Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America by Dana Milbank
Book: Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America by Dana Milbank
Read Free Book Online
Authors: Dana Milbank
Tags: United States, General, Social Science, Biography & Autobiography, Political, Authors, American, Entertainment & Performing Arts, Biography, Language Arts & Disciplines, Political Science, Performing Arts, Political Ideologies, Television Personalities - United States, Beck, Conservatism & Liberalism, History & Criticism, Television, Popular Culture, Conservatism, Ignorance (Theory of knowledge) - Political aspects - United States, Glenn - Influence, Glenn - Political and social views, Popular culture - United States, Political culture, Radio personalities, Radio personalities - United States, Political culture - United States, Conservatism - United States, Journalism
Ads: Link
he said. “What they’re about to pass is a bloodstream disease. It will be injected into our system and it will be incurable … The fundamental transformation of America is here.”
The bill passed. And, as of this writing, there are still no death panels, no eugenics, no euthanasia, nobody being sent to prison, no ripping in half of the country, no end of America as we know it, no nail in America’s coffin. Then again, maybe this is because of the painkillers; any day now, we could wake up with a huge pain in our national butt.
CHAPTER 7
THE MIDAS TOUCH
Let us now hear from Glenn Beck, regular guy.
“I am no different than you,” he tells viewers, with genuine regular-guy grammar. “I am just a regular schmo that finds myself on a set in New York.”
“Look, I’m a schmo,” he confesses to a guest one night. “I really don’t know how all this stuff works.”
“By the end of World War I, the power had shifted,” he informs his audience another night, “and really the schlubs—people like you and me, we didn’t even know it.”
“Back before the Enlightenment,” he says on still another occasion, “there were kings and rulers, lords and ladies, the landowners, and then there were the serfs, everybody else, people like you and me.”
A Tea Party leader is described as a “regular schmo just like you and me.” Beck says the government has a dim view of “dummies like you and me.” He asks whether the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee is “part of the ruling class or is he with you and me.” He says that “if it were up to you or me, just regular schmoes in America, the Freedom Tower would have been done years ago.”
Since Beck is using Yiddish when he speaks of schmoes and of schlubs, let’s do the same: It takes chutzpah to carry on with this shtick.
When he finishes his regular-guy routine at Fox studios in Manhattan, Beck hops into his chauffer-driven sedan and takes the drive home to New Canaan, Connecticut, ranked by CNN Money in 2008 as the place with the highest median family income in the nation. The man who has just described himself as a “serf” rather than a “landowner” disembarks and steps into his sixteen-room neo-Colonial mansion on Ponus Ridge (Ponus was the Greek god of hard labor), which he purchased in 2005 for $4.25 million. Perhaps he winds down by taking a swim in the pool or strolling his 2.87 acres bordering Laurel Reservoir. When Beck, on the air, claims he lives in a “subdivision,” his followers probably don’t picture the compound on Ponus Ridge. It is a castle fit for a king, but unlike other castles, Beck’s, sadly, did not come with fortifications. So he built them. He showed up at the New Canaan Zoning Commission office in 2008 with his wife and his bodyguard and his lawyer, demanding an exemption from zoning laws to allow him to surround himself on all sides with a six-foot barrier: a four-foot stone wall topped by two feet of wood fencing in the front, and a six-foot wooden barrier elsewhere.
The lawyer explained to the town elders how a portion of the wall had “already mistakenly been built.” Oops! A neighbor and board members said they didn’t think fortifying the Beck estate was necessary. The New Canaan Advertiser wrote that at the meeting, Beck’s lawyer explained that Beck was a hunted man. The barrier “won’t stop them but it will slow them down,” the attorney said. “It will stop anything people send into the property, whether photographs or bullets.”
Bullets! On Ponus Ridge in New Canaan! It was sounding like one of those postapocalyptic scenarios on Beck’s show, when people defend their property with guns and plant vegetables to survive. In reality, the closest the New Canaan police came to witnessing that sort of violence was “a report” about “an individual banging on a door” at Beck’s manse.
The commoner/serf/schmo Beck describes his business empire as if he’s running a convenience
The bill passed. And, as of this writing, there are still no death panels, no eugenics, no euthanasia, nobody being sent to prison, no ripping in half of the country, no end of America as we know it, no nail in America’s coffin. Then again, maybe this is because of the painkillers; any day now, we could wake up with a huge pain in our national butt.
CHAPTER 7
THE MIDAS TOUCH
Let us now hear from Glenn Beck, regular guy.
“I am no different than you,” he tells viewers, with genuine regular-guy grammar. “I am just a regular schmo that finds myself on a set in New York.”
“Look, I’m a schmo,” he confesses to a guest one night. “I really don’t know how all this stuff works.”
“By the end of World War I, the power had shifted,” he informs his audience another night, “and really the schlubs—people like you and me, we didn’t even know it.”
“Back before the Enlightenment,” he says on still another occasion, “there were kings and rulers, lords and ladies, the landowners, and then there were the serfs, everybody else, people like you and me.”
A Tea Party leader is described as a “regular schmo just like you and me.” Beck says the government has a dim view of “dummies like you and me.” He asks whether the chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee is “part of the ruling class or is he with you and me.” He says that “if it were up to you or me, just regular schmoes in America, the Freedom Tower would have been done years ago.”
Since Beck is using Yiddish when he speaks of schmoes and of schlubs, let’s do the same: It takes chutzpah to carry on with this shtick.
When he finishes his regular-guy routine at Fox studios in Manhattan, Beck hops into his chauffer-driven sedan and takes the drive home to New Canaan, Connecticut, ranked by CNN Money in 2008 as the place with the highest median family income in the nation. The man who has just described himself as a “serf” rather than a “landowner” disembarks and steps into his sixteen-room neo-Colonial mansion on Ponus Ridge (Ponus was the Greek god of hard labor), which he purchased in 2005 for $4.25 million. Perhaps he winds down by taking a swim in the pool or strolling his 2.87 acres bordering Laurel Reservoir. When Beck, on the air, claims he lives in a “subdivision,” his followers probably don’t picture the compound on Ponus Ridge. It is a castle fit for a king, but unlike other castles, Beck’s, sadly, did not come with fortifications. So he built them. He showed up at the New Canaan Zoning Commission office in 2008 with his wife and his bodyguard and his lawyer, demanding an exemption from zoning laws to allow him to surround himself on all sides with a six-foot barrier: a four-foot stone wall topped by two feet of wood fencing in the front, and a six-foot wooden barrier elsewhere.
The lawyer explained to the town elders how a portion of the wall had “already mistakenly been built.” Oops! A neighbor and board members said they didn’t think fortifying the Beck estate was necessary. The New Canaan Advertiser wrote that at the meeting, Beck’s lawyer explained that Beck was a hunted man. The barrier “won’t stop them but it will slow them down,” the attorney said. “It will stop anything people send into the property, whether photographs or bullets.”
Bullets! On Ponus Ridge in New Canaan! It was sounding like one of those postapocalyptic scenarios on Beck’s show, when people defend their property with guns and plant vegetables to survive. In reality, the closest the New Canaan police came to witnessing that sort of violence was “a report” about “an individual banging on a door” at Beck’s manse.
The commoner/serf/schmo Beck describes his business empire as if he’s running a convenience
Similar Books
