Last week, it was announced that Gollum finally chewed off Frodo’s finger, fell into Mt. Doom, and, in doing so, ended Glenn Beck’s reign at FOX News.
Now, there’s a chance you read that above sentence and immediately got mad at me. You wrote me off as a liberal member of the lamestream media who spends his days burning American flags and his nights drinking a special kind of white wine that’s brewed from gay grapes.
Thinking that is silly, though, because hating Glenn Beck isn’t something that ought to be liberal or conservative. The man is an obvious lunatic. Think about this: he was too crazy for FOX News. FOX News! A firing hasn’t said so much about a person since Dave Mustaine was kicked out of Metallica for partying too hard.
If you’re a conservative who is not Mel Gibson from Conspiracy Theory and you’re feeling the urge to defend Beck right now, I want you to take a deep breath and hold off on commenting for a second. You see, we’re not so different, you and I. I, too, have felt compelled to defend a fairly indefensible person.
Here’s what I mean: I’m an Eagles fan. Two years ago, before Michael Vick had shown himself to be rehabilitated, he was just a dog-murdering faded superstar who was more radioactive than Dr. Manhattan’s big blue penis. I was frustrated and annoyed that the Eagles took a chance on him and I own chihuahuas — imagine if I owned real dogs that I actually loved.
But the Eagles were my team and that meant that Vick was my quarterback. So I sucked it up and defended him. Think about that: my love of the Eagles was enough that I defended a dog murderer.
That’s what you do in sports, though. I’m sure there’s a Giants fan somewhere right now talking about how that underage prostitute totally conned Lawrence Taylor into having sex with her against his will. (And, in fairness to Vick, he certainly seems to be doing everything in his power to rehabilitate himself — and that’s not just the Eagles fan in me talking. Well, maybe a little bit.)
I accept this kind of thinking in sports because sports don’t matter. Sports are a diversion invented to keep married men from actually thinking about their lives and committing suicide; they don’t actually impact anything.
Politics, on the other hand, do. That’s what’s so unsettling about how people respond to criticisms of Glenn Beck. Objectively speaking, he’s an indefensible toad whose one purpose in life is to manipulate people’s fears into money in his pocket. Oh, and Goldline profits. And that’s BEST CASE. Worst case, he actually believes the words that are coming out his mouth and that means that three million people have been watching the rantings of a sociopath for the last two years.
There isn’t a thinking person in America who could possibly defend him. Yet there are many who do. Why? Because he plays for your team.
TV has made politics into a spectator sport and while that means more people than ever before are at least familiar with the issues (read talking points) of the day, it also means that our critical thinking about those things is at an all time low. You don’t think critically about your team, you root for it, and occasionally pour beer on someone that is wearing the jersey of the opposing team.
When things actually matter, though, when we’re talking about the primaries and not the playoffs, it’s important to avoid unconditional love. It might just so happen that people on the other side have a good idea. Or that a commentator you don’t agree with actually has something of value to add to the conversation.
Or, in the case of Beck, to acknowledge at some point John Coffee grabbed him and blew that evil black stuff into his mouth.
And just so you know, I’m not a liberal. I’m not a conservative. I’m like Martin Prince’s sexuality: I’m not an anything. I’m just a TV watcher trying to figure out how a guy like Beck gets two years on America’s top-rated news channel.
Oh, and just so you know: gay grapes really do make the best wine.
Clacked by Jay Black 
on Apr 18, 2011 @ 15:00 EST5EDT
I’m a conservative, mostly, and I didn’t get mad at you one bit. I love your posts, no matter the subject and you make excellent points. We’ve seen this type of behavior from both sides of the political aisle, although I think from now on when talking about politics we should permanently replace the word “aisle” with “madhouse” (or nuthouse, looney bin, wacky shack…you choose), it would be far more accurate.
