Well, frumps, for a while now I just haven’t been paying enough attention to Glenn Beck – I took a little rest cure. This weekend, however, I did some catching up and found this viewed-to-death video of Beck blubbering yet again. I’m posting it here because it’s relevant to a theory that’s starting to gather in my head. Watching Beck usually has a hypertensive effect on me but this film actually made me feel a little pity for the sorry little goober. Maybe I’m just going a little dotty in my dotage but my view of Beck as annoying agent provocateur has shifted to Beck as victim (albeit a relatively willing victim) of something that he and most of us, for that matter, don’t fully appreciate about our political evolution.
The current political environment seems so much more dislocated and dysfunctional compared to earlier American eras. Perhaps we were all a little too hasty to attribute unexpected aberrations to latent racism because it was the easiest difference to latch onto to explain the bizarre expressions of populist rage or the GOP’s meltdown and refusal to participate in a government that they had not fashioned. Everything occurring in and around the political arena for the last two years or so has seemed just a little deranged and disproportionate.
For sure, some truly awful things have happened to America in this century. We started the 21st century with an incomprehensible attack on 9/11 and the national sense of insecurity that it engendered; many of us were not reassured by the Bush Administration’s handling of the aftermath; and only a handful of secretive people saw the global economic crisis coming that turned our notions of the Joys of Capitalism upside down. Not one but two protracted wars; a record-breaking generation of retirees with only depleted and devalued assets to fall back on and a generalized sense of stress and uncertainty about the future have knocked our pins out from under us as a nation and fractured some of the bedrock assumptions that we have built our lives on. Who could blame us for suffering from a collective case of PTSD.
Nevertheless, Americans have always derived a sense of pride in their ability to pull together and weather any storm – until now. So it is that we are left to try to sort out what has happened to us, why we are so different and so splintered as a society after two hundred years of fairly steady progress?
Back to Beck
I’m beginning to see that that quest for answers and restored integrity is just about all that we have in common today. For better or worse, we are, and have always been, a culture that reveres “rugged individualism” so, predictably, we are all going about the business of making sense of our environment in wildly disparate ways and coming to wildly disparate conclusions – not very conducive to coming back together as a nation.
I’m beginning to see the “Glenn Beck Phenomenon” as just another manifestation of our dysfunctional times; I no longer see him as a contributor to the overall dysfunction, though, but more as a barometer of it. Today’s tele-journalists, people like Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Malkin, to name a few, operate on an entirely different plane than brilliant journalists of the past like Walter Cronkite, Edward R. Murrow or William Buckley.
On the other hand, these are different times that call for different “talents” and I daresay that we might never have realized the value of Cronkite, Murrow or Buckley had they come along today because I seriously doubt that any of those three would have been able to fit themselves into today’s “business of journalism.”
How many times, recently, have you heard the argument that Glenn Beck must be onto something – just look at his ratings. Most of us know that that is a laughably disingenuous argument. Nevertheless those ratings stand for something if nothing more than that they keep Beck firmly in place. And I believe that (being kept in place) is the well from which Beck’s famously teary breakdowns arise.
If you listen carefully to what Beck says, in this video, it’s pretty obvious. He says that “he’s tired.” And if Beck is “tired” for the reason I think he is, he might possibly deserve more respect than I’ve given him and we may get to watch his personal journey progress. If I’m wrong? Well, then Beck’s just a rodeo clown like he said.
Mere Conjecture & Remote Possibilities
I think it’s possible that Beck is largely a victim of circumstance. Usually being in the right place at the right time has a salutary effect, unless, of course, one is one of the unlucky few who discover that the “right place” is way beyond their depth. Finding oneself in that predicament is the opposite of empowering, it is “tiring,” as Glenn said, because it requires too much thought, too much unnatural effort, too much treading of water to keep from sinking. Beck went off to find himself a nice little zany “morning zoo” radio gig, that might lead to a career in stand-up comedy, who knows? maybe he’d be the next Seinfeld. Unfortunately he took a wrong turn and wound up on the slippery slope to “punditry.”
I am not saying that I think that Glenn Beck is a stupid man, I do think that he is a simple man and an unschooled man and, given his bio, I think that like many who had a difficult childhood, he might possibly be suffering from a touch of arrested development.
I also get the feeling that he is more interested in learning than he is in playing the pedant to an invisible audience. It became painfully apparent during his recent interview with Katie Couric that Glenn will say just about anything that will make the person he’s speaking with “like” him, which might explain why Fox plays it safe and only books nodding bobbleheads as guests on his program, keeping him far away from anyone who might challenge or debate him.
