Mathias B. Freese

Sometimes I participate in an exercise of futility. Presently I am surfing the immense amount of data on the Holocaust which is beyond anyone’s grasp. In a few weeks I will be making an announcement about the second edition of The i Tetralogy. I’ve waited five years to do that, having spotted errors within the book — typos, awkward terms, et al. I’ve also decided to change the cover which had an array of swastikas on it, being told it is jarring for some. Yes, for some. Not for me. A part of me is impish, Peck’s bad boy. I like to rub it in your face. I have capitulated to Jane’s wishes and to Jordan’s requests. He has redesigned the front and back covers. Additionally I dropped the introduction and replaced that with quotations from reviews that I have received over the years. And while that is going on I am trying to write an announcement that will attract readers. In that conext I am trying to reach out to reference librarians, acquisition librarians, professors of Jewish studies, Holocaust associations and organizations, museums, secondary teachers, Holocaust centers and any and all that might find my book of merit. I am tediously going through such internet directories such as “Jewish Studies at Universities,” searching for the e-mail addresses of individuals who might have an interest in my historical novel.

If you know someone personally who might want to receive this flyer, comment. Or if you have an idea or two about what internet group I might pursue for potential readers, comment as well. I have a few old edition copies at hand. Yours for the asking. I also donate books to libraries, the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum just requested a copy from me. I get a real kick out of knowing the book is in major libraries. Is there a library you can suggest?

So a part of a morning each day is spent searching out names and then recording them into a database. At present I have about 425 names of reviewers, friends, bloggers, professors, groups and librarians I will forward the announcement to. I realize that in a mailing of about 1,000 you are lucky to get 5 to 10 nibbles. So I feel a sense of futility in all this, but I persist quixotically. I look at my book as a long range life effort on my part. The book is an extension of my gut — and soul. It has real merit and deserves reading. However, I am lost in the sewer of marketing which I find just annoying to participate in. I placate or ease myself by realizing what would I have been without having invested years in writing the books I do. I would be frustratingly less.

When you can’t get your book read or sold, what do you do? You write another one. For writing a book is not selling the book, although that is sweet fun. I write to know and to learn; I write to expel person demons, to expose inner knots, I write not to offer resolutions or to experience redemption. I saddle my horse to explore the outer limits. I savor if not crave a reader’s comments more than the royalty it might bring me. I enjoy being totally unAmerican about publishing. I have already impacted upon close ones with what I have written — lucky me. I have the autodidact’s arrogance about me, for I have learned to write as best as I can in the way a young adult used to learn how to fix a carburetor — practice. I refuse to listen to all the old saws about how to be a writer, what to do as a writer as I find that death. I find it puckish to reject the conventional wisdom even if it has merit to it. I like being self-taught although I fully realize that I have gaps in my skills because of that.

Again I am perplexed and riddled by futility because very few read Holocaust novels, we’d rather not know. I understand that and that is exactly why I wrote the book. I wrote the book to deal with resistance. I had no hope of breaking through that. A good therapist does not launch an attack upon a client’s resistance; in fact, he joins it. Human beings can’t handle frontal assaults. The Holocaust is a frontal assault because on many profound levels it destroys, devastates and destructs any if not most of the conditioned responses we have as human beings and as a species. Who wants to read that we are demented and diminished as a species?

Who wanted to read about evolution? Who wanted to know about the unconscious mind? We are too busy “living” to contemplate that. There are the thinkers, the doers and the putzes. The putzes rule.

So I slog through the directories in the hope that a large mailing might turn the trick, that one soul might order the book or ask about it. And most likely nothing will occur except my solitary effort at “pushing” the book. Well it is the struggle, is it not? I have another recourse, but it would be hard for me to adapt to. I can give up writing, “enjoy” my retirement years free of thinking, feeling, writing books; I could ride my bike a little more; I watch the tires lose their air as I pass it every day in the garage. I could go to the local casino and lose more at the slots. I just don’t know what I would do with all this “time” on my hands. I could play golf, I could amble through each day until I stroke out. I could deny, I could rationalize, I could slough off daily events. I think I could do all these things if I put my mind to it. But putting your mind to it is not exactly what one does if one chooses not to live. I choose to live and that is another ballgame, for it involves writing, being, feeling, thinking. I am my own self-pest. Are you free of pests and live an American life? If so, go to another blog as my musings are not for you.

