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Glenn Beck and Public Faith
How
crazy can one bastard be?
Beck is no preacher, after all, and no
professor either; he's merely an entertainer, a guy who's out to sell
books,
safes, gold coins, and TV ads. He's smart enough to know that paranoia
motivates, which is why his speeches and
TV rants turn garden-variety political defeats into tragedies of epic
proportions. At Saturday's rally, Beck compared
himself to "the man who saw the iceberg as the Titanic's about to hit
it and said, 'It’s an iceberg.'"
The precise definition of this iceberg isn’t clear, but Beck’s
worldview is diffuse enough to cover all sorts of dissatisfaction,
from election of a president with a foreign-sounding name to concerns
about deficit spending. What seems to unite his
followers is a sense of persecution - and a need for some sort of
cosmic validation. On Beck's Facebook site, someone
posted a link to a video of geese flying past the Reflecting Pool, and
wrote: "The Military refused to participate,
so GOD sent a flock of his creatures to fly over in a perfect V
formation."
Maybe God did send those geese just to bolster Glenn Beck’s ego, though
it would have looked more like
divine intervention if they’d flown in the shape of, say, a pretzel.
Either way, Beck has somehow managed
to achieve a miracle of his own: He’s convinced millions of people that
our nation is suddenly lost.