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.
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