The King and the Fool
If you want to see how Fox makes the news, look at any news site or turn your TV to any news channel today, and you'll see Glenn Beck and his band of merry idiots marching on Washington with their hand—painted signs and making a mockery of Dr. Martin Luther King's world-historic speech.
Don't get me wrong. It's entirely appropriate that the occasion of that famous speech be hijacked and the memory of its real and stirring moral call to arms made a mockery of by Beck & Co., who claim to have chosen the place and time without knowing its significance. I believe them. I mean, of course they didn't know. Why on earth would they? But they have merrily capitalized on it as an afterthought, haven't they?
That's how mockery works.
So why is it appropriate, you ask? Because not only have we all but abandoned the moral mission King mapped out in his "I Have a Dream" speech 47 years ago today, but we have allowed people like Beck to hijack the agenda. We could pretend to be the nation MLK dreamed of almost fifty years ago today on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, but then along comes Beck.
We should all be ashamed that we can't look away.
Beck has been compared, and, indeed has compared himself to Howard Beale of Network. But in the movie, Beale raged against his bosses at the network (especially when he discovered it would be bought by a Saudi Arabian conglomerate — hmmmm?) — Beck wouldn't dream of criticizing his keepers. With his book clubs and online courses, he's more Fox's noxious answer to Oprah.
No, Beck is no Howard Beale. He's having his moment now, but when his ratings start to slip we can only hope Fox will do to him what UBS did to Beale.
Now, that'd be news.
Demagoguery is Beck et al. in their pure form. Whether conservatives, and effectively any Republicans of any note, claim mantles of news commentator, politician, mother of a veteran, or wrap themselves with religious or moral cloaks, they all - today - remain demagogues.
What the Becks, Limbaughs, Palins, Dobsons and Ted Haggarts of the world have in common is that they lust for power and fame.They will use anything and anyone toward to satisfy their psychological addictions.
On the other hand why are there no liberal demagogues? Because liberal or progressive thought rarely relies upon fear and paranoia. Joe McCarthy, who I think still remains the best example of demagoguery in this nation - and we've had some of the best of all time - was a pure expression of demagoguery. He was somebody who would have fit in the Third Reich without missing a goosestep. He used fear, psychological terror, insinuation, implication, he created a social terror that relied upon very few facts but a whole lot of FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt).
That is what Beck, Palin and the religious right folks are all promoting: FUD. They rely upon blowing things out of proportion, use real challenges created by their own political allies to smear political opponents, invoke scapegoats (is it any wonder so many condemn Gays and, that civilization shattering awful invasion of illegal immigrants?) and use FUD to create a hurricane of mental turmoil, so that they can then present themselves as the pure righteous leading the poor (that is actually middle class - doubt if any of them would ever live in a poor neighborhood ) confused masses to clarity and greatness.
That the mosque near the World Trade Center site is the controversy de jure is not surprising. Moslems - at least at the level of popular discourse - can be a safe scapegoat that now replaces Jews as a scapegoat. The irony is that this suggests growth in the fundamental American psyche that Jews can not today be used as a scapegoat in mass media (though anti-Semites are aplenty). The illuminating aspect of the irony is that the invocation of a Moslem as the new scapegoat, proves that the need for a scapegoat in a collection psche is as powerful today as it was anytime in the 20th century.
But then if we didn't have scapegoats who else could we blame when - WE, US, the supposedly greatest nation on Earth - screw things up?
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