Glenn Beck: He’s Got The Courage Of His Ignorance
For those of you that are regular watchers of Countdown with Keith Olbermann, you may have heard him occasionally refer to Glenn Beck as “Lonesome Rhodes”. This is a pointed reference to the main character in the 1957 film “A Face In The Crowd” staring Andy Griffith. The film charts the transformation of an incarcerated wandering bum, into a charismatic media superstar. Rhodes is charming and entertaining but also cruel and manipulative. He is always looking out for himself first and never misses an opportunity to further his career, even if it means the suffering of others. The film warns against the extraordinary power of television as a new and highly persuasive medium. It also serves as a cautionary tale concerning America’s unique love affair with the “common man”.
The film was made fifty years ago but it could have been talking about today’s news media superstars who push personality over information to their millions of enthusiastic watchers. Like Rhodes, Fox Fantasy News entertainers Glenn Beck, Hannity and O’reilly present themselves as ordinary, everyday Americans who are simply fighting for all of those other ordinary, everyday Americans. It is Beck, however, who best captures Rhodes techniques of gut level manipulation. He instinctively understands what his audience wants to hear and gives it to them with both barrels. He gets up close and personal with his viewers in a way that seemingly erases the barrier of the television screen completely. He is both comical and compelling and his earnest delivery obfuscates the absolute dishonesty of his words.
For both Rhodes and Beck, the power that they have stumbled upon is ultimately uncontrollable. It corrupted both of them into megalomaniacs who forever continue to push the boundaries of decency and honesty. The ultimate downfall of Rhodes is preceded by an extraordinary statement of ego that very well could be echoing in the mind of Glenn Beck before every single one of his performances.
“This whole country’s just like my flock of sheep! Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers – everybody that’s got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don’t know it yet, but they’re all gonna be ‘fighters for Fuller’. They’re mine! I own ‘em! They think like I do. Only they’re even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for ‘em.”
The Title of this post is from another quote from the movie. Walter Matthau plays the intellectual counterpoint to Rhodes “common man” and he utters this line as Rhodes is being particularly loud about one of his extemporaneous pieces of twisted homespun logic. You could have repeated the line verbatim after any one of Beck’s more uninformed statements of “fact” over the last few months. The time he called the President a racist is a good place to start. Any one of his statements about Obama’s “Czars” or his recent attempt to cite the University of “I don’t know” as proof of the large turnout to his Washington Tea Party will also fit the pattern. But that’s the problem with men like Rhodes and Beck. Whether they are ignorant of the facts or willfully ignorant of the consequences of their actions, they shout it to the heavens as if it was gospel and never back down even when faced with the truth. Beck’s “courage of his ignorance” is mistaken as a virtue and his reputation among his followers is then increased.
As I was watching this film again, I couldn’t help but think how angry Glenn Beck supporters would get if they saw the film today. I think it would drive them nuts. Even though the movie was made 50 years ago, they probably wouldn’t be able to get the idea out of their minds that this was a “hit piece” on their superstar. Although the parallels aren’t entirely consistent, the picture of common man as demagogue would be uncomfortably familiar to any Beck viewer.
One final quote from the film does leave us with some hope that men like Rhodes and Beck will always lose out in the end. As Rhodes is having a breakdown in his penthouse apartment, Walter Matthau delivers the final line of the movie. “We get wise to them. That’s our strength. We get wise to them.”
