Sunday, August 29, 2010

You Beck Ya!

One would think that when the two most challenged minds on the right join hands and word substitution in an effort to rally a nation back to it's "roots", the earth would move, the light would dawn, the chasm would somehow begin to close between perception and reality. Unfortunately, the only result was to see that that chasm is far wider and deeper than anyone could have imagined.
But then, according to Glenn Beck, who held his "Restoring Honor" rally yesterday in Washington DC, "Something beyond imagination is happening. America today begins to turn back to God."
As any viewer of Beck's FoxNews propoganda spread well knows, he teeters conspicuously on the side of righteous conservatism and evangelical statism. He has built an aura of pseudo-Christianity, using the names and verses of that faith(he is a Mormon) to stir the political pot and ominously warn of "thing to come". He is 100% political, and when he tried to characterize his rally,  "Restoring Honor", as unpolitical, it was not to be taken seriously, especially with the likes of Sarah Palin headlining.
As ex-governor of Alaska Sarah Palin said, "Sometimes our challenges seem insurmountable."
Certainly.
We have 18% unemployment, a recovery that never happened for roughly 80% of all working Americans, a rising deficit, an economy that goes in fits and starts, and a government that, as ever it has been, is in the clenched fist of business interests.
That's what a "jobless recovery" means---corporations profit while workers go poor.
Of course, that isn't what Sarah Palin was talking about. She was talking about that black guy in the White House, the Muslim scourge that is tearing around the USA building mosques like they're going out of business, and wars that we can't seem to convince anyone that we are winning.

Nonetheless, the rally was not political and though it was attended by Tea Party members and the crowd was unmistakably white, there was nothing about specific parties or candidates. It was a good example of how to rally conservatives without rallying the conservative vote--explicitly.
No, Glenn is out to milk God for all he is worth. Of course, because he has no idea, personally, what to think about God, and any honest investigation of the values of this God--be he Jehovah, Allah, or Christ--would demonstarte the obvious charlatanism of Becks campaign, Beck has to fall back on the audiences perception, as he often does on his show. He uses what are termed "connoctation words" to his benefit. That is, it doesn't matter whether he believes it, he uses the terminology in the context of the viewer.
A good example is this: "Really the only place you can really find honor is our military now, where you find it in abundance."
He was refering to his feature of the Special Operations Warrior Foundation, a group of Special Forces families committed to supporting the families of those who fell in any given campaign. But notice his use of the connoctation word "honor".
Does he mean sacrifice?
Does he mean honesty?
Does he mean a kind of truth, justice or merit?
Truth is, Glenn Beck doesn't know what he means and doesn't care either. If you choose any one of the available definitions of honor, you would find that his statement is a bloated generalization that devalues the word "honor" while it devalues both the SOWF, the military, and every America who ever thought they maybe possessed a little "honor" of any kind. Clearly policemen, firemen, rescue workers, doctors, pastors, teachers, community leaders, etc. have no "honor" because they aren't in the military and that's the only place you can find it, according to Glenn Beck.
So what you find is that he takes the power of the word, manipulates it to get his point across--while doing his best to appear distressed, exasperated, emotionally fatigued by the intensity of his concerns--and places it out there like a kind of subjective magnet for his ideas to draw into. Yes, subjective. Subjective words are perfect for connoctation because they often have broad perceptions of their meaning: democracy. freedom. liberate. just. true. fair. equitable. love. These are all very subjective words in that their exact meaning is predicated upon the context of the sentence and the perception of the reader.
Thus we have a rally of 150,000 white folks to "Restore Honor".
So what was the point?
To reclaim the civil rights movement?
To restore honor?
To get back to God?
To get "our country back", as one supporter insisted?
Or is it to "Go to church. Restore America with peace", as another declared to Al Sharpton marchers nearby?
No, it was a launching point. It definately, at the end of the day, was a kind of political rally in that it was a red-state jihad that paves the way for the November elections and scares the hell out of Democrats. But it also illustrates the power of Fox propoganda, of conservative christianity, and of grass roots organizing. It also shows that the middle of country is plenty disenfranchised and disconnected, but about all the wrong things. If there is a question of honor in America, one need look no further than the past few decades. Politicians and businessmen have never been honorable, and they have exploited any ill-deserved trust in order to engourge themselves while impoverishing the rest of us. Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama have all had similar programs, similar goals, and similar results.
Restoring honor?
Honor certainly has some relation to justice and to integrity. A nation that spends more than the entire world combined on defense to maintain the greatest killing machine ever known has a long walk toward any shade of  HONOR. A nation that tortures children, blows people up by remote control, and uses devastating disasters as a hook to keep the poor on a leash certainly has no relation whatsoever to HONOR. And a people who would hustle down to DC and talk about civil rights and God while showing not one ounce of love or compassion for the poor, the minority, the homeless, or the hungry in their country, and instead bemoan their black president, the healthcare bill, and the banker scam as some injustice done to rural, white, christian America and not ALL OF US surely are clueless about church, God, justice, truth, and HONOR.

Glenn Beck has no honor. He is a mouthpiece. A clown. An actor.
A charlatan.

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