Glenn Beck: Bring In ‘Da Idiot, Bring In ‘Da Crazy!

I admit I am late to the Glenn Beck party. I wasn’t particularly impressed by his “commentaries” on CNN.com, which isn’t illuminating, considering I find nearly all of the site’s commentaries adding very little to the public discourse. When he left CNN for Fox News, I didn’t care. My lack of interest in Beck, though, has been transformed into pure glee over the bent he has chosen (sky-is-falling survivalism) and wincing pity for the man.

Beck IS Howard Beale in another sad example of life imitating art.

Howard Beale is the character played by Peter Finch in Network, the 1970s dark satire of network television. (In case you are jumping up to buy the DVD, know that spoilers follow.) Beale is a longtime news anchor presumably from the generation of Murrow and Cronkite. News is news to Beale; it isn’t entertainment. When he is canned by the network for dropping ratings and because the network has decided news is entertainment, he has a mental breakdown, famous in cinematic history. The breakdown happens on air and culminates in Beale bringing this mantra to a crescendo:

“I’M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Beale begins his manifesto by saying:

I don’t have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It’s a depression. Everybody’s out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel’s work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. Punks are running wild in the street and there’s nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there’s no end to it. We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TV’s while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that’s the way it’s supposed to be. We know things are bad – worse than bad. They’re crazy. It’s like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don’t go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, ‘Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won’t say anything. Just leave us alone.’ Well, I’m not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don’t want you to protest. I don’t want you to riot – I don’t want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn’t know what to tell you to write. I don’t know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street. All I know is that first you’ve got to get mad.

At first the network is horrified, but a savvy, ballsy producer (played by Faye Dunaway) sees profit potential by marketing Beale as a potential prophet. Mind you, Beale really has gone insane. When he is asked to host a new show as an outlet of populist rage, he really believes he is that prophet, but the network doesn’t care. They had something no one else had, and they were going to exploit it. When it looks like show ratings had peaked, the network takes gratuitous murderous action to end Beale’s series with a bang.

Previously, I said “Glenn Beck IS Howard Beale.” Actually, Beck is neither clever nor intelligent enough to capture the tragedy of Beale’s story, but Beck’s lack of mental acuity does capture the comedy. Beck is amazingly over-the-top and is rich fodder for the likes of Stephen Colbert:   

The Colbert Report	Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Doom Bunker – Glenn Beck’s “War Room”
colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full Episodes Political Humor Keyboard Cat

I am not saying Beck will meet with Beale’s literal end at the hands of amoral network executives, but I do believe there is room to speculate about a metaphorical death to Beck’s career. I can only imagine he is riding high on the enormous ratings he has drawn. I also imagine Beck as the sort of person who might actually end up buying his own bullshit. If that is the case, where does Beck go from here?