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Book review: Alexander Zaitchik's Common Nonsense
When Glenn Beck went on tour last year to promote his book Glenn Beck's Common Sense, he often wandered, smiling, through the audience, dressed in full costume as Thomas Paine, the 18th century author who wrote the famous revolutionary treatise Common Sense, which supposedly inspired Beck's book. Beck lauded Paine for his love of freedom, opposition to tyranny, and, the FoxNews star implied, his views' similarity to Beck's.
Four problems: First, Paine, a British citizen, was one of history's most fervent advocates of the separation of church and state, and was strongly opposed to organized religion — which is plain ol' Satan Talk to Beck, whose Mormon-based politics couldn't differ more from Paine's. Second, contrary to Beck, who regularly condemns religious leaders who call for social justice, Paine believed "that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring to make our fellow-creatures happy." Third, Paine was one of the earliest advocates of workers' rights, thought all working citizens should be guaranteed a minimum income, and believed that governments should run old-age pension programs — all of which are a far cry from the "magic of the free market" fundamentalism preached by Beck. The fourth problem? Beck's adoring audiences had no idea that their media hero barely knew what he was talking about. By the way, Beck's book went to the top of the best-seller lists. This is what you get when millions of people fall under the spell of a guy who became famous by bringing his training in Morning Zoo radio showmanship to the realm of political talk shows.
In Common Nonsense, author Alexander Zaitchik relates Beck's circuitous path to the top of the right-wing media heap. He describes Beck's radio beginnings where, the author says, Beck "mastered the art of media stunts and calculated outrage while working as an itinerant showman in the clownish, cutthroat world of Top 40 morning radio." During his early Morning Zoo days, Beck routinely offended fellow jocks by his arrogance and self-absorption, while his cruel on-air pranks earned him a slew of reprimands. "He was like a child," said one former co-worker, "He thought he could do or say anything he wanted." One day, in a now-infamous episode, Beck called the wife of a competitor a few days after she had suffered a miscarriage. "We hear you had a miscarriage!" Beck told the woman. When she confirmed her loss, Beck joked that "[her husband] couldn't do anything right," then laughed, while the woman was still on the air.
It's that kind of cruelty and total lack of empathy for anyone else that comes through the loudest in Zaitchik's portrait of Beck. Now, we can forgive someone what is usually called "youthful indiscretion," and it would be easy to do the same thing for Beck's early public cruelties — except that he hasn't changed. Recently, Beck made fun of President Obama's 11-year-old daughter Malia, while using a racist caricature of African-American speech, and implying that both of Obama's daughters are stupid. Beck had to apologize on the air for picking on the president's children, but the point is that the guy is essentially out of control — a narcissistic hustler whose high ratings are apparently enough reason for FoxNews to leave him untethered. What's worse is that his exaggerated sense of importance has led him to publicly share his ongoing, and woefully out-to-lunch, remedial history self-education. Whether he's denouncing the early-20th century Progressive movement (which, among other outrages, outlawed child labor, gave women the right to vote, and instituted food and drug inspections in the U.S.), or claiming a kind of kinship with Martin Luther King (who was the quintessential "peace and love liberal" Beck and his followers despise), Beck lives in a historical wonderland where whatever he says happened really happened, and stunning leaps of illogic are the norm. Think of him as a right-wing New Ager, "creating reality" wherever he goes. His antics would be funny, albeit in a grotesque, cartoonish way, if not for the fact that so many people hang on Beck's every word and share his paranoid fantasies about Marxist presidents, impending national doom, evil, terror-spreading mosques, and on and on.
The state of the nation's political discourse is in deep trouble. Whether Beck is a cause or a symptom of that trouble is for you to judge after reading Zaitchik's valuable book. I'd say he's both.
Common Nonsense: Glenn Beck and the Triumph of Ignorance by Alexander Zaitchik
(Wiley, 288 pages, $25.95).
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