In the midst of Stephen King's epic series, The Dark Tower, Roland -- the last questing knight of a dying world -- comes across a degenerate tribe that worships the rotted end of a gas pump and shouts the name of an oil company as the invocation of their god.
In other words, he's tuned into the Glenn Beck show.
The rise of Glenn Beck is the clearest sign possible that we are living in the end times. Don't bother checking the situation in the Middle East. No Antichrist required.
The thing is, what's ending isn't the world -- it's the conservative movement. Sure, the term is still in use, and there are more than a million unwashed followers pressing their slack features to the glass as Glenn rants, cries, and slobbers (the Lovecraftian term "gibbering" never seemed more appropriate). But these aren't conservatives.
This isn't the conservative movement that grabbed control of the federal legislature in 1937 and held the reins all but two years over the next two decades. It's not the intellectual construct explored by Bill Buckley. It's not even the simplistic labor=communism right that Ronald Reagan forged while working as a paid union buster for GE.
These people -- Beck, and O'Reilly, and Limbaugh -- they use the word conservative, but it doesn't mean anything. They scream about socialism, but they don't have a definition. It's just noise. Just sounds that vaguely resemble language, a barbaric yawp that bounces along the roof of the world, but holds no content other than hatred. There's more real, substantive information in the morning chorus of Howler Monkeys than there is in an day of all three of them put together.
In that other massive fantasy of our time, George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, the last pretender to the throne of the dragon kings is derided as "less than the shadow of a snake." Beck? He's not even that.
Conservative writer David Frum calls Beck "a product of the collapse of conservatism as an organized political force." He's right about that, and he's right about the state of conservatism.
That doesn't mean the minions aren't dangerous. And it doesn't mean that the word conservatism won't wave on some banner in the future. But it won't be the house that Buckley built. That movement is gone, leaving only these slow mutants in its place.