Here's a passage from the start of the book:
"America has been slowly pulled off the course chartered for us in Philadelphia more than two centuries ago. Through legitimate "emergencies" involving war, terror, and economic crisis, politicians on both sides have gathered illegitimate new powers--playing on our fears and desire for security and economic stability--at the expense of our freedoms. And now, after supposedly massive change, not only are we still on the wrong track, bu it feels as though our new conductor has just increased the speed at which our misdirected train is traveling." (p.9)and a couple of pages later:
"It is clear the so-called political experts in Washington, the business experts on Wall Street, and the self-anointed experts of education and society have gotten it wrong for a very long time. They rely on their Ivy League educations, family connections, and misplaced egos instead of listening to the cabdrivers, mothers, or plumbers. They pay us lip service while stuffing their pockets with our money--content in their belief that average Americans are too dumb to notice." (p.11)The book starts by pointing out some important facts, including the danger of a nation that spends beyond its means. But while accusing others of class warfare and division, it begins and continues with a theme of us versus them, with the "them" often centered around what we would broadly call ruling elites. Beck calls out to aggrieved souls to stand up in righteous anger, be a true patriot, and change the direction of the country.
It's almost laughable, because he tends to gloss over the sins of the "us", while heaping scorn and broadly inflated and inaccurate motive to the "them". A not very religious Beck goes on to describe both President Obama and Vice-President Biden as ungenerous, Godless hypocrites.
And now there is a whole army, a whole party, a Tea Party of folks that have flocked to the inconsistent rants of people like Beck, and voices like Rush Limbaugh, and to people and writings further down stream. The conclusion: a sudden realization that all is not right in America. Many of these people did not have this anger and sudden epiphany during the 8 years of Republican rule, where taxes were cut (reducing revenue), two wars were started (increasing costs) and deficit spending continued without much concern.
These supposed ubber patriots, the Joe the Plumbers and Beck's hyper intuitive cabdrivers and bakers, came to their sudden outrage during a current near recession, fostered by the president they probably voted for (Bush), and have directed their darts and venom to the anomaly of a black president who has been progressive in tone, but largely duplicative of his predecessor in the areas most likely to be of concern to conservative folk (that issue largely being national security, since Republicans pretty much ignored all else when in power).
When you read enough Beck or listen to enough Limbaugh, it causes a bit of a jolt when you see someone like Joseph Stack waking up one morning and deciding to fly his plane into an IRS office to vent his frustration with the system. Ostensibly just killing yourself is not sufficient protest.
Slate has an article showing the "Seven Deadly Traits" of people like Stack, and when you read them, you can't help but see the same framing in the words and directive admonitions of Glen Beck. Under "Superiority masking self-loathing" Slate writes:
Stack lashes out at "the incredible stupidity of the American public": "brainwashed" "zombies" who follow along dutifully, incapable of his keen insights to look right through the horror of "the real American nightmare." It's a feeble claim of superiority, when the entire treatise reeks of self-loathing. Stark ends with an attack on capitalism—"From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed."Under narcissism/egocentricity we get:
Joseph Stack ended his life with a supreme act of narcissism, and that quality leaps out of every line of his rationalization. It's all about him. Through 30 years of his torture, "thieves, liars and self-serving scumbags" in Congress continually targeted Stack personally. The IRS and his own accountant joined in to make him their personal whipping boy. When the Senate redrew the tax code in 1986, "they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d)," Stack writes.
The Slate piece goes on, and while we don't accept their entire rubric word for word, we can see interesting parallels that can be found in people like Stark, voices like Beck, and movements like the Tea Party.
Commonalities:
- An appeal to some sort of authentic patriotism, which has the convenient ability to transform people who disagree with you into into, well, non-patriots or Anti-Americans. This allows you to get away with calling your opponents evil, and thus reduce the due diligence required by using your brain and analyzing actual facts.
- A deep dislike of intellectual achievement or expertise. Never mind that most of these elites who have done the university thing have excelled in some extremely difficult disciplines. Never you mind that most of these people graduating from elite schools like Harvard, MIT or Stanford worked harder while many of us "average Americans" were busy goofing, cutting class, dropping out, being "cool, jaded, or gothic." So the same group of people who would tend to make claims about the dumbing down of education, or the lack of academic achievement of ethnics, simultaneously follow a movement and line of reasoning that portrays the hyper educated as misguided, and more than that, pure evil.
- A distrust and dislike for government. They talk the rhetoric of 1776 and of fighting for freedom and being willing at the drop of a beer to fight to take America back from the various socialists, Fascists, and boogeymen taking the U.S. down the road to perdition. Never mind that people of that time were rebelling against taxation without representation and the system was not an elective leadership. England ruled. Today we have an elected government, and a government made less efficient by its very democratic essence. If you truly want stuff done, and fast, you have a dictatorship. The founding fathers created a system that insured a certain amount of gridlock, and a gridlock that is compounded by the complexity of the times we are in. For every lobbyist in Washington trying to sway policy, there is probably a family of four in some city or leafy suburb who will benefit from that action. Odd how lobbyists never seem to represent us, always some evil unidentified other. Same with our politicians. We love our own, and put them in office, but realize with 100% certainty that Senator Rhode Island is the corrupt one.
