Thursday, September 17, 2009

Glenn's Not-So-Secret Motive

Time's profile of Glenn Beck, the paranoid, recovering alcoholic suffering from DTs of the tongue, is mostly a tale of his rise from a 13-year-old kid with a dream of being on the radio to one of the most popular media figures in America. However, the piece goes expose the soft underbelly to the lighth of day and reminds us that he's just another huckster selling snake oil to stupid people:
There are bigger one-voice enterprises in the world: Oprah, Rush, Dr. Phil. But few are more widely diversified. In June, estimators at Forbes magazine pegged Beck's earnings over the previous 12 months at $23 million, a ballpark figure confirmed by knowledgeable sources, and this year's revenues are on track to be higher. The largest share comes from his radio show, which is heard by more than 8 million listeners on nearly 400 stations — one of the five biggest radio audiences in the country. Beck is one of only a handful of blockbuster authors who have reached No. 1 on the New York Times best-seller lists with both nonfiction and fiction. (Among the others: John Grisham, Patricia Cornwell and William Styron. Unlike them, however, Beck gets a lot of help from his staff.) His latest book, Arguing with Idiots, will be published this month, and if things go as expected, it will be the third No. 1 with his name on the front published in the past 12 months. Taking a page from Stephen King — who once called Beck "Satan's mentally challenged younger brother" — Beck recently entered into a partnership with Simon & Schuster that pays him a share of
profits rather than a traditional author's royalty, and he plans to create a range of books for every audience, from children to teens to adults.
He says he's afraid for this country, afraid that corruption in Washington is spreading on a nationwide scale, that there are communists in the Obama administration ready to replace the Stars and Stripes with the Soviet hammer and sickle, that ordinary people in ordinary towns across the country are going to be sent to Nazi-style concentration camps if they resist the Obama administration, that Obama's efforts to foster volunteerism is really an attempt to create a "civilian national security force that is just as strong, just as powerful as the military."

It's easy to laugh and dismiss him as a tin-foil hatter, but he has millions of devoted viewers, readers, and listeners, and he has the backing of one of the most powerful media corporations on the planet. And in truth, he's a sick puppy. One only need to look at the fact that his mom committed suicide while Beck was a teenager, that he used alcohol to medicate that pain, that he turned to a bizarre Christian cult like Mormonism (the only major world religion born in America, by the way -- seems fitting) for some meaning in life, to understand that his mental gears grind very differently than ours. At the end of the day, combining his pathology with his access to power should make us very wary.

The latest from Little Green Footballs reports that Beck's advertising revenue has fallen 50% since he said on his Fox show that Obama had a "deep-seated hatred for white people" and was a "racist." So far, 62 companies, including Wal-Mart, Bank of America, Procter & Gamble, and the US Postal Service, have pulled their advertising dollars from Beck's show. God bless America and the First Amendment.

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