Radio Dada: Glenn Beck as Performance Art
By Dylan Matthews
As tens of thousands of conspiracy theorists, right wing survivalists, and revanchist malcontents of all varieties streamed into Washington, DC this past September 12 to protest…well, everything, it was all too easy (and fun!) to point and laugh at the various nuts parading through the nation’s capital. There was the requisite Confederate flag, and a bizarre Photoshop of Barack Obama as Francisco Franco that is even more bizarrely labeled “MARXIST.” My personal favorite was the sign accurately noting that the Obama administration has “more czars than the USSR.”
But the highlight of the occasion was not to be found in the streets, but on Fox News, where the 9/12 Project’s founder, Glenn Beck, had prepared a ten-minute video for the occasion. It is a masterpiece of passion, schmaltzy music, and irrepressible incoherence. It begins with Beck standing on a skyscraper in Times Square, directly in front of the Empire State Building, extolling various landmarks around him (Did you know that the Statue of Liberty is in New York? True fact!), before he dives head-first into a rant about how “America” has failed to rebuild the World Trade Centers. Why? Special interests, of course. How will we rebuild them? By marching on Washington. Because that, my friends, is how buildings are made.
To most liberals, Beck is a modern day Father Coughlin, another demagogue in the Fox mold peddling dangerous half-truths and lies for mass consumption. I do not disagree, and indeed think the work of groups like Think Progress and Media Matters is invaluable in attempting to marginalize him as a serious political force. But acknowledging that he is a dangerous force should not prevent us from recognizing the almost wholly unintentional brilliance of his program, his persona, his “projects,” and indeed his entire existence as a media force.
His show presents itself as comic brilliance. Beck once stood in front of the blackboard in his show’s set, writing down the names of various enemies—Obama, the Left, Internationalists, Graft, ACORN-style organizations, Revolutionaries, and Hidden Agendas—and posited that if we added one letter to this acronym (OLIGARH), we would see the true enemy facing America. That one letter? Y, of course. What, did you think Beck was talking about something other than the OLIGARHY?
Not all of the show’s “jokes” are so broad and farcical. Indeed, a careful viewer can appreciate Beck’s more subtle laugh lines. Shortly after railing against the dread OLIGARHY, Beck looked into the camera and forcefully promised his viewers, “I will tell you exactly the place to go, the way you can save your republic.” Then, as stock cable news transition music started to play, he switched into a hilariously cliché announcer voice and chirped, “That’s tomorrow! Don’t miss it!”
But beyond its irresistible humor, Beck’s show is densely peppered with literary, or at least middlebrow cinematic, allusion. Take the aforementioned blackboard, onto which he scrawls the names of the enemies who have failed him in ever-more-vaguely explained ways. As Beck himself has said, his frantic drawing of connections resembles the scenes of Russell Crowe clipping news articles in A Beautiful Mind. As Rick Perlstein noted after this admission of Beck’s, these were the scenes meant to establish that Crowe’s character, John Nash, was a paranoid schizophrenic.
Indeed, if Beck was focused on avoiding comparisons to mentally ill people, surely he never would have told a New York Times reporter that he views himself as a modern day Howard Beale. Beale is the main character of the 1970s news thriller Network, a suicidal news anchor who undergoes a complete mental breakdown and emerges as a demagogue ranting about the evils of the Arabs and corporations and bellowing slogans like, “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!” In fact, there is something refreshing about the self-awareness shown by Beck’s self-comparison to Beale, who throughout his career in Network is repeatedly manipulated by cynical TV executives desperate for ratings and willing to put a clearly deranged man on the air for the sake of viewership. Beck knows he’s being used, and he simply does not care.
No discussion of Beck would be complete without commenting on his brilliant evisceration of the rhetorical gymnastics employed by racists to disguise their bigotry. Beck, being a racist, knows intimately the subtlety needed to express one’s prejudices in polite company. For instance, when appearing on Fox & Friends in July he started off with a bang, accusing President Obama of a “deep-seated hatred of white people and the white culture.” When pressed on this by one of his hosts, he immediately backtracked, clarifying, “I’m not saying he doesn’t like white people,” before reestablishing his bigot bona fides by saying, “This guy is, I believe, a racist.” Beck does a brilliant job of exposing an all too familiar dance between social necessity and primal prejudice.
It can be somewhat frightening to remember to remember that Beck does not view his show as a farce or self-satire but rather as a serious news show. That said, a focus on his aesthetic qualities seems justified. Until Glenn Beck does become a marginalized force in broadcast media, it seems a waste to pass up on the opportunity to gaze into the frenzied psyche of right-wing America.
So let us appropriate its entertainment value, disregarding the intent and appreciating it for the brilliant self-satire it is. Almost limitless amusement will come of it.