Historian Joseph Palermo on Beck's "history professor" pose, a "pseudo-educational propaganda tool"

[highplainsdem]

From the History News Network:

http://www.hnn.us/articles/127186.html

5-31-10

Glenn Beck: “Historian” For a Troubled America
By Joseph A. Palermo

Mr. Palermo is Associate Professor of American History at CSU, Sacramento. He's the author of two books on Robert F. Kennedy: In His Own Right (2001) and RFK (2008).

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Beck has emerged as the most influential promoter of the Jonah Goldberg/Amity Shlaes contention that President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal were unmitigated “calamities” for the country. Almost nightly, Beck tells his several million viewers that FDR, Woodrow Wilson, and other “progressives” (even TR) were engaged in a long-term project to strip Americans of their freedom and impose some kind of totalitarian state. Historians who specialize in the early twentieth century probably could never have dreamt that a TV and radio personality could convince so many ordinary Americans that laws that ensure the safety of meat and drugs, minimum wages, expanding voting rights, etc. undermine their “freedom.”

Beck, Goldberg, Shlaes and others seem to be pursuing a long-term project of their own to misinform their rather gullible audiences into believing that anytime a government imposes limits on the ability of private business (especially giant corporations) to exploit the country’s land and labor it is an attack on individual “liberty.” It’s the same argument that representatives of corporate trusts deployed at the turn of the last century when they demanded the “freedom” to do anything they wished. In the wake of the Wall Street financial meltdown and the Gulf of Mexico oil spill catastrophe, both brought to us by the less than benevolent actions of unrestrained corporate power, Beck’s views are not only stupid and false, but dangerous.

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And this brings me to the most fascinating aspect of Glenn Beck: Beck as Historian. To explain his novel historical theories to his viewers Beck assumes the affect of a university professor. When Beck sports a tweed blazer and rests his spectacles on the tip of his nose, eyes peering over his glasses, he’s impersonating the archetype of a professor that is widely familiar in the culture from movies and TV (if not from actual colleges and universities). Even in the era of erasable markers and PowerPoint he uses a chalkboard for heuristic purposes. The semiotician in me sees the chalkboard as far more than a mere stage prop. Given that Fox News has access to the most sophisticated and blaring computer graphics to drive home its political points, Beck’s use of the chalkboard is remarkably low-tech (even inside a very high-tech television studio). He’s the only TV personality who uses one. The chalkboard signifies scholarship and learning. His studio is transformed into a classroom and his audience becomes a class full of eager students. Beck becomes a professor—specifically, a history professor. Covered in chalk dust and ruffling through his lecture notes, Beck exudes a certain power that derives from the timeless teacher/student relationship even though he and his producers are deploying this demeanor as nothing more than a pseudo-educational propaganda tool. Writing in Time recently, Beck’s ideological soul mate Sarah Palin praised him for exactly this type of professorial playacting. I suppose we should be flattered that even Fox News recognizes the symbolic influence of our profession.

In The Use and Abuse of History, Frederick Nietzsche famously identified three kinds of history: the monumental, the antiquarian, and the critical. Beck does a little bit of each, but he is truly a practitioner of the monumental variety. “Monumental history lives by false analogy,” Nietzsche writes. “It entices the brave to rashness, and the enthusiastic to fanaticism by its tempting comparisons. Imagine this history in the hands—and the head—of a gifted egoist or an inspired scoundrel; kingdoms would be overthrown, princes murdered, war and revolution let loose, and the number of ‘effects in themselves’ —in other words, effects without sufficient cause—increased.” (p. 16)

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It’s fascinating that in an era where far-right ideologues like David Horowitz and affiliated organizations like “Accuracy in Academia” constantly scream about how terrible academia is and how “tenured radicals” have usurped the once noble purpose of the university still drift toward creating a fake scholarly environment for their propaganda. Like the recent Texas School Board decision to purge textbooks of ideological impurities, and Jonah Goldberg writing a “book” with all the trappings of footnotes and sources, or Liberty University conferring an honorary doctorate on Beck, Beck’s shtick is a backhanded nod to the relevance of history as a discipline and to historians not only as educators, but also as the keepers of the nation’s myths. We historians have more power in the culture than we often give ourselves credit for.

[KT2000]

1. Didn't FDR even have to halt

the corporate elite from taking over this country and therefore saving us from corporate rule?

[Chulanowa]

2. That hinged largely on Smedley Butler blowing hte whistle on the would-be coup

[highplainsdem]

3. kick

[Initech]

4. Mr. Nazi Tourettes as a history professor would be one easy class.

Anything + everything = HITLER!!!!!!!