Jane just read this blog while I was proofing it. She said I was a”dichotomy.” Jordan is working on a possible film called “Dichotomy/Lobotomy” about the daily grind we all know at the workplace. I choose dichotomy.

Americans abroad can be fairly obnoxious, fatuous and deaf, dumb and blind to their surroundings, often collectors of experiences without registering what they experience. On the Homes and Garden channel I often watch House Hunters and House Hunters International, both programs working on the premise that a couple see three different homes shown to them by real estate agents — a real estate agent is someone who eats and gives out shit in order to make a commission. Any dissent on that? The internal “excitement,” I suppose, is to compare your choice with theirs. I began watching the show before we moved to Nevada. One episode was about house hunting in Nevada that revealed the relatively inexpensive prices for homes. Jane and I went for it and so we are here. However, watching House Hunter 1 and 2 was and is a lesson in American values, of anthropological and sociological insights apparent to anyone who wishes to see beyond the surface, which is an unAmerican trait.

House Hunters International appeals to me in that I go on a tour to Cabo, Mexico, Panama, Paris, Aruba, Nicaragua, Spain and rural France. I observe real estate agents in these countries. They are all alike, acquisitive, stupid, pushy and remarkably obtuse, servile, all the characteristics one needs for a license in the States. They are parasites on the fat asses of the well-to-do. I try to overlook the agents and the house hunters and enjoy the visual surroundings; however, as you know human beings get in the way. What have I learned that I don’t really want to learn about Americans?

Couples, such as Liz and Bill, have three dogs. I sense that they view their animals as human beings and cannot differentiate between both species. Dog lovers view these animals as part of the family, as children in some cases. OK. I can take that for just so long. Often couples nearing retirement and in their early sixties, often without children, just dogs in this case, come into a home, this one is in Panama, and offer over a half hour the following commentary: Remember there are only two of them — there is no granite countertop…little counter space…not enough kitchen cabinets…the bathroom has to be redone…the bedroom is too small…I prefer a gas stove to electric…the floor tiles are not good for the dogs…it is too far from Panama City…the self-aggrandizing, “I can’t believe this backyard is really all mine”…this must go, that must stay, this is not good, that is so so. All in all we are getting here American insufferability big time.

What America needs is a good old-fashioned ground war with invading armies crossing our States so that we lose some of our precious airs and arrogance. Material discontent by couples like Liz and Bill runs rife through these programs: the inability to accept the less that perfect; the unwillingness to settle for an incomplete view of the ocean, the view of life as conforming only to one’s own needs. The list is endless. I watch the show and comment like a good old man reading the headlines and speaking to world leaders — that Beck is a schmuck; Hannity is a moron and Coulter is an ironing board posing as a woman. I comment as Liz and Bill actually do a dance for the camera, spoon for the camera, soak in their new Panamian spa, frolic like the old fools they are. Nothing is more embarrassing than to observe an old fool at play. Liz and Bill  kibbitz and cavort with one another on camera, bill and coo, and one imagines them nude, flopping about, moving their redolent tummies aside to find access  to empty pantries.

Unfortunately having excess money can wither the sense of proportionality. I sit and watch and wonder about what I am watching. What is it to want more and have the wherewithal to do that? What is it to have a need and be able to satisfy it completely? What is it to have no concerns about not having? What does it take to be less demanding, less narcissistic? What American contractor, what real estate agent, what hidden and driven agenda mandates that travertine is out and granite is in, that stainless steel appliances are the only way to go, that wood floors are a must and what demented soul or system urged an “open floor plan” upon house hunters? Who are, excuse the expression, the “tastemakers” in this nation? Not only are we conspicous consumers (Veblen), status seekers (Vance Packard) and outer-directed (The Lonely Crowd ), we apparently, like Liza and Bill, are caught in the Matrix, oblivious to how inane and insipid we have become.