Which also reminds me of Shutter Island, which we found ourselves watching Saturday night. Normally we try to avoid opening week, preferring to have ample space in the theater and not be subject to the slightly late arriving person who spots the two seats between your group and others, and climbs into them from the row behind, then spends the next few minutes calling and texting the even later arriving companion.
At the end the audience seemed muted, even disappointed, and we assume that this was because they walked in expecting a police procedural but were served up a psychological drama that rendered the entire very long movie a figment of boy-man actor DiCaprio's mental state. Martin Scorsese crafted a very visually stunning and moody picture, but the ending was a let down.
You sit for two hours only to learn that you are in the mind of a man gone loony. You are dropped into his head and are subject to government conspiracies, whispered secret knowledge from people equally bonkers, oppressively authoritative police, white suited negroes who are "in" on the conspiracy, Fascism run amok, the death of innocent family, secret holding pens, experiments on people, and crazy evil elites in the form of psychiatrists who listen to Mahler and drink wine and reside in fancy taxpayer financed digs.
We couldn't help but see Teddy Daniels, the decorated U.S. marshal, as a type of Glen Beckian Patriot that he imagines his readers and listeners think they are. Except that they are loons, have blood on their hands, and lack the self knowledge to see that. They are too wrapped up in blaming others, and seeing conspiratorial evil in everyone else, refusing to recognize, unable to see clearly or make sense of facts that are actually beyond their understanding. (Often, because truly understanding takes education, it takes reading boring things, it takes empathy and trying to see the good in your opponents, it takes recognizing organizational parallels and the reason for their existence).
(Scorsese was probably slumming, or hoping for a Clint Eastwood-Mystic River type moment by reproducing another book by Dennis Lehane. We were disappointed in the plot transition from real world to fictive DiCaprio world, but then again, how else do you get inside the crazy moments in someone's head and show it on film? We are mixed then, cutting him some slack but wanting to slap him just the same.)
That is the Tea Party radical conservative world--they see a Shutter Island of conspiracy and evil doers seeking to take away your free will and freedom and transform you into a zombie via lobotomy in a lighthouse of darkness. But only you true Patriot are aware of this evil, and are vigilant.
You may have been a pill popper in the past (Rush), or an alcoholic or divorced (Beck, Newt), but you are fine now, and concerned about morals and America. Never mind you have no economic expertise really (Palin) in a world where our problems coagulate into a largely economic issue. You are Beck's cabdriver or working guy, Joe the Plumber or Joseph Stack, just trying to get an honest days work for an honest days wages (give or take paying taxes).
In actuality these people, these pseudo patriots have a Bishop sized sense of entitlement. You know Bishop: Amy Bishop, the Harvard trained, University of Alabama Ph.D who felt aggrieved to the point of killing several of her coworkers because she did not get the job she so rightfully (in her mind) deserved. Oh yes, even the elites are getting their crazy on, and while not politically motivated, the same motivational ethic is at play.
She yelled at playing children, neighbors said, and rarely kept her opinions to herself. She rejected criticism and fudged her résumé. Her scientific work was not as impressive as she made it seem, according to independent neurobiologists, some of whom said she would have been unlikely to even get the opportunity to try for tenure at major universities.(N.Y. Times)
It's this lack of self-awareness that will doom the efforts of many of those on the right. With Glen Beck telling them that the solution to all our problems is a return to "common sense" and that the problem is an "out of control government," the true problem then goes unexamined. When it's the conspiracy, or cabal, or Obama the Socialist, or the psychiatrist of Shutter Island or the system, then we are never looking to see where we are causing the problem, or hindering authentic solutions.
Are you paying your taxes? Are you getting involved politically? If you are a moral or religious husband, are you "loving your wife as Christ loved the church"... which means dying to self for her? (Yea you don't hear that part preached as much, mostly the women obey part). Are you pushing your children to get the best education they can (and simultaneously glorifying stupidity by denigrating Obama or exalting beyond her state Palin)? Did you buy a home you can't afford now, blaming it all on the realtor or mortgage guy (but didn't read the fine print, assuming the sales people were economic geniuses)? Are you complaining because you finally got refinanced (as you had been complaining about "when will the little guy get it help"), only to whine when your credit score takes a hit saying, "Well if I had known I would have not requested this Obama-modification" (a modification designed to be for true emergencies)? Did you graduate from college? Do you read the Economist or other standard economic publicans? Do you watch C-SPAN or take a gander at foreign political news so you can make comparative studies of the possible and impossible? Do you vote during every election, with the knowledge that the guy running for school board today might be running for senator or president ten years from now? Do you listen to people lie, and accept the lie, or dismiss the lie, by shifting to some other fact that also turns out to be a lie, or do you accept truth in every appearance?
Or do you sit around listening to Beck, and watching him weave an island of mystery and evil inside your head, to the point where you don't know whether you are coming or going, and don't even know that you don't know?
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