Chubby, pudgy, with brush haircut, always wearing poorly coordinated clothes (tasteless, like himself), small specks of dry skin on the right side of his lower lip, with elaborate and future jowls, he reminds me of ignorance dressed in knowledgeabilty, much more entertainer than commentator, stuffed like a turkey with opinions on all things, and poorly mentally groomed. On purpose I have not gone on to the web to find something about his biography, although I did come across that he is a recovered alcoholic and has no degree in journalism. How has this mediocrity risen so “high” is more of a commentary on us than on him. When I look at Beck I try to assess him as I often did when a new client came into my office. I tried to register this human being and continued to do so until treatment ended, be it months or a few years. I worked on feeling this person, to discover as one therapist called it, the central organizing dynamic, that is, what drives this person, what is the emotional spine of this human being. When I look at Beck, who considerably annoys me, I find a messy oxymoronic individual. I feel that he wants to be smarter than he is and he knows that his pretensions outweigh his insights. As long as we go along with that, are suckers, in effect, buy into his media self, he can feed his family. All unconscious to him, for I doubt he has ever experienced the awakening of intelligence, as Krishnamurti termed it.
Bringing charts and signs to his presentations, I feel I’m with a hack school teacher trying to communicate with his students who feel, with their silence, that he is a jackass. I’ll endeavor to reach further into what I am trying to say. Beck is a shaky man interiorly, presenting self-assuredness and adamantine opinions seemingly arrived at after long cogitation — George Will, he is not. Will is a constipated self, a stuff-shirt and anal whereas Beck-a-la is oral, the major sewer main of discharge of Fox 5 News. Go further with me as I look at Beck from a prejudiced point of view, how delightful. I find him particularly annoying in that he presents his opinions as if thought out. I believe not. I believe he is a product of his producers. He is a prepared TV personality in that I find it hard to believe that preparation for anything has ever played a part in his life.
Capturing Beck is like capturing quicksilver, for what we get are only images, so my assessment is not based on who he really is but on what he gives us visually. However, in his case, I believe that the Mr. Bluster he gives us is in large part the Mr.Bluster he is in real life. His slobbering bluster is much too real to be affected. He is an unrealized human being. I would find as his son or daughter or wife that I am being presented with a false self, a person inhabiting a self without substance. That’s scary. I grew up with a fairly empty father and I have had to scramble all my days and years to make sure that I ejected what emptiness he gave me so that I could fill myself up with healthy nutrients — and that has been one of my life tasks. Beck’s emptiness, I feel, sadly, is largely unknown to himself; however, he uses his neuroses, don’t we all, as the schtick by which he entertains and keeps his audience, for he, like O’Reilly, sustains a large market share. That’s all right; millions loved Nixon. Americans, historically, are enamored of dunderheads — Custer, MacArthur, Reagan, Nancy, too, Michael Jackson, endlessly so.
Beck’s appeal is to the lowest common denominator, the person who actually feels the flag goes beyond symbol and is alive and vibrant in and of itself — and idol of the mind; he satisfies those of us who want their pablum in tightly condensed packets; subtlety is unknown to the followers of Beck; he speaks for the masses, as he sees it, much like priests say what god wants or does not want as if they had a smart phone jacked into their asses and are speaking to god himself; Beck warbles the primal cries of the infant — feed me, wash the drool off my mouth, take away my soiled Pamper. It is a distinctly curious thing to me, worthy of more self-reflection, how Beck ties in with millions out there in terms of his primal songs, his base attitudes, his gross neediness. It all comes back to Beck who is a narcissist, for it all feeds him like some grotesque literary Grendel. When Hitler had his rants if you’ve seen old movies or heard him on old broadcasts, one could feel how enwrapped he was in the spirit of the race and of Germany, how his howling and rampant rage ensconced him into passion, zeal and fury. Watching Beck is watching an attentuated Hitlerian tantrum, of a lesser order but garnished with the same neediness and infant cry to be heard, to be tended to, to be needed.
Beck is not despicable because he is who he is, although as a person there is much to deride. It is we who are despicable if we attend to what he says and encourage his primal lunacies. I must try to extinguish this naivete within myself because I am always in a state of mild astonishment that Beck is salaried, watched and listened to by large herds out there in never never land; he speaks for the untethered, the uninhibited, the boors, the crude, the pistol packin mother fuckers who watch Obama and really want to blast him. And, of course, we have an entire channel that supports the morons from the right — Coulter, Limbaugh, Hannity, O’Reilly, Cavuto, who feign rational discourse and tap into their basest passions and offer them up to the public as if pristine pages from a newer testament, Christian, of course. All religions are structured to be rigid and unyielding; many of these “commentators” have that same conditioning that religion provides. It is in the air; I can smell it. An argument can be made, I suppose, that to be well indoctrinated in the gravies and soups of religious thought is to have been brainwashed. In fact religion has brainwashed the species from the beginning of time. In short, query the prementioned newscasters and you will find card-carrying religious believers. This tangent is not so tangential as it may seem.
Writing this blog I associated to Laura Ingraham a Fox 5 commentator, who wears her gold cross clearly to be seen– why else wear a cross? I read it this way: I have the truth and you don’t; this is the way to the truth and your way is misguided; this is a symbol that I belong to the greatest of the great; that because I wear this cross I am dedicated to the truth, indeed, I have and I own the truth; my religion mints the truth; that although TV news is secular it is sad and a disgrace that it is not religiously grounded; finally, for all you out there who don’t wear the cross, I feel so sorry for you, for you are lost and forlorn. And, of course, as Laura gives her truths, in fact, pontifications, given from a staunch and steady stream of language filled with pebbles and stones, you can detect the conditioning, that this is the way, the only way, that my religion supersedes yours. I have and own the truth. In another time, people like Ingraham, were crusaders, fascists, Nazis, conquistadores, Torquemadas, and Herods.
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