We talk of nation-building in Iraq and Afghanistan. After a summer watching Tea Parties, Glenn Beck, “You Lie,” Wilson, we are the very last nation who should be doing that; our own democracy is pretty shabby of late. Arnold Toynbee, historian, once wrote that all that Western civilization can give the world is its “bag of tools,” meaning that we can offer techiques and diesel engines but not much more.

When I watched Liz and Bill this Saturday night I felt like an ancient Roman slave who wanted to put a dagger into the back of his master. The aristocracy of bloated self-interest and exalted bad taste reigns supreme and the two programs I watch slash open the belly of the beast to reveal the inner rot. As a culture we are long overdue for a comeuppance.

I thought it might be of interest to myself, perhaps to you, to give the classic bibliographic list of books and films that are very much current in my mind, and for that matter, in my literary and cinematic genetic database. Here, first, is a list of books, stories or authors that have impacted upon my thinking and feeling. When I was a history major I used to enjoy reading the bibliographic essays at the end of a book in which the author let his hair down and made comments about what he had read; I enjoyed the good-natured criticism or pleasure that the author had in excavating his pearls from the select oysters he chose. So it will be here.

As to plays, Sartre’s The Flies, was for me the best introduction I ever had to Existentialism and a goddam delight to read. Miller’s Death of a Salesman moved me but Miller pulled his punch; it was a play about a Jewish salesman, for I feel Miller sanitized it for the public as he also kept the fact he had a retarded child away from the public as if some slur on his self (my personal crankiness about him). If you get a good translation, Moliere’s The Misanthrope is a soaring and scathing commentary on what each of us has to do to defeat the grind. It is also called the French Hamlet, although it is often performed as high comedy. I may return to this but I am trying only to list those artistic works that bring a sweet or sharp taste to my mind after all these years.

As to short stories, I am always charmed and swept into the arms of Conrad, remembering his “The Lagoon.”  Crane’s The Open Boat  is a seamless story in which not one word is out of place, pure as a crystal marble. The Martian Chronicles for its remarkable creation of a world; I Have No Mouth and I Want to Scream, absolutely brilliant science fiction psalm, title story in the collection; I am only, again, citing books that have moved me in one way or another and sometimes I remember only snippets or the tone and sometimes forgetting who wrote the story. What I consider perhaps as the geatest collection I’ve read for sheer humanity is Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. If you want epiphanies and glorious and practical insights about human beings, read and study him, in fact, Hemingway did just that and never gave Anderson his due.

I move on. As to novels, Mary Renault’s volumes, The King Must Die and The Bull from the Sea are magnificent recreations of ancient Crete in all its glory. I remember reading her description of a gem -encrusted saddle and I could almost touch the facets of the jewels; you want to learn how to write description — seek out that one paragraph (epic). The Nigger of the Narcissus by Conrad is profoundly psychological and it is like reading one of Freud’s works but it had magic for me and I was thrown off by its depth and brilliance, insights dripping off it like a steak. The great novels I’ve read must include very high on the list The Last Temptation of Christ by Kazantzakis, a genius. He had the audacity to write a sequel — in verse — to the Odyssey (in two volumes) and by all literary accounts equaled Homer before he began writing novels in his seventies. Wrenching, powerful, all powerful, mystical, earthy, when Kazantzakis wrote about a bowl of grapes in a bowl you not only could see them, you could taste them. I loved his willingness to be ornate if need be, to be a Gaudi — in his time he was a diplomat, a Communist, broke out in stigmata, a mystic and god knows what else he was. Krishnamurti was a friend — one can only imagine what they spoke of over a cup of Turkish coffee. Kazantzakis was a Cretan, not Greek — a significant difference to my mind. Report to Greco, his confessional, is ranked up there with St. Augustine, but Kazantzakis is so very much more real as a human being. His St.Francis gave one the suffering in the man without Bambi and flitting birds; intensely  and agonizingly is the prose so that you feel what this man felt for life. I remember asking people to read him and offering to girlfriends, etc a copy of the book just to have someone talk to me about that.

