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.

A glimpse behind the curtain...

I read this article and figured it all out:

Seeking vengeance for the CIA's creation and release of the HIV virus that decimated his native land, Obama and Jeremiah Wright developed the H1N1 virus to destroy the population of old white people responsible for segregation and other race crimes.

It's obvious that Obama had to rapidly force a health care bill with a death panel provision through congress so he could euthanize those old white people.

It's all so obvious when you put the pieces together.