Glenn Beck: Still Batshit Crazy (Bonus: Left Crazy vs. Right Crazy!)
Just checking in on Glenn Beck...
Oh yeah. Still cray-cray...
This guy, like Limbaugh, seems largely motivated by a kind of inertia he builds up when blabbering... It's rather like he just enjoys the sound of his own voice...but IMO there's something more there...something that's a bit like...well, such interpretations are dicey, but here's what I'm going to suggest: he is in love with the idea of being some kind of prophet or scholar or something...someone who sees farther and knows more... He wants to be that guy...though he has none of the requisite abilities. Such people are supposed to be driven by their ideas or insights, and their passion is supposed to follow from their recognition of something important they have come to understand. Beck, he just likes the trappings of insight. He likes to talk the talk, even though there's no walk there to walk...er, as it were... He doesn't know much, he isn't that smart, he's not particularly perceptive, he hasn't achieved any special insight...but he wants to be the guy who gets to act that way. He likes the cadences, he's in love with passionate speaking itself, even when he really has nothing to say. Limbaugh's roughly on the same page, though with fewer aspirations to prophet-dom, and...I dunno...maybe more of an aspiration to be the crotchety, Eric Hoffer-esque blue collar scholar...
Or something.
There's a fine line between hypothesis-formation and bullshitting...
Anyway, dude is crazy. Hard to say anything much more definite about it...
Oh, and: as for my general view that the American lefty-left is, though less dangerous than the right, pound-for-pound crazier...yeah, well...that theory has a rather hard time dealing with Glenn Beck... I guess I could plead outlier...but that seems ad hoc and shifty...
Oh yeah. Still cray-cray...
This guy, like Limbaugh, seems largely motivated by a kind of inertia he builds up when blabbering... It's rather like he just enjoys the sound of his own voice...but IMO there's something more there...something that's a bit like...well, such interpretations are dicey, but here's what I'm going to suggest: he is in love with the idea of being some kind of prophet or scholar or something...someone who sees farther and knows more... He wants to be that guy...though he has none of the requisite abilities. Such people are supposed to be driven by their ideas or insights, and their passion is supposed to follow from their recognition of something important they have come to understand. Beck, he just likes the trappings of insight. He likes to talk the talk, even though there's no walk there to walk...er, as it were... He doesn't know much, he isn't that smart, he's not particularly perceptive, he hasn't achieved any special insight...but he wants to be the guy who gets to act that way. He likes the cadences, he's in love with passionate speaking itself, even when he really has nothing to say. Limbaugh's roughly on the same page, though with fewer aspirations to prophet-dom, and...I dunno...maybe more of an aspiration to be the crotchety, Eric Hoffer-esque blue collar scholar...
Or something.
There's a fine line between hypothesis-formation and bullshitting...
Anyway, dude is crazy. Hard to say anything much more definite about it...
Oh, and: as for my general view that the American lefty-left is, though less dangerous than the right, pound-for-pound crazier...yeah, well...that theory has a rather hard time dealing with Glenn Beck... I guess I could plead outlier...but that seems ad hoc and shifty...
posted by Winston Smith at
10:13 AM
3 Comments:
So, comments. No longer getting them? No longer approving them? I come for the dinosaur obsession, but I stay to get to toss in my two cents. Is that no longer possible?
Winston,
The term you may be looking for is *Delusions of Grandeur*.
but who on the left has a forum like limbaugh or beck? sure, you can find some lefty who writes a blog no one reads and point to him and say, geez, what a nut. but that's not true on the right. their nuts are leading the parade, front and center. i just don't know how you can compare the two and say they are equivalent
mark
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