I enjoyed reading John Hersey’s The Wall, a terrific recreation by a non-Jew about the Warsaw Ghetto; his identification with the Jewish mentality was spectacular, his ability to identify really remarkable. Gulliver’s Travels is far from a children’s book but a very dark and scathing depiction of human beings, its misanthropy is a delight and right on target. At the end Gulliver is so sickened by human nature that he at first refuses to be rescued at sea — now that is darkness to be relished.

Let us casually move on to other tomes. Elias Canetti’s, Crowds and Power, is probably one of the best books of the 20th Century dealing with the psychological and sociological and emotional  analyses of human beings in groups — he was a novelist and it reads beautifully. His chapter on the Xhosas, a tribe, will make your shudder in its retelling of an actual event; his prose is impeccable. Freud’s Moses and Monotheism and DaVinci are examples of a master at play whose data later on proved unsound but whose prose is wonderful. St. Exupery’s small series of essays, Wind, Sand and Stars, is a mystical reflection on flight and simply sweet existential wonderings. In one essay he is forced to land on a sand dune in the desert. It takes off from there (no pun intended). Loren Eiseley’s The Immense Journey combines the thinking of a scientist who writes like the poet he was; the prose is entrancing. Again, all of the above left reminiscences within my mind, traces of having read something that touched me and that returns not necessarily to haunt or nag at me, but to wash across my soul in pleasure and fond remembrance.

As to the movies of my mind before they became art works to be studied. I was deeply affected by movies. In the late 40s and all of the 50s my childhood was not glued (I actually played in the streets) to the TV set but to the actual seeing movies on the screen where they had much more impact. For its emotional impact, The Thief of Bagdad grabbed my heart. Starring June Duprez, John Justin, Conrad Veidt, and Sabu, the adolescent mischief maker, the film is now seen as one of the great epic fantasies ever put up on the screen — I can still hum a few notes of the magical score, revel in the glorious technicolor and find Veidt’s performance as the evil vizier and magician lithographed in fear and acid — a remarkable performance. I first saw Welles’ Citizen Kane at the Lakeland, an old movie house affectionately called the “dumps,” in the 40s and I knew on some level I was watching something very special. How special? The burning of Rosebud burned in me for decades until I finally put it to partial rest by writing a few articles about it as well as other articles about early movies that moved me deeply. In fact the publisher of an old movie magazine that published some of my essays in the 80s just retired and published a book about his film magazine. Sure enough I’m listed in the table of contents. Goddam! The circle is complete. Got to buy that book! One other movie, The Search, starring Monty Clift, about a soldier tying up with a waif in postwar Germany who is searching for his mother, eviscerated my gut. The loss of a parent is mind-boggling and Zinneman caught that in his direction. Remember when you are 8 or 9 you are in many cases just an empty vessel for what is put into you. It takes centuries of psychic time to turn all of that into feelings, observations and sympathies. I end here; perhaps more some other time.

While Jane is off to Utah for a meeting of new students gathered for a degree in library science, I sit home here in Nevada trying to arrange my day, trying to fill in the spaces left by her leaving. Once again, I am alone for a while and wondering an old man’s thoughts, I suppose — the what ifs. You imagine them, I need not explain. At this juncture in my life having a partner is critical for me. I am feeling more dependent on the Other. I am not as strong as I thought I was. The realization is one of many I am having of late about myself and life as well. Realizing I need the Other, Jane, and the presence of my son more frequently than he can manage — or realizes, I sense the lengthening shadows coming across my lawn. Chronology destroys all of us, but it is durationally that we can live intensely or meaningfully. I am trying to create as much as I can because I know in creation time passes fleetingly and one does not sense one’s age. I am also feeling how often I deluded myself, as I reflect, of how imperfect I was as a father, sometimes highly insensitive, of how mistakes I made damaged my life, perhaps others, of how failures in my own psychological life made scaring impact of others.

