I have mixed feelings about Frank Rich's having chosen to make Glenn Beck the focus of today's column. There is nothing Glenn Beck likes better than to be taken seriously, and this week's upswing of MSM attention, including a puff piece and cover photo in Time, has been great for Beck, lending him authority as some kind of representative of a genuine populist movement, rather than one of the opportunistic and cynical aiders and abetters of radical, me-first-and-me-only laissez-faire capitalism.
From the title, "Even Glenn Beck is right twice a day," to his concluding paragraph, Rich holds up Beck as a (if not the) current instigator and inventor and fueling agent for the rage evident at the 9/12 rally and at teabag parties, health care reform forums, and the like, which Rich cogently describes as
right-wing populism in the classic American style, as inchoate and paranoid as that hawked by Father Coughlin during the Great Depression and George Wallace in the late 1960s. Wallace is most remembered for his racism, but he, like Beck, also played on the class and cultural resentment of those sharing his view that there wasn’t “a dime’s worth of difference” between the two parties.
I am sure Beck is thrilled to be compared to both Coughlin and Wallace, especially when his rivals (Limbaugh, O'Reilly, etc.) scarcely merit a passing mention. Once done bestowing a crown of influence on Beck, Rich's column turns into a critique of the Obama administration:
Unlike liberal critics of capitalist inequities, of course, Beck and his claque are driven by an over-the-top detestation of government. Washington is always the enemy, stealing their hard-earned money to redistribute it to the undeserving and shiftless poor (some of whom just happen to be immigrants or black). Though there is nothing Obama can do to stop racists from being racist, he could help stanch the economic piece of this by demonstrating how a reformed government can at times actually make Americans’ lives better. ....
Nor has Obama succeeded in persuading critics on the left or right that he will do as much for those Americans who are suffering as he has for the corporations his administration and his predecessor’s rushed to rescue.
My problem with Rich's column — and I am a big fan of Frank Rich, with whose views I nearly always agree — is that it addresses two very different kinds of topics. For one, Rich has given Beck a huge boost of legitimacy — not just because "there's no such thing as negative publicity": there is such a thing, but Rich did not devote enough space to exposing Beck's lies (and the sources thereof). Instead, Rich even ends up providing a link to a website where the reader can sign up to be proselytized by Beck's Mormon church. Had Rich chosen to dig up and publish the background dirt on Beck, that in itself would have been a public service.
For the other, while I largely agree with Rich's criticism that President Obama has not had huge success in selling his programs and reforms, Rich might have, and should have, spent time focusing on MSM's insistence on giving equal airtime and column inches to ideas and assertions filled with lies and distortions— without doing its job to inform the public that those winger ideas and assertions are false. President Obama is fighting a huge battle against corporate-controlled media whose interests focus on making money rather than on promoting the public good.
As is my wont, I responded to Rich's column in the comments (though I never know if what I write will appear); I wrote two, back-to-back:
Comment 1: I remain astonished at the rank hypocrisy of someone like Glenn Beck — much more than just "financially secure," possessed of good health care (quite apart from being possessed, period) — who eggs on the masses to reject the health care reform from which they and their children would directly benefit. Of course, Beck and his cohorts (Limbaugh, O'Reilly, Coulter, etc.) would likely face higher taxes on their considerable wealth should genuine reform pass.
All of these right-wing demagogues rely on the low-information voters to fill their coffers, listen to their too-often dishonest and fearmongering screeds, buy their books, and attend their rallies. But all of America ends up being penalized for such venal, partisan ignorance and opportunism. Mainstream media must shoulder a considerable portion of the blame for our country's current turmoil for having given column inches and airtime to the silliest and most nonsensical of charges, often without bother to inform the reader or viewer or listener that those charges are flat-out lies. (Clearly, controversy is a money-maker for the handful of corporations who control most of America's media these days, and making money is more important than truth-telling, regardless of what the lies and distortions are doing to pull America apart.)
I look daily at this untoward spectacle playing out from my relatively safe haven here across the Atlantic, and more often than not, I find myself in tears.
Comment 2: PS: I followed the "Glenn Beck is a Mormon" link Frank Rich provided in his article, and landed on a site offering me the chance to listen to Beck's conversion story and sign up to find out more about Mormonism. My response:
For someone who claims to have found and been healed by Jesus Christ, Mr Beck's words and deeds are hardly what any objective observer could call "Christian." He is a very poor ambassador for the Mormon church, let alone for the Lord whose precepts he ignores daily as he dishonestly and opportunistically fans the flames of bigotry and hatred in America.
To conclude, while I think "attention must be paid" to partisan hate-mongerers such as Beck, I think focusing solely on one (as opposed to all of them as a group) serves to stroke the ego of someone already sufficiently ego-maniacal and doubtless filled with visions of his own grandeur and importance. Focusing the spotlight on Beck in particular is especially dangerous — after all, he is a Mormon "elder," and as such, may genuinely believe that he is going to fulfill Mormon prophecies about Mormon elders saving the U.S. Constitution once it is "dangling by a thread." (He will most certainly not see the irony of his contribution to the Constitution's precarious state.)