Category Archives: The Zeitgeist

Beck’s Left The Building

Glenn Beck, Media, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist, Uncategorized

Glenn Beck believes that the blackboard has made him a philosopher king, a teacher. Most of the Glenn Beck Show, unfortunately, is now devoid of useful information. it wasn’t always so. I was, as you recall, a big Beck fan. Since I require information—news, data—I opt for Hardball. A horrible prospect, I know, but Chris Matthews’ currency, however debauched, is the news of the day. The same cannot be said for the Beck hour. Hardball also gets me the progressive perspective. I have to keep abreast of Left-liberal thinking on the issues, since it is never intuitive.

From Beck you get the following:

Sighs.
Nods.
Lots of self-affirmation (Glenn said this and that years ago).
More ego announcements and exhortations to TiVo upcoming segments
Mention of George Soros (who also recognizes Glenn for the threat he is)

Today Beck was pushing for an answer his rapt audience was unable to give him because, mercifully, they do not “think outside the box” like he does (he kept trying to get them to be as “creative”). Beck asked those present in the studio what could transpire when Germany, forced to bailout out Europe, felt backed to the wall. Of course, knowing how he thinks (and he has maligned the Europeans in the past), I knew that what Glenn wanted to hear was this: given their history, the productive and pedantic Germans could well turn to fascism if forced into an economic corner.

In the past, Beck has attempted to provide historical information. Now he only alludes to the need to know history so as not to repeat it, study it, buy books about it (his).

Other repetitive themes:

Dark times are ahead (well, dah!)
Help your neighbors.
Pray
Be true to yourself.
Be honorable
Sign up for my …

I don’t watch Oprah. Why would I watch her conservative, male counterpart? I want the old Beck back but that bloke has left the building and is levitating high above it.

I guess Judge Napolitano, on at 5:00PM at Fox Business, makes up for it all.

Braggadocio Broadcasting

Anti-Semitism, Glenn Beck, Judaism & Jews, Media, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

Glenn Beck was once informative and edgy. No longer. These days the Fox News Talker is mostly tedious, windy, preachy and plain spaced-out. “Spooky Dude” is a sobriquet Beck uses to describe his latest personal nemesis, George Soros, about whom he intones for hours on end, aided by the usual indecipherable charts. Beck is one spooked-out dude.

Beck is too boring and marshals too few facts to persuade me of anything he says these days. However, no matter the number of fatuities Beck disgorges in one session, one thing is clear: he is not an anti-Semite. Beck is no hater; he’s a nice guy. He has just become so fat-headed that he believes his own hype. A muddle-headed man who has deluded himself about being a philosopher king will ad lib himself into trouble.

Our man from La Mancha is aping Bill O’Reilly. BO’s show revolves around BO and his encounters. The mental midgets of The View will pick a fight with BO, and BO will devote the week to discussing the implications for the nation of his squabble with some bitches. Their body language he’ll dissect (“analyze” is his term for wanking on-air with junk science), his body odor his expert will break down; he’ll invite guests on to praise him and damn the dames, and vise versa, on and on.

But even BO picks up on more news items, these days, than does Beck, whose hour is bereft of any information. Beck, once a humble man, has adopted Bill O’Reilly’s braggadocio broadcasting. (Warning, Glen: that’s un-Godly!)

So now the Jewish, liberal establishment is having a go at Beck for rambling incoherent about Soros.

This is what happens when one let’s the ego take over, as Glen has done. It all began when Glen discovered that Soros had donated money to combat the Beck tidal wave. Thereon-in Beck was like a man possessed; high on his own importance for drawing Soros’ attentions. The dybbuk did not pay dividends.

On November 12, Simon Greer, president and CEO of Jewish Funds for Justice, went on Countown [sic] with Keith Olbermann to discuss Glenn Beck evoking anti-Semitic sterotypes [sic] to attack a prominent Jewish philanthropist and Holocuast [sic] survivor. In his three-day “Puppet Master” series, Mr. Beck accused Geroge [sic] Soros of “helping send the Jews to the death camps” when he was 13 years old. There has been an overwhelming response condemning Mr. Beck’s grotesque falsehoods from Abe Foxman calling it “horrific” to Elan Steinberg calling it “monstrous.”

If you’re interested (I’m not) read more about the developments on this badly spelt website.

EGO TV has taken a predictable tumble. I don’t agree with a word he says, but Simon Greer seems a sincere, refined man. This is more than one can say of Countdown Keith, into whose trap Talker Beck stepped.

UPDATED: The Comedy Central Campaign (The Monochromatic Face Of Morons)

Elections, Glenn Beck, Hollywood, Left-Liberalism And Progressivisim, Media, Political Correctness, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

The media meme is providing wall-to-wall coverage of the Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert comic relief. The consensus is that the “Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear” held by the two smarmy entertainers was all good. In contrast, naturally, to Glenn Beck’s middle America rally.