 Realizing that regrets do nothing for one, for they cannot release you from the errors made, what I am left with, in instances, is a deep sense of grief for what I have done to others first, and then to myself. Although my parenting was poor, I am responsible, mostly, for the choices I’ve made. And often they were not good ones. So as I wither I see more vigorously and clearly the errors of my life. And what is to be made of them? I am not sure. I know that guilt is irrelevant here. I realize that self-mortification is not a wholesome choice. Turning to a god in prayer is an unbelievable self-hoax and the ailment of the species, for I believe the responsibility is not to be given to an omniscient being, particularly the sad ones the species has promulgated for its own relief. I seek of late how best to come to terms with my human foibles, mistakes and stupid behaviors.

I think I may near something comforting for me. I just sensed here while writing that if I remember the lost ones in my life I pay them the respect and homage and care I may have not afforded them while they lived. If I have to be crucified, let me be crucified on the cross of memory. If you want eternal life, brethren, hope that your children or spouse will remember you long after you are gone. It would move me deeply if my son or Jane carried me in their minds until their days were over. I can feel this or say this freely because Caryn, my daughter, Rochelle, my wife, now more than 10 years gone, are as present in my mind and thoughts on a daily basis as ever. I don’t recall events so much as critical parts of our relationships, often some of these make me morose because of personal failure on my part. I cannot help that, it is what it is. I think sometimes that on my deathbed what Rosebud might I say, what final image would shatter my dying mind so that I had to say it and then be gone forever. I am not sure what I might say, a few come to mind for me to reflect upon. I am besotted with a crazed or mistaken notion that I need to leave something behind for those who knew me. Apparently I am of late more concerned with dying than with living, although I can make the case they are very much the same.

It turned out that I became the self-appointed recorder, the writer, of the Freese family. In a long essay I gave my son there are pages of descriptions of family members I grew up with and that he has no idea ever existed. I collected all the photographs I had and in that same essay tried to give something of who these people were. He may never read it. However, I had to record that. When I look at all these people long since gone, I wonder, like a Holocaust survivor, how much was lost, what context and human glue is now gone. And so, unlike the paranoid Pharoahs, who extended their efforts on the enslaved efforts of others to go to the other world I reach out in the autumn of my years to those who are alive and vibrant about me. I seek solace and comfort in their well-being. I continue to write in order to define who I am, for I am as fuzzy and unclear as the bottom of a Coke bottle. I am infected with knowledge. Useless. I am coated with sophistication. Eunuch. I sing smarts like a flirty castrati. But who I am is vastly unknown to me. We really are gross ignorances trying to make our way in this world. Someone, perhaps rightly, labeled me as a seeker, for he detected the search in me, the nagging quest to arrive. Imagine a needle in the middle, if there is such a thing, of this universe, a needle millions and millions of miles in length. At the tip of the needle is my squirming body.

Vanity of vanities, I write to be remembered. What a foolish self-assigned task!

Wending her way through my collection of short stories on the Holocaust, Jane is formulating, in mind, what she intends to write in her introduction to the new book, hopefully published in Spring 2010. What I discovered when writing these stories is that as I crept toward an understanding that I could translate into writer’s words, that very understanding backed off and off, like receding waters. I just couldn’t grasp it and had to settle for approximations of what I thought I knew or had fathomed. Consequently I am dissatisfied with my efforts except for one or two stories. I associate to breaking off a piece of peanut brittle, messy, awkward, angular and shattering better stuff off the hand than on.

So as a defense mechanism, I have ”deceived” myself — accepting what I have written as the best shard I can make. Most if not all the stories have been written within six months or so and I am suspicious that they do not have the gravitas they should carry if I had written them over a period of years which I did with my last collection — thirty years of gravitas. However, I must write and I will not torture myself over how well or not time saturates a writer’s efforts. The grim reaper is using his sickle at my rear and I am running as fast as I can to complete the loose ends we all have if we are aware of time’s guillotine. Look, some of us need golf; I need to write. I am on my last eight holes, really the last four. I’ll take a birdy, an eagle is beyond me. I have always maintained that I write not for my children so much — you don’t count — as for myself. Writing mirrors who I am and I’d like to get a non-distorted image of myself before I croak. Why, you may ask? Can you handle the truth? My taproot is in Judaism and I am a secular atheist who admires the ethos I emanate from. The answer is: I am a Jew. I have to know. Ridiculous quest, is it not? Oh, but the side dishes are wonderful — crinkle-cut fries, round potato knish, sour tomatoes and pickles and the New York waiter’s thumb in your glass as he gives you water.

