Limbaugh, like their counterparts on the Left, keep fishing for ever more startling statements to hold our interest, but in a time when politicians say and do the unthinkable daily, it's getting harder to stay in the spotlight.

The only novelty left would be public figures coming on stage fully clothed and speaking with civility, but so far Barack Obama's act is only attracting a bare majority of the audience.