The Glenn Beck Dilemma
How do you solve a problem like Glenn Beck? Of all of the right wing talk show hosts, Glenn Beck is the most difficult to define and the most difficult to fight against. He clearly hates the Democrats and especially our current president. But the way that he chooses to present his hateful arguments leaves one wondering if he really believes his strange rambling accusations or if he is playing his audience and critics for fools. In other words, is he a zealot or an actor? One thing is for sure, he is not a journalist. His technique requires no fact checking and he uses the words “may be”, “possibly” and “we don’t know” more than any other news figure on TV. Despite the many qualifications of his “facts”, the conviction of his delivery is able to sell simple innuendo as the absolute truth.
But again, does he really believe it? I think he really does. First, the amount of creative writing that would be needed to come up with enough conspiracies to fill 5 hours of television and 15 hours of radio a week would be enormous. Second, it is obvious that his ideas flow freely and prolifically from a manic stream of consciousness. He uses numerous asides and strays from idea to idea. He sees connections in everything and seems willing to make leaps of pure faith so astounding it would make a normal person swoon.
With Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity, you can see their mind working behind the words. Theirs is a purposeful propaganda that is designed, sometimes expertly, to scare, incite and motivate their audiences. When you watch Beck, you see a man walking a razors edge with no real understanding of the consequences of his words and no concern at all for his many contradictions. The episode where he calls the President a racist is the quintessential example of Beck’s incoherence. Within 30 seconds he went from saying the president “has a deep seated hatred for white people” to “I’m not saying he hates white people” to “he’s a racist”. Again, all within a thirty second sound bite. The stunning thing is that he truly did not see the crazy contradictions of his own words.
So, how do you solve a problem like Glenn Beck? How do you argue with a crazy person? The answer is you don’t. You can never win that argument; you can only lose your own sanity. Glenn Beck will continue to say what the voices inside his head tell him to say, and people will continue to watch and listen. We can only hope that his insanity does not infect many more people than it already has.
