I found the Glen Beck video in the last post unimaginable. For reminder, he’s showing carvings on the Rockefeller Center from which he concludes that Rockefeller was a communist and/or a fascist, and that since NBC is in that building, they are too, as are modern Progressives. Oh yeah, Rockefeller donated the land for the UN building which has a Russian Statue of a man turning a sword into a plow – ergo, the UN is communist? I had no idea that Beck was that crazy. It prompted me to find the original red-baiter, Eugene McCarthy, and look at the video of his finale with Joseph Welch. I knew Ann Coulter was a neo-McCarthyite, but I didn’t realize that Beck was too.
Who watches such things? Who believes such things? Does Beck really think he can revive the red-baiting from the last century and parlay it into some kind of new Republican Meme? It’s laughable on the one hand, and horrifying on the other. I wonder where they found Glen Beck. He’s more like a character from an old movie than someone to take seriously…
WE don’t take Beck seriously. But I wonder how many of the people who watch him do — people who have their own hatreds and fears about things changing, and who don’t have the knowledge or perspective of history to combat his rants.
Instead of saying Beck is crazy, they pick up the idea that Rockefeller was a commie. To us it’s laughable — It really is laughable. Rockefeller — the quintessential capitalist — a communist?
But I’ll bet a sizable portion of the people who watched Beck came away believing it.
A very liberal member of The Back Fence blog just wrote that she has a friend whose parents are very conservative Republicans. Her father says on his FaceBook page that the public figure he most admires is Glenn Beck.
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. [H. L. Mencken]
It could be reasonably said that the evolutionary change observed in the motive behaviors of human beans is slower than that of almost any other species with some exceptions perhaps ( the pallid sturgeon, the musk ox). As I watched this entire exchange involving the late Senator from Wisconsin, I was amazed at the recognition of his archtype that I experienced in the 60s as the penultimate pig (as in “off the pig”). Shallow, deceitful, arrogant, nakedly ignorant and yet in a position of influence. He was an alcoholic, a serial liar and a gambler who was thoroughly shunned by his Senate colleagues well before the media catapulted him from his own miserable angry and rage-filled shadows into the national spotlight where he had a brief pulpit from which to spread his groundless palaver. In the end, despite Mr. Welch’s impassioned plea to his conscience, McCarthy had no sense of decency and he kept up his empty parade of bunkum until a merciful Lord took the boozer out of the program at age 48. The difference between McCarthy and Beck is that the former was a person in a position of political prominence who stumbled into becoming an entertainer and the latter is an entertainer who has stumbled into a position of political prominence. Another difference is that McCarthy never produced any evidence whatsoever to substantiate his drivel but you have to give credit where credit is due and allow that Mr. Beck showed pictures of iconic buildings in a sophmoric attempt to validate his outlandish claims. It’s all just statistics and epidemiology in the end isn’t it – we regress to the mean. The common man is painfully common, his/her world is truncated and relatively impervious to reason, he/she is intellectually lazy and askeerd of they own shadow…all one has to do is raise up a hobgoblin and they will make you rich with their fickle and short-lived support.
“The difference between McCarthy and Beck is that the former was a person in a position of political prominence who stumbled into becoming an entertainer and the latter is an entertainer who has stumbled into a position of political prominence.”
“The common man is painfully common, his/her world is truncated and relatively impervious to reason, he/she is intellectually lazy and askeerd of they own shadow…all one has to do is raise up a hobgoblin and they will make you rich with their fickle and short-lived support.”
Carl, you’re having a wisdom attack! So let us ardently pray that you’re right about the “short-lived” part…