Boundaries

I really don’t want to write again about Glenn Beck fulminating on Fox 5 views. As an old history major and secondary teacher of social studies for several years, I watched him this afternoon –one does not observe Beck, for he is as deep as a wall decal — take a few facts, twist and distort them, and come out the other end of Alice’s tunnel. Often he has an “historian” as an accomplice to support him in his big lies. He will take a simple historical fact and right before you eyes draw the most eely and exquisitely malformed conclusions with all the sincerity of a Goebbels.

Beck cherry picks history and once he finds a ripe cherry he wraps it into interpetations and glazes it with assumptions and then pimps it out as a general rule about all cherries in all history. Although he is a “recovered alcoholic,” his thinking process is like that of one completely soused. And he is not only a danger to himself but to others. If i were teaching today I would tape one of his rants and present it without any observations on my part to a class and ask them to tell me what or what is not going on here. I’d examine Beck as if he were the first microbe of living matter on Mars, without judgment. Think of Lumet’s prophetic “Network,” and Howard Beal (Is that his name?) and you have a sense of the directon Beck is heading for. I await a swoon. Indeed, he will be speaking at the Lincoln Memorial in a few days (the hubris must have been soaked in aged whiskey). I can’t wait to see the video of that and the vermin that will come out to support him and collude in the desecratation of that monument, the site of King’s and Lincoln’s speeches.

When Rush Limbaugh refers to the President as “Imam Barama,” and Hannity calls him the “anointed one,” when a Senator slyly avoids the question about his being a Christian or not, we are in real trouble. The racism is palpable. Boundaries are being crossed, the center doesn’t hold. I am not writing here of good taste, good behavior, reasonableness, sensitivity, tolerance and precision with words. I am writing of those inhibitions we need to keep and sustain if we have any characteristics of a civilized humanity. I do not piss in the street nor do you. I like that inhibition, a standard for all of us. However, Beck and his cohorts are marching knowingly or sometimes not knowingly, propelled by conscious (often) and unconscious forces into areas that I had assumed were generally taken for granted among rational human beings. At my age I cannot avoid observing the decline — maybe decadence — of the body politic. Anything goes now. I didn’t believe I would see a person such as Sarah Palin hold people in rapture so that they would stand in lines for a book she most probably never wrote, given her use of “refudiate” a few weeks ago. She is a total ignoramus, a spawn of McCain’s dementia, the so-called “maverick.”

For me Palin represents everything that is loathesome and repugnant about American marketing, capitalism and culture.

These are savage times and the beasts are on the prowl. I am not John in his wet dream writing about the Apocalypse, but few voices of recognizable character are making their voices heard. Stalwart souls are hard to find as night crawls over the cityscapes like tar. I do not have faith for humanity, for it has revealed itself over and over again to be a worldwide plague. When boundaries dissipate and dissolve, inner controls are lost and anything goes. The tether we hold on ourselves, on our culture, in my view, are precarious and slipping away. No use to get up and leave the USA; entering Belize with my luggage would just reintroduce me  to another variant of humankind — the American tourist.