Well, his tears were a nice touch.
They came roughly in the middle of the few, preposterous minutes I spent with Glenn Beck on Saturday. The first of those minutes he devoted to something about another George Washington being somewhere in the crowd, who, perhaps a mere eight years old now, would in 25 years mount the steps of the Lincoln Memorial and announce either the coming or culmination (I was a trifle vague about which) of his American dream.
Or at least I think that's what I heard. Following Beck's drift was tricky, since he sloshed from George to Martin to Abe -- and at one extended point, Moses, who, by the way, "had a stick" -- in torrential currents of historical reinvention which were, admittedly, vastly amusing, but therein also quite distracting. Which is to say, I couldn't stop chuckling. And that rendered my full attention to Beck's insights a rather bumpy endeavor.
But those tears of his -- ah, that clenching of the throat, that breaking of the voice, that Swaggartesque timing of Vesuvian emotion. Well, as I said, nice touch. For one transcendent moment, I was as Proust at the theatre, marveling at the splendor of low theatricality.
Too soon it was that we were then thrust back into Beck's "history" tutorial, now featuring the Gettysburg Address. He recited it and suggested its immense relevance to today, with which I wholeheartedly agreed, since all I could think of as Beck exploited Lincoln's mass eulogy was that the bloody thing was necessary only because states-righters, wrapped in a violently false philosophy, had gone madly demagogic.
But that's just about enough said. I refuse to spend much time on Beck, either watching him, listening to him, or writing about him. For there's little of fresh value that one can note, or long bear, about a megalomaniacal, messianic, world-class crackpot of cosmic ambition and honorable void.
His artistry, as it were, is no secret. Beck is but the most recent manifestation of yet another Face in the Crowd; he mixes subatomic particles of truth with complex molecules of fabrication and distortion and then hawks the resulting swill to a pitiably ill-read, inexcusably credulous audience.
Before Beck, there was a Beck; after Beck, there'll be another Beck. Because with sufficient glibness and loads of marketing talent -- two human commodities hardly rare -- one can sell absolutely anything to appreciable chunks of the American people.