I realize that starting a thought with "Last night, Glenn Beck said ..." is the intellectual equivalent of saying "Watch this ..." before you abuse some inhalants, so bear with me. Because, before too long, it will all make sense. On Wednesday's episode of Glenn Beck's
new television show, the host was in the middle of a rapid-fire rant and said under his breath and about college professors, "Weasels."
Curious, I decided to look into Beck's obviously rich college experience. I wondered:
Did Beck, during his undergraduate and possibly graduate years, come to dislike certain professors he encountered along the way? Perhaps an advisor rubbed him the wrong way. Maybe he took that one bad class we all ran into. Could Beck have been the victim of an overzealous campus disciplinary system, which?
Well, any of these three things could have happened to Beck while studying theology at Yale.
Or all three. One thing is for sure. If they did happen, they happened in a very, very short period of time. Because Beck, that professor-hating right-winger, was only around them for one semester. So where was he getting his hatred of academia?
From the horse's mouth, here's the relevant portion of Beck's
official biography: "At the age of 30, Glenn lost his passion for radio - and everything else - as alcoholism and drug addiction took him over. Struggling to find some answers to his problem, Glenn pursued higher education. Though he was accepted by Yale as a Theology major, he lasted only one semester, faced with a divorce from his first wife and separation from his two daughters - the oldest with Cerebral Palsy. He was emotionally and financially decimated and relegated to one of the smallest radio markets. The shooting radio star had fallen to earth." Wow.
Sounds like it.So Beck, mired in addiction and faced with a crumbling private life, was only at Yale for one semester. But it must have been one hell of a semester, because Beck, like many conservatives, seems to have a hatred for higher education. A hatred that has manifested itself recently in such attention-grabbing right-wingers as David Horowitz, whose
recent book is titled "The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America". On a smaller, yet equally harmful, scale, groups like
Chris Flickinger's seek to fight what he considers a liberal bias on America's college campuses.
To right-wingers, "college eduction" means "liberal education".
Why? Because, on the right, there's not only a distrust of knowledge, but there's also an unhealthy fear of it. As you know, fear is how the Republican Party operates. Without fear, without distrust, without
panic, Americans would see right through the rather transparent Republican platform and realize that the party's agenda clearly isn't theirs. The more informed you are, the
more likely you'll be able to separate fact from fiction. If your entire political ideology was steeped in fiction, wouldn't
you run from a well-informed public?
It makes perfect sense for educational also-rans like Beck to dislike academia. Republicans often succeed by fostering a sense of "they think they're smarter than us" in their base. Without that distrust of education, how else could Republicans push such ludicrously incompetent ideas as
intelligent design? And, as I
said before, "If they can't control it, preach to it, hop it up on Ritalin or stick it in middle management, they
always marginalize it. Happens every time. If they don't quite understand something - cultural diversity, homosexuality, science - they relegate it to the smelly, hacky-sack playing grassy field of the bizarre."
While we were busy watching reality television, we've missed a trend that corresponds quite well with the Republican ascendancy:
That ignorance now trumps intelligence. Thanks to the Becks of the world, it's in style to be a complete moron. In fact, everywhere you turn, moronity is championed, while intelligence is given short shrift. A country that used to ask something from its citizens
now asks us to be ourselves. We're more interested in having a beer with our presidents than trusting them to know what they're doing. Moreover, people like Beck
encourage stupidity, because, if they didn't, no one would pay attention to them.
While opinion makers and those in power seek to keep Americans in the dark, it takes two to tango. Without a portion of the electorate
unwilling to show any intellectual
curiosity, Republicans wouldn't have a dance partner at the ballot box. Again, returning to something I wrote earlier, the thinking among many rank-and-file right-wingers goes like this:
Why think for ourselves when our church or political party can do it for us? Why base things in reality when we can live our lives in a fantasy world populated by Godless baby killers, activist judges and walking, talking Terri Schiavos?Thinking like that, coupled with a distrust of intelligence, has many Americans embracing idiocy. No one is happier to witness this public display of affection than the Republican Party. The longer the relationship lasts, the longer they'll stay in power. And the longer people like Beck pollute our airwaves, the harder we'll have to fight. But fight we will, because the truth is on our side. And if that makes me a weasel, so be it.