Homesick for the Sixties?!
This short little video is so demonstrative of where Beck is coming from and how he got to where he is that I wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t fully blow his cover in the end. Beck is a quasi-populist and a demagogue’s demagogue, he “want’s to buy the world a Coke” and then enjoy chillin’ with his new friends, not necessarily hold sway over them.
After the build-up to the vintage TV ads, I half expected to see June Cleaver come out and give him a hug (and I think Glenn would like that very much, actually). Beck is indulging in nostalgic dreams of a golden era that was never as golden as he remembers. I can guarantee that if he were transported back to the “glory days” he would quickly find something to go off the kook-end over because his attention-challenged mind is a restless, questioning one. And it’s exactly that quality that makes him all wrong for the conservative “Message Machine.”
I think it would probably be best for Beck to stay put and try to figure out where he fits in the current picture rather than doing what his resume suggests comes all too naturally to him – doing a runner. I can hear the warning signs in his voice on this video, though – I think Glenn Beck desperately wants out of the paranoid conspiracy theorist role that he’s cast himself in. When he draws the dreamy analogy to the teenager that goes too far to impress his friends and winds up getting on the wrong side of his parents, it’s very easy for me to believe that Beck is not talking about national politics as much as he is giving us clues as to how much he’d like to stop playing the fool for Rupert Murdoch.
I’m not even sure that we can pin this one completely on Murdoch’s nutty notion of the news. I think Beck, like many individuals who crave attention and the approval of others stumbled on an attention-getting persona that quickly spiraled out of control as Beck tried to take it to ever greater heights. Now he’s stuck with an exhausting, crazy role to play – all the time. Unfortunately for Beck, I think he’s stuck with it for now. He’s not assertive, coherent, self-assured or fact-oriented enough to recast himself in a more natural, more comfortable role. And there’s his young family and new lifestyle to hang onto.
As Dan Carter, the author of The Politics of Rage put it:
“ . . . we are all being swept downstream into a political culture in which entertainment, politics, make believe, and breaking news have become as indistinguishable from each other as from the commercials that separate each meaningless and disconnected factoid. As one of my conservative friends, said: so much indignation, so little time.”
Brave New Liberal World
I’m not even sure, anymore, that there’s any point in arguing our political differences because that argument has been transformed, essentially, into a religious argument. There are those who belong to the conservative religion and those who do not. Conservatives have infused their politics with the religious qualities of absolute right and wrong, good and evil. Conservatives speak only of “values” and not of ideas, and if questions arise, faith is the answer.
The same mindset that set the Crusades in motion seems to prevail in the ultra-right conservative camp today – “kill them all, God will save his own.” This ruthless Religio-Capitalist horde finds proof of their righteousness in their historically unprecedented ability to amass monetary wealth. To them it is God’s stamp of approval and I believe that explains, in part, why they appear to be prepared to fight to the death to preserve the governmental safe harbor for their capitalist “ship of state.” It’s less about greed and more about preserving and institutionalizing the inarguable proof that they are “right.”
The new conservatism is not a very intellectually rigorous position but, then, it doesn’t have to be; it is an absolutist position and, as such it is perfect bastion against inquisitors and change agents. An additional perk is that since the “ends” are always holy, any “means” are pre-approved. Maybe the best approach for non-conservatives is to nod politely at the smug self-righteousness of the right, as if it mattered, and move on into the future without them. Something tells me that they probably wouldn’t like the future very much anyway.
Oh . . . and, if you extricate yourself from the mess you’re in Glenn, there’s still room on the bus.
Technorati Tags: Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, conservatives, Dan Carter, The Politics of Rage
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Wow. Beck reminds me of a pregnant woman crying over those same maudlin commercials because her hormones are all out of whack. Why didn't he throw in the Shake 'n Bake commercial for good measure? Those ads weren't even that old—these were the "good times" when we all came together and loved one another?? What planet has he been living on? You're absolutely right in your assessment about the conservatives' view that they have God's stamp of approval. To paraphrase Pascal, there is nothing so dangerous as a man with religious conviction.
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I hear you about Shake 'n Bake, Texas – I was surprised we didn't see any Anheuser-Busch horses and jingle bells ads. I got over my fit of empathy for this boob quickly, enough. This AM the first thing I saw with my coffee was Be-elze-Beck going off on volunteerism again. He seems to have Chairman Mao on his mind a lot lately . . .