Glenn Beck Is An Idiot – Fox News Host

Glenn Beck has a deep seated hatred of himself. This can be traced to the underlying rage and confusion he experienced over the apparent suicide of his mother when he was teenager; exacerbated by the humiliation he felt for having failed college after a single term; and crystallized by a career which started early and rewarded him for demeaning any idea or person that threatened his damaged self-esteem, This resulted in a compensatory grandiosity that blossomed into the pathetic, maudlin egomaniac that we know and hate today.

Of particular interest to me is his propensity to perceive high achievers (‘elites’) as evil, driven by power and manipulative, withholding approval from him. His own followers are perceived as naifs who need to be educated by him, and once so educated, can provide him with the approval he is hungry for.

Striking is his tendency to assume that, if he learns something new, it is as though no one has known of it before him, except those elites who he assumes do know it but for insidious motives, are withholding this ‘secret knowledge’ from himself and others as a way of retaining their power.

• Auriandra’s diary :: ::

Often, Beck will discover a nugget of knowledge and, instead of concluding that he has learned something new, something that other people absorb as part of a normal result of learning, he will ask his audience, “Did you know that before?” then he will ask “Why not?” [long pause, signalling that something sinister is at play.] Often, it turns out, this secret knowledge is in fact something I did know. For instance (from his 8/28 rally) – why the color of the marble on the Washington monument changes a third of the way up; or that “Amazing Grace” was written by a converted slave ship captain. There is nothing uncommon or inaccessible about this information; many people know these things. But, unlike Beck, most people do not assume that their learning such things involves breaking through an imaginary conspiracy of a group of elites who have tried to withhold the information. This explains his typical refrain, “Why aren’t the schools teaching this?” Because most people accept learning such things to be part of the work of a life’s work, most people do not react to such new information is an affront to one’s ego. They experience no need to presume that not having known it before indicates that there was an conspiracy to keep the information hidden. To Beck, new knowledge always presents such a threat.

This paranoia was apparent at his Martin Luther King event. He assumed, erroneously, that blacks think they “own” Martin Luther King. As a white person, I have felt I too have access to the King legacy for one simple reason. MLK’s own words say so. His vision was of a world in which whites and blacks would live together without racial hatred, tension, or prejudice. I never felt excluded from this dream, but Beck’s view appears to be that blacks have assumed sole ownership of King, thereby excluding him, and white people in general.

Not that everything Beck asserts is something I knew before. Some things he asserts, I know of but do not agree with. Other things are jumbled together (as when he says Obama is both fascist and communist) or that the Founding Fathers were the equivalent of modern evangelical Christians. In the first instance, he simply does not seem to know that ‘fascism’ and ‘communism’ are defined by academics to be at opposite ends of a scale from extreme ‘right’ to extreme ‘left.’ To deal with the fact both tend to adopt certain common methods, another term is usually invoked (courtesy of Hannah Arendt), “totalitarianism.” These are definitional matters, terms that have been agreed upon to allow for discourse. Communication requires accepting such shared terms and definitions.

The assertion that the Founding Fathers were essentially evangelical Christians in the modern sense, and that they intended the founding documents to define a theocracy, is more complex. Here what is needed, and what Beck lacks, is a sense of historical context, as well as a sense of what constitutes evidence. For instance, the fact that Washington (or any other FF) may have referred to God in one or two letters out of thousands of documents, is not enough to establish that his views were the same as those of a 20th Century Rev. Hagee. In order to interpret the phrase, “they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights,” it is important to know the history on English law in which rights were not considered inalienable, but rather granted by the state and the crown. One need not invoke a Creator to maintain that rights are inalienable, but in the mindset of the 18th century, this was a pragmatic way of saying that the state was not empowered to displace these rights.

Beck often shows naïveté with regard to historical context. The Republican Party of Abe Lincoln was not the same as Republican Party of today, just as early 20th Century Progressives are not the same as early 21st Century progressives. Parties and movements evolve over time; in fact, sometimes they swing dramatically in a short period, as when the Republican Party emerged after the Civil Rights Bill passed as the more anti-civil rights party. Nor does the fact that the Progressive President Wilson exhibited a degree of racism mean that modern day progressives are really closet racists, as though the word progressive is not amenable to changing over time. History is, in some ways, the study of social and political change over time in which a significant amount of effort must go to understanding events in ever-changing contexts as well as the evolution of labels used to describe them.

My advice to Glenn Beck would be to take off four years (he can afford it) and get a college education from a reputable college or university. He’s bright enough. However, I doubt his damaged ego could handle the assault of so much new information. Sadly, lacking this, I fear he will continue to be a thorn in the body politic, and become one of history’s stranger footnotes.

by Auriandra

Source: DailyKos.com

This entry was posted on Monday, August 30th, 2010 at 10:33 am and is filed under Glenn Beck News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.