Some of the stories, perhaps most, are surreal for in that heightened awareness, I believe, I can assess or paint in the characteristics of the Holocaust that I need to get to, rather, that concern me.  For instance, terror is hard to write about; it is worst to experience, of course. I find it hard to describe terror and so I try to approach it indirectly, to slyly hint at it. Film directors have that issue as well. Although they show pictures in motion, only a few directors can make you feel the atmosphere. Just today I had to turn off “Schindler’s List” because it began to creep into me, especially the early scenes when ther Jews are moving into the Warsaw Ghetto, having been evicted from their homes which would now be taken over by the Germans. I felt something in me, the feeling of having been selected, of having been picked out, of having been geeked out of the matrix of a society and I quickly associated to present events in this country and the latent menace in events — the fears of Obama speaking to children; Birthers; the dangerous lunacies of a Glen Beck; the adamant polarization in this nation and the scariest thing of all to me — the abyssmal knowledge of Americans about their founding documents and their own history. I believe that in my community for perhaps 50 miles in any direction there is not one American who  can name a socialist of the 19th century or the 20th , for that matter.The last twenty years must have produced a bumper crop of moronic teachers. In my mind a great teacher takes on the PTA, the principal and the community if need be. OK, go down in flames but what a war story to tell your own children decades from now. I once told a group of kids in an eighth grade class that the Declaration of Independence was progaganda; of course, it was and being a history major I had really a significant amount of essays and papers on that subject, especially by the great historian Carl Becker (look him up). Well, I did get shit; a few parents took their kids out of my class. I guess I was an early socialist in Elmont, Long Island, a Progressive, as Beck terms it. Naive and new at my “profession,” I quickly learned that the truth does not set you free. Awareness sets you free. As I look back on my desperate years as a teacher, I am glad I made waves but blood pressure is not a happy consequence nor suppressing rage and anger at the buffoons who run our schools for the buffoons who procreate conditioned little creatures called “students.” I do digress.

Things are not that dire in this nation but we do have one man carnivorously biting off the tip of another man’s pinky at a town hall meeting. However, you may know that canaries were used in English mines in the 19th century for the purposes of alerting miners of methane gas in the tunnels. If the canary died, get out. I am going out here on a limb but if there is a spate of swastikas across synagogue walls, for civilized dialoguing this summer of ‘09 seems to be disappearing, it is symptomatic of the hatreds being spawn at this moment. Cooler heads are not winning the moment. I sense a rage that is primal without censorship or inhibition which to me connotes the thin pie crust we term civilization, the basic rules we need to get by with. I give you a dollar and ask for change. You give me a quart of the milk; the response is disturbing and psychotic. The Jew is society’s canary; kill him and it is time to emigrate.

All this colors revisiting my little book of stories, crosshatching my characters with feelings and ideas, motives, fears and quirks. I sally forth against Holocaust deniers or revisionists, the same hater, writing satirically, scathingly about the mind and its mind set that denies such an event. I excavate, I eviscerate, I plumb, I leap into that slime pit and try to return to the surface world with some insight of what makes a fellow human being deny such facts; but wait a minute. Did you ever speak to someone who looks just like you, shops, eats, farts, dates, sees the movies and is completely psychotic?  Not a few therapists adhere to the thesis that most of the world’s population is psychotic if we examine the criteria we use to diagnose clients (see the DSM IV).

I tried my hand writing about such a revisionist and sadly enough my reach exceeds my grasp. I may not have written a good story, but a well-intended one. I’ll let Jane correct and emend that and if it does not work, I will dispense with. However, the search inward brought me some personal insights. Tell me, when was the last time a golfer walked off a course with an insight other than he did or did not play the ninth hole well? Don’t you get it, reader, I don’t have much time and while I search and seek and attempt to determine my life’s course of action the sands pour through the glass. And what did you do today?  I personally have no time to be lint in eternity’s pocket. Ultimately I will be an iota, but while here, while alive and kicking, while aware to the best I can be, I am kicking ass.

