some irritated thoughts about Glenn Beck.
So I sat down today to watch the last half hour of Glenn Beck’s show. I’d never seen Beck before outside of brief sound bights that CNN aired to make him look like a jackass.
As far as I could tell, they weren’t distorting his character much.
Now, let me be clear. I’m not saying Glenn Beck’s an idiot, and he’s not arguing as crazily as Rush Limbaugh. But he’s spinning harder than bill oriley and his persona disgusted me.
The half hour or so I watched dealt with three issues, both of which I’ll summarize, more for what they show about Beck than there relevancy to the national political discussion.
I tuned into the show at a random point, and caught the latter bit of a discussion on the economy. Beck was making the point that in 1946 the people who thought the country was heading back into depression were wrong. He drew parallel’s to our own time and how people on the left say we’re heading back into a recession with a possible depression looming.
I’m ignoring his argument because it isn’t the point. I’m not an economist; I can’t tell if what he is saying is crazy right wing bullshit or cogent. But when quoting a 1946 article by a liberal economist, he started the quote by going “egghead speaking, get ready folks.”
Ah, folks, people who say folks must be down to earth, with not a bit of yolk in their heads whatsoever. The quote he read on his show wasn’t even that convoluted, but he wanted to make it appear as though it was.
Why? Well, it seems to me that it was to advance a deliberately anti-intellectual stance. This stance is a thorny thing because his viewers aren’t supposed to think his arguments are intellectual, though they of course are, but they are supposed to distrust liberals for being overly intellectualized eggheads. Of course every economist of whichever stripe is, by definition, an egghead, no economist, however conservative stands up and says “we should do this because I feel it in my gut.”
the first issue Beck discussed which I watched fully was that of Obama’s supposed hatred for Great Britain. This stems from his returning of a Churchill bust the British gave us shortly after 9/11.
The thinking goes something like this. Obama’s grandmother relates that Obama’s grandfather was tortured by the British because he was involved in Kenya’s war for independents against the British.
Now, this makes sense. I’m not Obama, I don’t know if he hates the British because they tortured his grandfather or if he’s dispassionate enough not to care. But the way beck presented it was… Rather off putting.
The problem is the way he told the story. When mentioning sources, he pointed out that the grandma was Obama’s step grandmother, the third wife of his grandfather. Beck pronounced “third wife” to implicate that the wife was either the third at once, or a long string of failed marriages but didn’t clarify which it was.
Step grandma was also emphasized, as though it made a difference.
Beck then goes on to ruminate on whether or not a grandfather being tortured by the British would result in a hatred for the British. He concludes that if it were his grandfather, he’d hate the British. He goes on about this for a minute or so before saying that he doesn’t know how Obama feels.
Note the contrast between his rant on how he would have felt and then the soft spoken disclaimer that he has no idea how Obama would feel. It gets lost in all the noise. Its like talking about how most Afghanis are baby eating heathens, and then, in the last minute of your speech saying, “but this afghan is ok.” No ones going to remember that little contradiction.
Second was the death of Robert Byrd. Byrd was in the KKK in the fifties and spent that decade just basically being a racist douche. I dislike him intensely for this, and am moderately glad he’s no longer a senator. He apologized for the racist stuff but I doubt the sincerity of his apology as he only apologized once it was socially unviable to continue being a racist.
Beck talks about Byrd’s death. He’s upset that CNN and all the other news networks only show clips of Byrd playing the fiddle to crowds and fail to mention his KKK involvement. I was also upset by this.
However, I was even more upset by what followed for the sheer Orwellian doublespeak of it. Beck shows a montage of Byrd being racist. He details the man’s unsavory remarks, saying he wouldn’t fight beside a black man, that he’d rather die than do so. That mlk was a rabble rouser, that all men created equal wasn’t meant literally, the basic ranting of ignorant racists everywhere.
Beck intones all of this in a sneering baritone with menacing music in the background. Then, the music fades out and Beck points out that Byrd repeatedly apologized for his involvement in the KKK.
You can’t have it both ways! You either trust the apology or don’t. I don’t, but Beck tries to do both, but the scary music montage of all the racist shit Byrd did followed by, “but he apologized a few times.” Its discordant and leaves the viewer thinking some democratic senator was a racist, which is weird because the republican right probably hates Obama for being black… And to top it all off beck then takes a five or six word quote from Byrd’s 2005 autobiography where he calls the Klan a “fraternal organization.” But then Beck once again points out Byrd apologized.
He’s doing what he did with the British grandfather thing. He admits, in passing, a certain fact, in the grandfather situation that no one but Obama can know what Obama feels, and in the Byrd situation that Byrd did apologize, but he deliberately lets those things be overshadowed by the type of hysterical thinking liberal’s accuse him of fostering among his audience.
He said that the reason for the “BYRD WAS A RACIST” spot was to ensure that people did not forget that Byrd had once been in the KKK. OK, I remember. But it was such a jumbled message and that’s what pisses me off. He apologized, but he was racist, but he apologized later, but remember this racist stuff he did for which he then apologized.
Now, I don’t like Byrd, but take this quote from an interview Byrd gave shortly before his death.
I suppose what upsets me most about beck is the demographic he’s playing to or the demographic he’s helping to create. Its hysteria, its simple sound bights decrying other simple sound bights.
It isn’t that the arguments that Beck presents are wrong, its that they are dumbed down to such a degree that in their very simplicity they are hard to refute .
I know now I was wrong. Intolerance had no place in America. I apologized a thousand times … and I don’t mind apologizing over and over again. I can’t erase what happened. I still don’t trust Byrd, I never liked him as a senator, primarily, but not exclusively because of his involvement with the Klan, and because he got flagged by the media for saying racist things after he was done with it. But I also did not follow his career so closely that I’m ready to say without a shadow of a doubt that the above doesn’t express sincere regret. But the guy was in the senate for fifty years, his life shouldn’t be symbolized by a membership in an organization which was eclipsed hugely by his time spent in the senate.
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