If you were watching an NFL football game in 1981, you might have gotten a sales pitch straight from Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca. Declaring “war on sticker shock,” Iacocca promises to “hold the line” on the Omni Horizon Miser and other cars. All in a plain-Jane speech against a beige background.

No fancy ad agency needed.

Miser, indeed.

Terrible reactions that I saw yesterday about the death of Rush Limbaugh:

You may or not have agreed with his politics but no one can dispute his impact.

Who will take his place?

And this one, by Ohio Governor Mike DeWine, saying he was “sad to learn today of the death of #rushlimbaugh.” DeWine endorsed my book and I know he actually read much or all of it. If you liked my book, you can’t possibly be sincerely “sad” to learn of the death of for-profit people-divider like Limbaugh. In hot water for his mild Trump resistance, maybe DeWine felt this was an easy way to let Trump voters know he’s at least still down with the Ditto-heads.

And one of the very dumbest things said yesterday about Limbaugh, was also said by me, when I was younger: He was entertaining!

I used to say I admired Rush Limbaugh as a showman, who all communicators might learn from. Not a serious person or a true propagandist—a clown prince, more than a menace.

I listened to Limbaugh a lot when I was driving. National Public Radio only plays Brahms in Indiana, Michigan, Iowa, Ohio. And against those dreary interstate landscapes, Limbaugh’s act passed as entertainment: “Greetings, conversationalists across the fruited plain,” the New York Times obit quotes him. “This is Rush Limbaugh, the most dangerous man in America, with the largest hypothalamus in North America, serving humanity simply by opening my mouth, destined for my own wing in the Museum of American Broadcasting, executing everything I do flawlessly with zero mistakes, doing this show with half my brain tied behind my back just to make it fair, because I have talent on loan from God.”

Ha ha! I prided myself on my intellectual remove. Didn’t people understand this was an act? It was funny?

I was gently, lovingly humiliated about that once and forever a dozen years ago, in a brief conversation in the middle of an overnight Lake Michigan sailing passage, by a guy who I’d never met before and haven’t seen since.

He’d witnessed his own beloved father, terrified of emphysema, gays, dying, going broke, the government, the gathering mist of dementia and immigrants and Blacks—not in any particular order—huddled in the corner of his kitchen for three hours every weekday, taking in Rush Limbaugh, like a kind of reverse valium that told him he should feel anxious. Or a reverse dialysis, adding toxins in. Or a reverse prayer, asking for annihilation.

“No,” my sail mate said softly into the wind. “I don’t think Rush Limbaugh is funny at all.”

I’m starting to do podcast interviews and other talks about An Effort to Understand, and I can’t believe what I hear coming out of mouth. I’ve never been the guy calling for peace and consideration, for even the people we find most obnoxious.

At my most grandiose, I’ve thought of myself as an afflicter of the comfortable rather than a comforter of the afflicted. Somebody asked me when he heard about my book, “Who are the bad guys in your book?” I said we are. But I said the good news was, we were also the good guys, too.

With apologies to the Wizard of Oz, what the fuck kind of a clinking, clanking, clattering collection of caliginous sanctimony is that?

And how did I become the peace and love guy?

Well, John Lennon isn’t here, so somebody has to be. And I’m better at it than a lot of others, precisely because I’ve always thought of smarm as social skin cancer, and believe banality bores and numbs us into embracing evil just to break the monotony.

Why does somebody have to be?

A functional family is not a family in which every member is always sane. It is one where all the members don’t go crazy at the same time. They take turns.

Same is true of a church board, a shipping and receiving department or the federal government.

And same is true of a society itself.

And it’s always especially true in a time of grief. In a time of grief, someone in the family is always going crazy. Sometimes two or three members are going crazy at once. But somebody has to hold it together. Make the coffee. Listen to the wailing. Draw the line at breaking furniture. Build a prevailing coalition of cooler heads. And above all, do nothing to make matters worse.

That shouldn’t be any one person every time, because that’s a sickness all its own. Even Andy Griffith messed up in a few of the episodes. And Opie or Aunt Bee was always there to set him straight.

“Everybody’s crazy but you and me,” a friend’s dad used to tell him when he was little. “And I’m starting to worry about you.”