Glenny and His Little Red Phone

A tale for children of all ages:

Thomas Frank asserts Beck's red phone "really symbolizes a new kind of ignorance"

http://mediamatters.org/items/200911040001

From Frank's November 3 Wall Street Journal column:

Glenn Beck, the popular Fox News host, has a red telephone on his desk that never seems to ring. Every now and then, in a moment of acute frustration, he will pick it up and give the camera his trademark pleading-puppy look.

(Does that "look" make anyone else think of a puppy, pleading or otherwise? I love puppies. I would never think of harming a puppy or even wishing that harm would come his way. As a matter of fact, I would rescue every puppy I see,  if I could make his or her life better. This man, Beck,  does not remind me of a puppy, no matter his expression. I don't care what happens to him, I just wish it didn't have to happen on live television.) 

What Mr. Beck wants to hear from the phone are answers, and he wants to hear them from the highest authority in the land: the phone, he says, is "a dedicated line right to the White House." And when Mr. Beck gets things wrong, he wants his antagonists on Pennsylvania Avenue to correct him. But "They don't call. They're not going to call."

(Of course not. Does anyone relish the idea of calling crazy Aunt Matilda at the local macadamia ranch. In all seriousness, why on earth would anyone expect that the White House would publicly call someone who a majority of people believe is either demented or a damn good actor.)

Consider a few of the other grand assertions tossed out by the panic-peddling host last week: that the cause of last year's financial crisis was pressure exerted by Acorn and "the people in Washington" on otherwise-reluctant mortgage lenders; that the cause of the inflation of the 1970s was President Jimmy Carter's quest for a "socialist utopia."

(Say what? Damn! I can't even follow that "logic," having actually lived though the period he mentions in a fairly conscious state.)

These are postulates that it is only possible to believe after you have utterly closed yourself off to conventional ways of knowing, after you have decided that the reporting and analysis and scholarship on these subjects are not worth reading, and that you will choose ideological fairy tales over reality until the day a magical phone call comes from on high.

  

What Mr. Beck's silent phone really symbolizes is a new kind of ignorance, a coming high-tech dark age in which people can choose to blow off professional standards of inquiry; in which they can wall themselves off with cable TV and friendly Web sites, dismiss what displeases as liberal bias, and demand that any contrary view be transmitted to them via telephone call from the president himself.

Yep, and this is no laughing matter, unlike Mr. Beck is, from time to time. It will be interesting, indeed, to see how America deals with containing two entirely different realities. I certainly hope that the powers-that-be do not over-react and try to start controlling everything, especially the Internet. No doubt, this is a dangerous time in this country and, let's face it, the world-at-large is not all that safe. Not only does Beck's phone represent a new kind of "chosen" ignorance, but an ignorant, narcissistic sense of entitlement that, I'm afraid, doesn't stop with Beck. 

Why not let Mr. Beck and his viewers have their fun? Because ideas have consequences. Maybe, as many believe, Glenn Beck is indeed the future of the conservative movement. From tea parties to town-hall meetings, thousands are signing up and fitting themselves out with their very own hotline to nowhere.

I have yet to figure out what Beck's ideas are. Of course, I must admit that I cannot watch much of his shtick. From what I have been able to deduce; Acorn is responsible for every bad thing that has happened to the country since Blacks got the vote, or something like that. Barack Obama is connected to Acorn somehow....Acorn in Indonesia? . He had it all on a magnetic board one day when I happened by. That board was such a hideous mess by the time I tuned in, I could not make heads or tails of it. Is this what the guy's brain looks like on a Pet Scan, I wondered?

From what I can tell, his ideology goes something like this: All things Democratic are evil, corrupt and dark (one can take that last one anyway one wants and they will be correct). If God, itself, spoke from the heavens and, in a booming voice heard round the world, anointed Obama has his sacred messenger, Beck would declare him the anti-christ and the battle would be joined for Armageddon. Beck has no sense of history at all from what I can tell, not unlike the mouthpieces of the last administration.

He seems to believe that Democrats are the spiritual sons and daughters of Stalin and Lenin. He seems to not know what socialism, communism and Marxism are, let alone understand the role of authoritarianism in some of the greatest and most damaging crack-ups in history. Does he not understand that Stalin no more represented what Marx had in mind than Beck, himself, represents what any rational person means by "fair and balanced." or  just balanced, for that matter.

I imagine that he is a huge fan of unfettered capitalism since it is this system which allows him to be paid a huge salary to seemingly have a slow psychic meltdown on Teevee for everyone to see. Hey, reality teevee sells and it's cheap to produce. Old Rupert knows what sells. It's all to be expected in anything-for-a-buck America.

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Let The Sun Shine In......