You may have seen this the other night on The Daily Show but if you didn't, you should. A lot of folks are cheering Lewis Black for his evisceration of Glenn Beck's incessant likening of everything he opposes to Nazis. And actually, credit here should go primarily to the writers and producers of The Daily Show because I don't believe Mr. Black writes his own segments for them and he certainly didn't find all those clips.
What I've seen of Glenn Beck reminds me oddly of my brief time working with wrestlers who were in what was then called the World Wrestling Federation. The thing I learned about pro wrestling was that it was not mainly about making money. It was solely about making money. You might think that some other factor would be a close or even a remote second — fame, honor, sportsmanship (good or bad), settling personal grudges, pride of showmanship, the thrill of victory, any of those. But no. The wrestlers and those who controlled the industry were only about money and they would say and do whatever they thought would yield the most. That didn't make them bad people. Some of them were great guys. But they functioned in a field where there simply were no non-monetary rewards to be reaped and it was kinda startling to me to realize that that's all it was about.
I don't think it's exactly that way in our punditry today but it's close. I think "celebrity" functions as a distant second and the prospect of changing the world for what you think will be better is an even more distant third. But the cash is way out in front as the prime motivator. Beck strikes me as the most obvious example of this principle. I don't think he cares if he warps history, spouts nonsense, contradicts his own views or incites the small-minded. He's so transparent in this regard that I can't understand why anyone listens to the guy apart from, well, maybe it's funny to some to hear the crazy guy rant. I understand, I think, why people go Conservative or Libertarian. I just don't understand why they pick some of the people they pick to follow. (In the same sense: I understand, I think, why some people believe in E.S.P. and communicating with the dead. What I don't get is why any of them listen to Sylvia Browne.)
Anyway, here's Lewis Black deconstructing the inanity that is Glenn Beck…