Adieu.

Watching Glen Beck on Tuesday, 1 September, I heard this pastiche: I am a self-educated man…I put myself through school…I am a clown…My daughter disagreed with me on a historical point so I studied history… I read about the Progressive Movement in this country…Goebbels studied this movement to learn about propaganda… All of this is extracted from Beck’s mini-tirade. It is out of context. However, it is exactly what Beck did on Tuesday as he went after administrative czars who he feels are radicals. I imagine at night he drops his whole head into a bowl of potpourri. I imagine that mother Beck almost called him Extraction instead of Glenn.

Parallel to his extracting tidbits here and there, he uses the ellipsis [indicating an intentional omission of words or letters or an abrupt change of thought, lapse of time, incomplete statement, etc] as a minor art form. If I were a savvy secondary social studies teacher, I would assign students to see Beck for at least one week with the task to approach his presentations from a critical thinking point of view, to observe what subtleties he uses to make his case, how he leaps from one point to another and then reaches a conclusion not grounded in fact; how he bastes arguments together as if stitching with  ten foot needles. What they should also be assigned is to observe how he uses his facial responses and voice to make the reader infer or conclude what conclusions and inferences he has already made. I’d have them examine the latent messages in his show — the frustration and fear in Beck himself, his addressing us all as “America,” his feeling that all is almost lost and we are going to the dogs, and his sly call for us to tell one another what is happening, to share his learnings with others, perhaps to form a movement so that Beck riding his white horse would be one of its enablers. The final question: See “Network” and compare and contrast Beck with the deranged newscaster.

In one section of his show, truly a show, he reproduces quotations by having them generated in voices that sound robotic and, in fact, one sounded much like Stephen Hawking’s mechanical tones. So, students, do you feel this is a necessary thing to do? Or does it infer something else?  Is it fair to quote the personally unlikeable by expressing them mechanically? Better still, students, what is the tone beneath the entire show? What is it trying to communicate? Fear? Bewilderment? Concern? and so on Like the autodidact he is, he presents data on a blackboard, has his producers create graphics, rests his case(s) on bits and pieces, fragments of truth, stereotypes, claiming he is quickly trying to get up to speed as an educated citizen, forgetting that he is totally bereft of who he is interiorly, a dinged Pepsi empty outside a bodega. Students should study him intensely for he is a low-grade Goebbels in the making; he is a perfect example of how progaganda is shaped and formed on a network, of how the Big Lie comes to be accepted, believed and acted upon the more and more the lie itself is exaggerated and enlarged. He ended his show with this: “The truth will set you free.”  I have a better one, one you can see at the Jefferson Memorial at the top of the rotunda: “I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal enmity against all tyrany over the minds of men.” (Not bad for a Deist.) Thus Beck has my eternal enmity. Beck has no concept of who Glen Beck is, for he is an outer-directed empty man who has risen to such popularity by the very same kind of people he caters to. He almost makes you ashamed for being educated as if to be ignorant and unquestioning is a higher level of intelligence, or that “structured” ignorance makes you a better citizen. It is not! Whoever said or claimed that the mass of men are Jeffersons?

All of his personal dreck rides a raft of emotional appeal. What is disturbing to me is that he has this platform to spew his ignorance and we have arrived at such partisanship that Beck is viewed as a useful clown, given the monies he draws into the station, the same applies to O’Reilly. Beck is monstrously ignorant of American history, of world history, ignorant of himself for he has not as yet, at this time in his life, grasped who and what he is as a human being — he is riddled with fears, racism and stainless steel cliches; he is the kind of man who can make barbecue, smokes cigarettes and is distressed that a black man is president. I am fairly disgusted or bored or fed up with the average man concept, that the man down the block could be your next president; I have lived long enough to see the highly educated become schmucks as presidents and the fairly ignorant adding to the schmuckdom.  Joe the Plumber sickens me — fix drains and keep your watery hubris to yourself. Beck is of that ilk. The man in the street is as stupid as the man in the CEO suite. Human beings are generally stupid. Take a look at your fellow man and then get back to me.