http://killingthebuddha.com/mag/dogma/brother-beck-presentsBrother Beck Presentsby Alexander Zaitchik
Glenn Beck’s Mormon masterpiece theater.- snip -
This is not an accident. As they were always intended to do, Beck’s tears have become a distinctive corporate-brand handle. They mark him clearly from everyone else in the broadcasting industry. When Beck began his career in conservative commentary, the field was thick with tough-guy know-it-alls—from the lace-curtain boor O’Reilly to the cigar-chomping blowhard Limbaugh.
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“There were definitely times the crying was a tactic,” remembers Vinnie Penn, Beck’s former cohost in New Haven. “He’d be crying on-air. Then we’d go on commercial break and he’d phone in an order for a bacon-and-egg with cheese. Then we’d come back on-air and the tears would be back.” In Tampa, too, where he launched his talk radio career, he was known for turning on the waterworks for dramatic effect.
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Those who study Mormon rituals and rhetoric say that the fingerprints of bearing testimony can be found all over Beck’s public tearfulness. “Beck’s ability to ‘cry on cue’ appears to be a combination of Mormon culture and the practiced delivery of a media professional,” says Daymon M. Smith, a Mormon doctoral candidate in anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. “He is using Mormon tactics to spread Mormon ideas, such as the gospel of Cleon Skousen, under the cover of secular political revelations.”
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It is hard to imagine a religion better suited to Beck’s emotional neediness and hack entertainment chops than the Church of Latter-Day Saints. Mormonism has not only made an art of fake crying, it has institutionalized Beck’s favorite mode of speech, the sentimental monologue. It also encourages a certainty of spirit based on self-revelation that lies outside argument, fact, or logic. What Beck does on radio and television is an amped-up version of the testimony ritual: he fervently talks about what he believes—knows—is happening, describes the dark secrets he has uncovered, conveys the transcendent importance of these discoveries, and frames it all in a Manichean narrative—America as a battlefield on which God-fearing defenders of liberty face off against evil big-government conspirators.
The way Beck has built his movement and his audience is a microcosm of the method by which the Mormon Church grew into a worldwide religion. Like an earnest young missionary spreading the good word through emotional speeches to confused Latin American villagers, Beck has brought his gut self-revelations to the angry, not-so educated audiences of Fox News and AM talk-radio, employing emotional intensity overflowing into tears to conquer doubts of his sincerity and prove his access to powerful truths. By asking his viewers to “join him”—in the 9.12 Project, as a “constitutional watchdog,” for his 100-year plan—or to “follow him” (as he says at the beginning of each Fox broadcast), he is offering viewers a chance to share in his revelation.
Bear testimony; recruit. Bear testimony; recruit.
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Like Beck’s work in radio, television, stage, and publishing, official Mormon culture is more than aggressively anti-intellectual; it is infantilizing. Those who stray too far outside the sandbox of accepted narratives do not fare well. In 1993, after a brief glasnost period at Brigham Young University, the school purged its faculty of feminists and liberals. Church officials gave speeches naming feminists, intellectuals, and gays and lesbians as the three greatest enemies of the church. Ever since, the BYU faculty has been required, as a condition of employment, to annually renew their endorsements by local ecclesiastical leaders. Beck, so ready to decry imaginary neo-Soviet policies in the U.S. government, is silent about the real neo-Soviet policies within his church.
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Mormon sentimentalist culture results in more than just bad film and fiction. It obliterates any possibility of a fuller reckoning with the complexities of history. In his essay “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” James Baldwin argued that sentimental novels, by cheapening tragedy, help to reinforce the reality that made the tragedy possible in the first place. Sentimentalism, Baldwin wrote, is rooted in a “medieval morality (of) black, white, the devil, the next world—posing its alternatives between heaven and the flames.” This medieval morality is fertile ground for medieval politics. For Baldwin, the politics of sentimentalism always shared an “indecent glibness” with those “moral, neatly framed and incontestable . . . improving mottoes sometimes found hanging on the walls of furnished rooms.”
In other words, Beck World politics.
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