The Awesomizer

Glenn Beck wins the newly established Awesomizer Award for “the Biggest Idiot Ever”

Watch this, if you can stomach it … a prime example of the dumbing down of our nation.

This is how the Right wins hearts and minds … pay careful attention to his description of the New York Times’ coverage of the Left Wing protests and the Right Wing Tea Party. He reads a quote from one article in a sappy, false voice we’ll call the “sarcastic, rainbows and fuzzy puppies” voice that most bleeding-heart liberals use when they talk about the stuff the Left Wing does. The other, he reads in the voice we’ll call the “sarcastic, angry, hate-speech” voice that the “liberal media” uses to denounce the actions of the Right Wing.

In Glenn Beck’s world,by changing his voice while reading articles, and by following the readings with comments like, “I want to wear a tie-dyed t-shirt and drive my VW van while listening to the Grateful Dead and not bathing for six months,” actually changes reality. It makes the article about the Left Wing rally a happy-day love fest (in the eyes of the liberal media, of course), while the Right Wing rally is seen (by the same liberal media) as a hate-filled festival of hate. However, if we look at these two quotes as they appeared in the newspaper, without Mr. Beck’s spot-on line reading, we can see that there is actually very little difference between the two.

“Several thousand demonstrators espousing and denouncing a host of causes converged on downtown Pittsburgh on Friday, pumping up signs and playing instruments in a peaceful and permitted march calling for solutions to a range of problems they attributed to the economic policies of the world leaders at the Group of 20 meeting.”

“A seas of protesters spilled onto the national mall on Saturday in the largest rally against President Obama since he took office, a culmination of a summer-long season of protests that began with opposition to a health care overhaul and grew into a broader dissatisfaction with the government.”

Was the Pittsburgh protest not a peaceful and permitted protest (yes, there were arrests, but very few in comparison to the people in attendance)? Was it not in protest against the policies of the G20? Was the Tea Party not a culmination of a summer-long season of protest? Was it not against Obama and the health care plan?

But, when read in the “sarcastic, angry hate-speech” voice, the second quote takes on this meaning:

“The liberal media hates you Right Wingers. They hate you and therefore, they are going to talk about your protest like you’re anti-American. They’re going to make you look like a bunch of hate-filled hate mongers. While the Left Wing protest was a bunch of loving, fuzzy puppies and pink, fluffy bunnies dancing hand-in-hand. Right Wing = bad. Left Wing = good.”

Of course, Mr. Beck mentioned nothing about the use of signs at the Right Wing rally that depicted Obama as Hitler. That seems to ring with a little bit of truth on the hate-filled, hate-monger front doesn’t it?

But it is this convenient leaving out of crucial facts, mixed with the outlandish performativity of Mr. Beck (and his other nutter cohorts) that is such a powerful drug for the dissemination of stupidity. You don’t need to interepret your own facts when Mr. Beck is there to interpret them for you … when he can read you the cherry-picked quotes from the newspaper while adding his own verbal, sarcastic spin to them. Why should you bother picking up the paper and reading it for yourself when Mr. Beck told you what was important? I mean, he did it in a funny and entertaining way, didn’t he?

There is good and bad on both sides. There was discord at the Pittsburgh rally. There was discord at the Tea Party. There was hate and violence on both sides. But in Mr. Beck’s world, and therefore in the worlds of his listeners and viewers. They are the victims of all the hate and violence, and if they become violent and hateful as a result? Hey man, it’s just the natural progression of things. We’re the victims, right? Obama is a hatemonger who is against us, so we need to paint a picture of him looking like Hitler to make our point, right? That’s what Mr. Beck said anyway.

This from a man whose vision of utopia, at the end of his rant, comes down to a Norman Rockwell painting and an episode of Gunsmoke. Because these are both accurate representations of reality. Or at least that’s as much reality as we need.

If that isn’t the dissemination of hate, violence, and misinformation, then I don’t know what is