“The old American mind-set that Richard Hofstadter famously called the paranoid style — the sense that Masons or the railroads or the Pope or the guys in black helicopters are in league to destroy the country — is aflame again, fanned from both right and left … No one has a better feeling for this mood, and no one exploits it as well, as Beck. He is the hottest thing in the political-rant racket, left or right.“
Did Glenn Beck rape and murder a young girl in 1990? If not then why won’t he deny these allegations? I’m not accusing Glenn Beck of raping and murdering a young girl in 1990. In fact I don’t think he did but I can’t help but wonder in light of his failure to deny these horrible allegations. Why won’t he deny that he raped and killed a young girl in 1990?
If you are unfamiliar with this meme then I recommend the excellent Ars Technica article on the subject. However as this is a controversial subject it bears restating. Glen Beck is infamous for his inflammatory wording and antagonistic phrasing. A man who, if he could get away with it, would routinely ask politicians if they had stopped beating their wives. So to mock Beck’s histrionics someone adopted a routine that Gilbert Gottfried used at a roast of Bob Saget. The question is phrased intentionally and is reminiscent of Beck’s interview with congressman Keith Ellison. Beck asked the muslim representative to “prove to me that you are not working with our enemies“.
The author of the page says he is doing this to make a point about political demagoguery and it does just that. How many of you first read this “allegation” with shock at the potential reality of this claim or disgust with it’s author. A reaction to the claim formed almost instantly without any consideration, a purely emotional response. How many progressives read this as amusing satire or thought for a moment “I wouldn’t be surprised”? How man conservatives read this as an intellectually vacuous attack or immediately suspected this was an intentional falsehood by leftist groups? It excites the passions doesn’t it?
It was intended to and so are the performances of Beck, Limbaugh, O’Reilly, Coulter, Malkin, et al. It’s agitprop, agitation and propaganda. On the one hand it’s a good five minute hate to get your blood up and make you feel righteous indignation. Damn good entertainment according to ratings. These pundits have more in common with John Stewart and the Weekend Update than Edward R. Murrow. Much of it is designed to attract ratings from the faithful who can join in the host’s staged catharsis and the opposition to tune in to see what new absurdity is on offer that night. Just consider how much traffic Michelle Malkin gets from Media Matters and Crooks and Liars. Robert Stacy McCain, himself a firebrand, offers a number of recommendations for getting a million hits to your blog including “make some enemies“. Being a provocateur gets you the ratings.
Except this agitating entertainment isn’t about a border dispute between Freedonia and Sylvania. It’s about real issues that effect people’s lives. So it’s not only agitation but also propaganda in that it’s designed not only to attract a commercial audience but then get them to empathize with the performers hatred and make them hate the same things. The philosopher A.J. Ayer once categorized moral statements as those made “in a peculiar tone of horror, or written it with the addition of some special exclamation marks“. Which perfectly describes the routine of our modern pundit class. The word liberal emerges from their mouths dripping with venom. They mention opposition legislation with tears in their eyes. They are always ready with a neologism like obamanation” or their own condescending shibboleth like “the one“. Everything calculated to insults and denigrate rather than rebut and analyze
One wonders if these pundits take their inspiration from Schopenhauer’s 38 Ways to Win and Argument as they are concerned first and foremost with eliciting an purely emotional reaction to overwhelm and extinguish more deliberative inquiry. The pundit class doesn’t offer us round table discussions or dispassionate debates. They offer sack cloth and ashes presentations about the horror of a marginal tax increase. Rather than trying to argue a point they resort to smearing the other with comparisons to Nazism or Fascism. This is not conducive to finding compromise or discovering the optimal solution to a problem. These are the tactics of people who do not necessarily want their side to win but want the other side to lose at all costs. Just look at the support for conspiracy theories among the media pundits from Obama’s birth certificate to death panels and from red scares to the charge of “secret muslim“. Let’s look again at R.S. McCain where he defends the infamous World Net Daily from conservative critics because, as he says, “The simplest way to define conservatism is this: The belief that liberalism is wrong“. This is the nature of demagoguery. It is a way of thinking designed only to tear down that which it considers evil and embraces any willing to join in the attack. No understanding, no mutual respect, no viewing your enemy as another human being who also wants to see a better world. No demagoguery is not debate or deliberative discourse. It is an angry mob looking for more torches and more victims.