A couple of years ago we bought some grape vines to grow our own grapes in the yard, but I think they’re hetero grapes. They’re a little sour and have seeds. Where can I get some of them gay grapes? And I want really gay grapes, not some of those closeted kind, either. So don’t hold out on me young man or I’ll send my wife to your house to tell you everything you’re doing wrong, have done wrong and will do wrong! I mean it. Don’t make me turn this computer around.
This is why I don’t drink.
Well, it’s nice to know that not all conservative worship at Beck’s altar! It still scares me that there are people out there that do. With Donald Trump’s recent rantings (and those have totally kept me away from his show this season) I’m beginning to believe that none of these people actually believe the crap that comes out of their mouths but they’ll say anything to make a buck or get a few votes. Even scarier than people following Beck’s rantings are those 51% of the Republicans who have made Trump a front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination. Aren’t they all going to feel really stupid when they find out it was all a publicity stunt to boost his show’s ratings? And if it wasn’t, then the only person I could picture as his running mate is Charlie Sheen. Winning!
You know, everything every politician does these days seems like nothing more than a publicity stunt to boost their ratings. Left, right, center, top, bottom, fringe edges…they all seem completely self-serving. So Chuck, I’m surprised at your apparent assumption that all/most conservatives are big fans of Beck’s. I’ve never assumed most liberals love Olbermann or any other person who espouses political views from any place in the nuthouse. As long as there are people who believe they were abducted by aliens, think wrestling is real, just know the Earth is a sentient being, et cetera there will always be people who follow the “religion” of anyone who grabs a microphone and states their beliefs about anything.
Basically what I’m trying to say is people are crazy and stupid! Don’t believe me? Try driving, go to WalMart, watch sports fans after a few beers, have a garage sale that starts at 8am and tell me there aren’t people there at 6!
Wrestling’s not real?
Honestly, I’m making a generalization about Beck and his viewers, but I’ve had plenty of conversations with the crazies who do worship at his feet. There are a lot! And when 51% of the Republican voters believe Trump’s birther nonsense, well, that’s a majority and that’s frightening. I’m not saying that all conservatives are on the fringe, but the ones who use the media to spread their brand of crazy make it seem that way – and maybe those who don’t agree with all of that stuff need to stand up publicly and say these people don’t represent the true conservative viewpoint. So far, that hasn’t happened so Beck, Trump, Palin, Bachmann, et al get to carry on and give sensible conservatives a bad name.
And for the record, I was brought up in a very conservative, religious environment so I still have conservative values at heart as much as I’ve opened my eyes and mind to a lot of liberal viewpoints as well.
I don’t want to get into a political debate here, but regarding the “birther” issue if I was President I’d just get the long-form official birth certificate, slap it down on my desk in front of television cameras, tell people to shut the hell up and that would quell the majority of doubters. By not doing so people like Trump say he’s hiding something and it just lives on.
From where I sit it’s simple: put up and they’ll shut up. Plus there’s the added benefit of humiliating anyone who’s come out against him in this issue. That, I think, is the core of the whole mess.
People love conspiracies of all kinds. This one seems rather easy to snuff out. Not doing so just fuels it.
Well, we’ve all seen the copy of the birth certificate which is exactly like the one I got so I could get passport. To me, it’a a totally racist issue. I didn’t see McCain’s birth certificate and he was born in Panama! None of these others screaming about the thing (pretty much all of them white folks) have publicly revealed theirs either, so until they do they also need to put up or shut up. I’m sure somewhere, at some point before he could even run for president, there had to be some verification of his citizenship. I don’t know how all that works, but I don’t think you can just come out of the blue and get into the race without some kind of qualifications. I think it’s been proven beyond a doubt by many sources and the fact that people like Trump have to jump on this particularly ugly and offensive bandwagon once again to stir up discord (and ratings for his show) is disgusting.
The only thing I have to add is to point out that Dr. Manhattan’s big blue penis was not radioactive. That was a vicious, murderous conspiracy enacted by a sociopathic supervillain CEO to make the naked blue guy impotent. I don’t know where politics enters into this except to point out that Manhattan was the blindly obedient tool of Nixon’s foreign policy, and Ozymandias was very socially progressive…