Glenn Beck: a clown by moonlight

"...there's nothing funny about a clown in the moonlight...." Lon Chaney Sr.

(hat to James Kunstler)

David Seaton's News Links

First, once again, it is important to remember that it is central to Glenn Beck's message that nothing in it make much, or sometimes any, sense at all.

This is not some sort of defect due to lack of intelligence or skill on his part.

Quite the contrary, his is a work of art in the media of cynical confusion. There is no other meaning to it than the anger he arouses.

No other fuel for the fires he ignites than the frustrations and confusion of his listeners.

To keep them confused and frustrated is the goal. Glenn Beck is a master of his art form.

What is disturbing is not so much Beck himself or even that an audience exists for Beck. What is disturbing is that there is an enormous amount of money being spent to put him into every home in America. That is terrifying.

The idea is simply to manipulate through emotions. The only real messages are the emotions.

To understand what Beck is doing, to understand him, you must suspend your capacity for rational thought and just let the emotions wash over you and try to take note of them as they assault your endocrine system and all I can say is this: children don't try this at home.

Here is a hostile sample of Beck in full flight just to get your juices flowing:

Charming isn't it, the devil doll cuteness of it all? The little campy gestures...

What is behind this grotesque performance?

Simply this:

The USA is moving into what appears to be a long period of low growth and the rapidly increasing deterioration of the American middle class's legendary living standards, not to mention the working poor's. Also reform and regulation are necessary in the energy and financial sectors. America's infrastructure needs restoring and refurbishing. The whole thing is a mess and needs to be firmly taken in hand with the greatest good for the greatest number as the guiding principal.

This means, in the not too long run, more regulations, more control and more taxes, which means in turn that people with a lot of money are going to feel a little less free and a little less wealthy than they do today. They are paying Mr. Beck to help keep Americans from thinking rationally about their problems or thinking rationally at all.

If people could think straight for only a few days, be sure that sensible solutions that would benefit the majority of citizens would follow as night follows day. Those who have discovered and nurtured the talents of Mr. Beck and have provided him with the opportunity to reach millions of viewers are investing their money now to avoid those sensible solutions affecting their future earnings.

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Lately I've discovered that one of Becks favorite targets is none other than Woodrow Wilson, who he accuses of multiple sins, among them for being a fascist avant la lettre.

Watch how he does it:

Here is a little explanation of why he puts this Wilsonophobia all together, written by an egg headed, Ivy League, frau doktor-professor and published in that Marxist-elitist, Islamofascist, cheese-eating, faggot-socialist, competition-for-Rupert-Murdoch rag, the New York Times:

To the campaign to make “progressive” a slur, Wilson is useful. Much as many people admire aspects of his presidency, he has no natural constituency any more, right or left. He was opposed to female suffrage. He supported Jim Crow. He wrote about Anglo-Saxon racial supremacy. He makes a good bad guy. He was also an intellectual, the first U.S. president to hold a Ph.D.(...) This professor-president has convenient similarities to our current chief executive — a scholar of constitutional law, professorial, intellectual, even, in some people’s eyes, effete (as, for instance, T.R. and F.D.R. were not). Jill Lepore Professor of American History at Harvard - NYT

I find it curious that Beck should attack Wilson, when those who supported the foreign policy of George W. Bush, neocons and the like, often portrayed it as Wilsonian. Wilson's interest in imposing American values on errant primitives by force of arms, was often used as the precedent for invading Iraq or fighting the Taliban. 

Of course consistency has nothing to do with Beck, still that he should attack the one figure that was used to add a bit of class to Bush's presidency seems a bit weird even by Beckish standards.

My particular beef with Wilson is a little different.

With the best intentions in the world, "making the world safe for democracy", Woodrow Wilson took the USA into WWI thereby setting off a series of catastrophes whose aftereffects we are still living with. I am sure that he would have been horrified to know what his meddling brought about.

It goes like this:

In 1917 Britain and France, Germany, Austria and Turkey had basically bled themselves white and had fought World War One to a draw. 

If left to themselves, they couldn't have continued much longer, especially with the Russian Revolution at their doors. Soon they would have had to come to the peace table and split the difference.

Thus there would have been no Versailles treaty and Germany wouldn't have had to pay the crippling reparations that caused the hyperinflation that helped bring Hitler to power, thus avoiding WWII.

The Austrio-Hungarian empire would have had time to collapse more gracefully and Turkey might still have control of the Middle East, thus avoiding many of the problems we have there today such as the Israel-Palestine conflict. 