The thing about agitprop is that it is an effective, albeit far from rational, way to convince certain people of the rightness of your position without having a solid argument. From time to time I see people claim there are those who still think the mainstream media is never wrong but I highly doubt there are many people left who actually believe so. No, agitprop appeals to people who are, at best, weekend warriors in politics. To people whose knowledge of political history is limited to their morning paper. It appeals to people who don’t think to challenge or admit their biases. It appeals to people who haven’t formulated a systemic way of looking at the world. There are far too many people who are moved to political conclusions by their emotions.I’m not saying these people are less intelligent, they simply are not thinking critically about politics. For many the realm of politics is the game of kings and land barons in ivory towers and they have better things to do with their time and energy than read some 19th century treatise on capitalism. I don’t necessarily blame them but we can do better as individuals and as a society. Or so I believe.
We have reason to value critical thinking and should always support it whenever possible and decrying these agitprop tactics is in fact the current cause du jour. Of course it’s not so simple as a few bloggers and journalists explaining that these people prey on emotion and our human reflex toward in-group loyalty. We are attempting to address a symptom. A symptom of a poor electorate. As I said, not every man has the time or ability to read Rawls and Burke but there is room for education in more effective decision making. Of course doing so won’t rid us of our pundit class. There will always be room for the passions to override our reason and it will always be an effective tool of whipping up sentiment amongst the converted but I think we can and should marginalize the power of these agents of outrage.
Our biggest obstacle though, to limiting the effect of these talking heads and raising the level of public debate, is that a good screaming match is far better for ratings than civil deliberation.
{ 4 } Comments
I can absolutely guarantee you, having blogged on this one myself some weeks back, every other comment you get on this will be from people who "get it", interspersed with people who've never "got" anything in their entire lives.
That Beck attracts such people to his defence alone should speak volumes about how he sees himself; championing lunacy in the name of free speech.
Sadly he's not going to go away and take that lunacy with him any time soon. He's only going to get more and more vocal and less and less capable of thinking clearly. Until eventually they'll either do for Obama the way they did for JFK, or another pretext for war will happen to come drifting along and give them even more of an excuse to hate anything which requires a modicum of intelligence to fully comprehend.
With a combination of a vocal and monied minority pushing the country farther right and a global economic crisis there is some cause for concern about America's political future.
But I am a hopeless optimist. I have to be to stay sane.
In recent history America has seen the pendulum swing many times and lived through many economic busts with the status quo more or less intact. Never underestimate how tightly the majority is willing to hold on to the present regardless of how much they might want things to change. It certainly continues to amaze me.
So perhaps the political apathy that holds us back from making drastic changes for the better will save us from drastically changing for the worst.
With a combination of a vocal and monied minority pushing the country farther right and a global economic crisis there is some cause for concern about America's political future.
But I am a hopeless optimist. I have to be to stay sane.
In recent history America has seen the pendulum swing many times and lived through many economic busts with the status quo more or less intact. Never underestimate how tightly the majority is willing to hold on to the present regardless of how much they might want things to change. It certainly continues to amaze me.
So perhaps the political apathy that holds us back from making drastic changes for the better will save us from drastically changing for the worse.
As I understand it Mr. Beck has failed to provide any of his DNA. If he didn't rape and kill this nine year old girl, why does he refuse to deny it? I read somewhere that as a child beck was raped by a barn yard animal (it could have been a pig). I have no idea if this is true, but it might explain the way he is. Mr beck could certainly silence these rumors by addressing his audience to refute these allegations. Perhaps, he can provide some proof that he is not a child rapist and murderer. His silence on this issue is deafening!!!!
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