Friday, August 28, 2009
Step aside, Borat
Sometimes I attempt to describe with words the sensation of listening to John Coltrane play. It's a futile task. Music, and non-literary arts in general, affect an emotional part of humanity that resides deeper than our language faculties. It is quite simply ineffable.
I feel a similar limitation when attempting to describe Glenn Beck. Yes, he's crazy, but his insanity, though hardly subtle, is somehow kind of charming. It's not "kidnap a young girl and keep her in your shed crazy." It's more like a combination of "enthusiastic Star-Trek nerd crazy" and "four year old explaining the preferred diet of her imaginary friend crazy." An excited, earnest communication of his fears and beliefs...that just happen to be so bizarrely incorrect that one almost feels bad refuting his facts. There's so much more wrong with him.
Of course, his delusions, entertaining as they happen to be, are hardly harmless. Given that leading Republicans view him as an intellectual luminary, his portrait of Obama as an white-people hating communist cannot simply be shrugged off as the work of a cable entertainer.
Watching Beck in real time, and noting with shock and disappointment that he has a large, devoted following, feels like being on the ground floor of the creation of a new religion. He has a passionate, unhinged certainty that is the hallmark of all mystics and cult leaders. Numbers, not truth, make a cult a religion, and I'm not sure a television show produced by Joseph Smith would be all that different.
But I find myself simultaneous in stitches (Oligarhy? Really?) and terrified. Especially given the oddly violent tone of the health care protests. He seems so daffy and harmless, but it only takes a couple of nut jobs to buy into his mutilation of affairs, both current and historic, to turn the clown into something all together more dangerous.
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There was a moment just after he'd written "OLIGARH" and said, "There's just one letter missing," where I thought I knew where the segment was headed. Then he 'completed' the word with a "Y", and I was dumbstruck.
ReplyDeleteWhat does "OLIGARHY" mean? What did he mean by the phrase, "I don't know if we're turning into an oligarchy, or what," mean? I'm stupified.
I love how we're now either an oligarchy, fascist neo-nazi state, or a socialist distopia. Or, perhaps, all three rolled into one? Perhaps he believes that supreme executive power is weilded by a cabal of obscenely wealthy, autocratic rulers who somehow managed to both seize power and be granted it by the will of the people in order to share basic resources with the society at large while at the same time hoarding them for themselves?
I can't wait for him to tell me exactly what to do to 'get my Republic' back tomorrow.
An inside source told me that Beck is going to do a devastating exposee of Obama's appeasement of the Decepticons. Apparantly he talked to Megatron without precondition.
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