These are some Zizekian thoughts I had in a recent IM conversation with Mark, which I figured I would share with the rest of the Velvet Howler-reading world:

What Rush Limbaugh is to the GOP is what characters like Frank (here the drug aspect overlaps), Mr. Eddie, and Bobby Peru are to the films of David Lynch. Whenever the authority of the GOP’s “symbolic father”—generally a “realist,” “family values” Oedipal father figure type, sort of like Pat Buchanan—begins to erode, like in the beginning of Lynch’s Blue Velvet in which the protagonist’s father has a seizure while gardening, the crazy/impotent primordial father emerges: in other words, Rush Limbaugh.

This primordial undead father of the penis makes all sorts of harsh superegoic demands from his loyal minions who can never live up to his zeal and thus enjoins their guilt—as we’ve seen recently displayed in the quasi-Stalinist pageantry of CPAC and the slew of conservatives who, after criticizing Limbaugh, have pathetically retracted their statements. Even Newt Gingrich, another nostalgic figure of the days before the decline of symbolic paternal authority, is powerless in the face of him. Nonetheless, there’s ultimately something pathetic about him, which is that all of his bombastic rhetoric and empty posturing serves to cover up the wound of castration.