One Lump Or Two? (James Howard Kunstler)

[Tace]

Glenn Beck

James Howard Kunstler -- World News Trust

Aug. 30, 2010 -- Here come the Corn Pone Nazis!

Fox News entertainer, former drug addict, and professional weeper Glenn Beck took center stage at the Lincoln Memorial exactly forty-seven years to the day after Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech for a rally dedicated to "restoring honor," which is tea party code for the otherwise unutterable idea: get that nigger out of the White House! (despite the attendance of a few African-American shills on the scene).

Eighty-seven thousand disoriented citizens lined the DC Mall reflecting pool and adjoining lawns to witness Beck overstep his role as a television clown and don the mantle of an evangelist-savior battling the dark forces working insidiously to put the America of WalMart, Walt Disney World, Nascar, and Burger King into the Collapsed Society Hall of Fame -- where it's heading anyway, due to the bad choices these self-same citizens made during an extraordinary bonanza era of cheap oil that is now drawing to a close whether anyone likes it or not. Naturally, Beck invoked prayer against this prospect, which is what people resort to when they don't understand what is happening to them.

Beck himself just seems to be following a career arc more than really answering "a call." The emptiness of his platitudes and the confusion of his ideas shows that he is just flexing his demagogic muscles in a moment when weepy bluster passes for heroism. Ten years ago he was a cringing drunk contemplating suicide. Then he went shopping in America's Mall of Utopias for something to believe in and found Mormonism, a "religion" dreamed up by an imaginative young man on the agricultural frontier of western New York during an earlier age of ferment which -- guess what -- coincided with a decade of economic turbulence. (Anyone interested in the bizarre subject is advised to read Fawn Brodie's excellent biography of Smith, No Man Knows My History .)

Of course, what has allowed Beck to occupy center stage is the failure of rational political figures to articulate the terms of the convulsion that American society faces, brought about not by communists and other John Bircher hobgoblins but by the forces of history. The failure at the political center is a conscious one of nerve and will, of elected officials in both major parties playing desperately for advantage in defiance of the truth -- this truth being that the USA went broke trying to swindle itself into prosperity. Add to this the failure of the law to go after the swindlers, which has undermined the fundamental belief in the rule of law that enabled this society to function as well as it did previously.

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[Blue_Tires]

1. ttt

[bulloney]

2. What's the officially-recognized attendance for Beck's teabagger party?

CBS gave the low figure given in the OP - 87,000.

I've seen figures as high as 700,000. There's too much discrepancy between these two figures.

Even if it was closer to 700,000, the attendance seems small considering all of the hyping Glenn and his enablers at Faux Snooze have given this event to their base, especially when you compare it to recent anti-war protests, Obama campaign rallies and the like.

The fact that they had to tell attendees to keep their signs at home speaks volumes on how they did not want the event to be viewed as some convention of illiterates or a KKK rally.

[diane in sf]

3. I heard 40,000

[Demeter]

4. 2 Card Monte (banks)

Sarah and Glenn

[nightrain]

5. It's an important article. Some of the best points are further down than

what you quoted, I think...