Of Becks and Men - Democratic Underground

NanceGreggs

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Sat Mar-20-10 10:43 PM
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Of Becks and Men

Edited on Sat Mar-20-10 10:44 PM by NanceGreggs

Only a handful of TV personalities have garnered the kind of attention that Glenn Beck now commands. He is at once vilified and canonized, dismissed out-of-hand and praised as the real deal, debunked or deified, one’s view of him dependent on one’s ability to think for themselves – or, in the alternative, to have him do the thinking for them.

Beck is many things to many people. But if there’s one thing he’s not, it’s stupid. In fact, he is one of the more intelligent hucksters to come along in a great while, and he has his audience – and his detractors alike – to prove the point.

In the World According to Fox, a place where no publicity is bad publicity, Beck is a man amongst men – deceitful, lying, abhorrent men to be sure. But that is of no consequence in the environment in which Beck (and those of his ilk, though of lesser notoriety) flourishes.

Armed with nothing more than a piece of working-class chalk and a seen-better-days blackboard, Beck wisely eschews the use of technology-driven devices that might tend to distance his unsophisticated viewers – those who believe the internetz is a series of tubes spawned by the devil himself, and would rather put their faith in a medium they can comprehend.

The self-proclaimed “rodeo clown” then dazzles his audience by scribbling a name – like “Obama”, as an example – surrounded by arrows pointing to words like “socialist”, fully cognizant of the fact that his average listener needs no further proof of the undeniable connection between one and the other.

As I said, Beck is not stupid – in fact, he is a flim-flam man of the highest order, savvy enough to know the intellectual limitations of his audience, and unethical enough to exploit their fears, their bigotry, and their ignorance in his pursuit of ratings – and, in the doing, his own personal gain.

Beck’s Oscar-worthy performances as the driven-to-tears patriot, the oh-God-I-fear-for-my-country Christian, the here’s-what-they-don’t-want-you-to know truth-teller are as sincere as those previously offered by snake-oil salesmen who erected tents in small towns and pilfered the pockets of the clueless – the only difference being that Beck has national airtime to spew his brand of worthless cure-alls. But the buyers of his products are the same ill-informed, scared-shitless citizens who are mad as hell and desirous of a scapegoat – someone, anyone – on whom to blame their every misfortune, real or imagined.

Does Glenn Beck actually believe the BS he spews? That’s doubtful. But he understands exactly how much BS his audience will swallow whole, and has amply displayed his ability to stretch the corners of the envelope when it comes to the limits one can go to – limits which, thanks to Fox-News, are so far without limit – in garnering a following that craves being told they are merely the victims of an out-of-control government in league with the forces of evil.

Beck, like so many before him, delivers what he knows his audience wants to hear. Their financial woes are caused not by a Republican administration that plunged their country into unfathomable debt, nor the war-profiteers who stood to make a fortune through armed conflict, nor the actions of “conservatives” who have traditionally stood for fiscal responsibility – despite the fact that they never practice it.

Instead Beck insinuates that it is the Welfare Queens who have stolen the money of hard-working taxpayers, the adherents of Islam who have caused global unrest, the Liberals and the Progressives who, by virtue of being educated and informed (i.e. “elitists") have wreaked havoc in the lives of average citizens who they perceive as being beneath them intellectually.

He is, for all intents and purposes, a Master at the game. He plays it well, and he has the money and the ratings to prove it.

However, there is more to be said about Beck’s well-honed skill, and it is this: The man knows what he’s doing, and it doesn’t bother him a whit.

He knows he is fomenting discord among his fellow Americans based on lies and innuendo. He knows he is inciting otherwise peaceful citizens to become violent and take up arms against their fellow citizens. He knows that his rhetoric leads his hapless fans to believe they are under attack and have no recourse but to fight for the way of life they are being led to believe is under siege – and must be met with all means available in order to preserve what little the “conservative agenda” has left them.

I repeat: Glenn Beck is NOT stupid. He knows the consequences of his actions – he just doesn’t give a fuck, one way or the other. He’s got his – a network that will support him despite the fact that his former sponsors won’t, and a paycheck that says Keep Up The Good Work and let the wellbeing of the country be damned.

Beck’s latest tirade, however, may have crossed that line that only the most foolhardy politicos have mistakenly deemed ripe for trespass: he has admonished his hapless viewers to abandon Christian churches that support “social justice” – the very core of Christ’s teachings.

Being a woman of a certain age, I remember well when the world-wide press eruputed in collective outrage when John Lennon opined that the Beatles were “more popular than Jesus Christ”. I will wait patiently for the backlash to Beck’s contention that he is more influential among Christians, and what they should be swayed by, than the Nazarene himself.

It will be telling.

Silence from individual Christians, as well as the powers-that-be in Christian churches, can only be perceived as acquiescence to Beck’s assertion that his influence is more powerful than that of Jesus himself.

And a backlash from those same Christians, those who believe in the teachings of Christ rather than the blatherings of Glenn Beck, will be his undoing.

FOX-News huckster OR the Prince of Peace – it’s time to pick a side.

I merely report – you decide.