Monday, August 30, 2010
Just because I'm a glutton for punishment...
...I'm going to link to Clive Crook's little write-up on Glenn Beck's rally on Saturday. (Actually, many of you who beat me up for this post will like Crook's, I think.)
4 Comments:
By 
JPMcT, at
Mon Aug 30, 07:14:00 PM:
Beck is a complex fellow. I have enjoyed his morning AM radio show for a long time because he always seemed to be able to condense the meaning of a story down to a kernel that still retained the moral complexity of his argument. Like any good orator, I admired both his style and substance.
Now that he has become a "personality", he has picked up a flair for the dramatic that is a bit alienating, but he STILL has the capacity to take an argument and crystallize it to it's essence while retaining the complexity.
His current argument is that our society is off balance, our leaders are driven by an agenda ourside of public service, our educational system has systematically purged a new generation of it's appreciation of what made America wonderful...and...as a consequence...we are on a road to failure, probably a catastrophic one.
It's easy to trivialize Beck by aligning him with religious themes...and it's quite sad to see that THAT is a way of trivializing someone.
Crook's article trivializes him in this way. What he does not seem to understand is taht one does not have to be a religious person to agree with Beck's basic propositions.
There are a HUGE number of people within our borders who think that this country is massively off-course. They find in Glenn Beck a kindred spirit.
I guess that we will have to wait until the November election results to see if Beck's efforts are successful.
"God" help us if we are not.
By MTF, at
Mon Aug 30, 07:56:00 PM:
To provide some continuity, I'll go to all the trouble of signing in despite the difficulty of working the sign-in system here. Yes, I'm not happy about it (whatever the system is, it stinks). Anyway, Crook was probably not far off my own view, though I think there was more to the substance of the speakers than he lets on; I thought there was value in the talk about public virtue, as in classical "virtue", apart from the religion. Beck had two aims I think, but both involved trying to change the country: he was certainly interested in promoting Judeo-Christian values, but he was also trying to promote public virtue of the non-secular, ant-PC type. He spoke about the importance of celebrating hero's, of the civic and military type. He wants children to grow up emulating those heros, and citizens to worry less about victim-oriented identity politics and more about "what's right". The speakers, one after the other, defied type, and black people stood up to talk about the necessity of listening to old time values, and latinos stood up to talk about the greatness of America and white people stood up to celebrate diversity. Lefty racists, who regrettably might well include CC I think, will deride those people as traitors to their race, but (if you actually watched the broadcast) I think you would see that view is wrong headed. As simple as Beck might be, and as superficial his view of history might be, it was a very interesting non-political medicine show.
By Diogenes, at
Tue Aug 31, 12:30:00 AM:
Sorry TH, that was not a sufficient understanding of Glenn Beck's Saturday rally.
Proper penance would be to watch his TV show for at least two weeks (that's ten programs) and report back to us.
By 
, at
Tue Aug 31, 09:10:00 AM:
Any effect Beck's rally for getting back to constitutional values will have will be more than offset by the nefarious actions of the opposition.
To get an idea of the tactics you may want to check out We will not be silenced. The site contains a preview of a documentary which purports to show how the Obama Campaign won the Democratic Nomination.