Ask yourself, if Palestine were still a Turkish protectorate and the Holocaust had never taken place and European Jews were living happily in Germany, would Israel have even come into existence?

By entering the war, when it did, the USA was directly responsible for humiliating Germany and thus, in my opinion, is directly responsible for creating Hitler.

So for me Wilson is the father of the most evil century in humanity's history.

And so, logically, to top it off, without Woodrow Wilson there would be no Glenn Beck.

Way to go Woodrow! DS

Woodrow Wilson: the man who destroyed civilization

Woodrow Wilson

"Nicholson Baker, a supremely talented novelist, has written a surprising book of nonfiction titled "Human Smoke." It is composed primarily of snippets taken from contemporary newspapers in the run-up to World War II and makes the daring argument that the war -- our supposedly "good" war -- was not good at all. We shouldn't have fought it." Richard Cohen - Washington Post

"Politicians constantly fondle a small, clean, paperweight version of this war, as if it provides them with moral clarity. We know that it was the most destructive five year period in history. It was destructive of human lives, and also of shelter, sleep, warmth, gentleness, mercy, political refuge, rational discussion, legal process, civil tradition, and public truth. Millions of people were gassed, shot, starved, and worked to death by a paranoid fanatic. The war's victims felt as if they'd come to the end of civilization." Nicholson Baker

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Many people's interest in history begins with reading or seeing films about World War Two. My father's generation fought the war and my street was filled with veterans of North Africa, Sicily, Italy Normandy and the Pacific. It was natural for us to be curious and every house had stories to tell: history was a living thing. Most of us that became history buffs got our start there. This has caused many to have a very distorted view of how historical processes work, as if visiting aliens from outer space, intent on capturing a member of our species in order to study our habits and nature, captured and flew off with a schizophrenic they found talking to himself on a street corner. On debriefing this subject, the visitors from outer space might come to some curious conclusions about humanity's thought processes. In my opinion The Second World War is as valid a sample of typical human history as the schizophrenic, encased in his private logic, would be of the general run of our species.

World War Two, its insanity and evil continue to fascinate and the "Good War" has become a political Swiss Army Knife. As Nicholson Baker says in the quote from the box above:

"Politicians constantly fondle a small, clean, paperweight version of this war, as if it provides them with moral clarity."

I believe, however, that much of this emphasis on World War Two is misplaced or rather misdirected. The wrong questions are asked. What is the correct question?

First, there is no mystery about Hitler himself. Whether he was "evil" or not we must leave to theologians, what he was for sure was bat shit crazy. There are a lot of criminally insane people running around at any time and anywhere. The fundamental question is... has to be:

How did a totally insane, former corporal, failed watercolorist and recent clochard get supreme power in a country that had produced Meister Eckhart, Martin Luther, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Bach, Beethoven, Einstein and, and, and... the list goes on forever.

Germany was considered by many the most advanced, productive and civilized nation in the world. We are not talking about Idi Amin Dada taking over Uganda.

So, briefly, my idea is not that Hitler destroyed civilization, but that civilization had to be destroyed already for Hitler to have ever left the level of street thug or soapbox agitator. I disagree with Nicholson Baker, by the time Hitler took power war was unavoidable, simply because Hitler would have gotten the atomic bomb and put it on a V-2 rocket.

The war that really has to be studied is World War One. That is the war that could have been avoided and that was the war that could have ended differently. That is where civilization was destroyed. And as horrible a war as it was, it was not the war itself, but how it ended that brought on World War Two.

By 1917, when America entered the war, Germany and the Allies had bled themselves white, essentially they had fought each other to a draw. It was America's entry that "won" the war. If America had stood on the sidelines, the exhausted combatants would have had to make peace on the basis of that exhaustion and have signed a treaty formulating how they would continue to live together. The humiliation of the Versailles Treaty and the ensuing economic ruin and social disorder it brought upon Germany were what broke down Germany's social order to a point where a lowlife like Hitler could seem like an answer to it all.

Therefore, in my revisionist opinion, America' entry into the First World War led directly to the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Second World War and all its insanity. Wilson = Holocaust.

If we add all of the "Wilsonian" ideas of "self-determination" that led directly to the destruction of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Turkish Empire we can see the germs of the tragedies of the Balkans and the Middle East that are still with us today. All in all, I can think of no other individual in the history of humanity that caused so much death and destruction as Woodrow Wilson.

So, my plea would be when ever you hear Woodrow Wilson and "Wilsonism" invoked in order to invade or to bomb, remember what Wilson and Wilsonian really mean and the harm they have done and are doing at this very moment and the basically Wilsonian attitude of all of the candidates running for President of the United States today. DS