TIME magazine found statist clown Stewart “earnest and eloquent” as he preached from his perch of sinecure: “we live now in hard times, not end times. And we can have animus and not be enemies.”

And what do you know? The very same parrot press that was unable to gauge how many people attended Glenn’s rally; never contested the turnout at the Stewart event.

The magazine’s adoring description of the fun attendees conjured Pat Buchanan’s astute observation not so long ago about Americans: a silly people living in serious times.

“Attendees came decked out for the season, sporting zombie face-paint, Waldo costumes and Richard Nixon masks; a coven of Christine O’Donnells strolled by as Darth Vader snapped a picture with a conservationist toting a massive replica of an Arctic tern. To catch a glimpse of the proceedings, crowd members staked out space atop port-a-potties or climbed trees. Others hoisted Shepard Fairey-style Team Sanity placards and meta-ironic signs advertising their views on abortion, taxes, beards, Lost, Lyndon LaRouche and lunar prisons. ‘God Hates Rallies,’ declared one missive. ‘God Hates Snuggies,’ went another. Still a third: ‘I am pretty sure God Hates Us All Equally.’ There was a yellow Gadsden flag — the ubiquitous Tea Party emblem — but instead of ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ it read, ‘OMG, Snakes!'”

Whereas tea party protesters have been described invariably as angry, ugly, racist, and not diverse; these equally monochromatic morons were “the stars of the show.”

To help you understand why American kids will become a drag on the country’s economy for years to come, meet rally attendee “Marsha Eck, a 54-year-old teacher from South Bend, Ind.,” who “expressed hope that the gathering could provide ‘a model for a new kind of conversation.'”

Or the “trio of teenagers from Downington, Pa., who came with their high-school civics class and wore matching lime-green t-shirts so that their teacher could spot them,” and who “explained that the rally was important because ‘everybody is yelling but nobody listens to each other.'”

Look, I know that in America, people who do stupid, venal, or ill-conceived things will generally suffer no setbacks. But, for my money, Jon Stewart’s stuttering attempt at politicking are mistaken. He had managed to keep his comedic hat on until now. This strength he has now forfeited.

UPDATED: The Monochromatic Face Of Morons. Monochromatic of mind, that is. Larry Auster has it:

UPDATED: The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture

Britain, China, Classical Liberalism, Conservatism, Old Right, Political Philosophy, Pop-Culture, The Zeitgeist

“The French Revolution did not generate only a new politics … Along with the new politics there came a new concept of personhood, a self-caressing egotism … a moral and aesthetic theory based upon sentiment” (p. 122). And relativism too (p. 146). In my experience, this malady affects conservatives and liberals alike in the US. Hierarchy, so essential to ordered liberty, is no longer. Lost is the distinction between men and women of character, and those without it; between adults and youth (the latter are usually elevated and worshiped by ever-errant adults); between experience and a lack of it; between quality in intellectual and cultural products, and its absence. Faction has replaced the fellow-feelings that ought to accompany a shared purpose. Talk to me about what you’ve dubbed the Zeitgeist’s ‘moronizing dialectic.’

This was one of the questions I posed to Prof. Dennis O’Keeffe in the second part of our WND.COM interview, “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.” (Last week’s Part I was entitled “Thomas Paine: 18th–century Che Guevara.”)

Still on the topic of the remarkable “Edmund Burke,” my conversation with Dennis O’Keeffe continues this week on WND.COM. O’Keeffe is Professor of Sociology at the University of Buckingham, and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs, “the UK’s original free-market think-tank, founded in 1955.”

The column is “The ‘Moronizing’ Of Modern Culture.”

UPDATE (Oct. 29): Writes Ron S.:

To: imercer@wnd.com
Subject: Please, no more tantalizing via..

…Edmund Burke by Dennis O’Keeffe when it costs $130 at Amazon. Best, Ron S.”

This is why I have resisted a request from an academic press to view my completed manuscript, Into the Cannibal’s Pot: Lessons For The West From Post-Apartheid South Africa. With 800 end-notes, and a considerable level of abstraction and originality that do not compromise its readability—my book more than meets the requirements. However, as Ron has discovered, an academic press prints a few hundred copies and sells them to libraries at prohibitive costs.

I am lucky: the academic friends I approve send me their books; I get them free. I say “approve” because I never bother with boring second-handers, writing unoriginal stuff; with topics I do not care for. Nor do I bore myself with the works of people I have no time for. I have a passion for Burke. I have no time for “clever” smarmy comments about the man—comments which may or may not be correct. Burke is too important and too neglected in American public life to mess with.

Dennis’s little gem of a book conveys just this sentiment.