Beck’s new book, An Inconvenient Book: Real Solutions to the World’s Biggest Problems, just debuted at number one on the Times’ hardcover nonfiction bestseller list, making
the Beck-Cooper set-to newsworthy, in the opinion of the editors of the Times.
I managed to miss Beck vs. Cooper – I would rather coat myself with molasses and lie down on a fire ant hill than watch the fat, fatuous, smirking sap-for-all-seasons Beck do his shtick – but I got a pretty good idea of how wise and witty Beck was from the following lines from the Times piece: “When Cooper said ‘most scientists say yes’ while asking if man is to blame for climate change, Beck replied: ‘Ooh. Most scientists say yes. Wow. You got me there. That’s why you’re on Sixty Minutes.’”
Every few months, some right wing media “personality” like Beck, Limbaugh, Michael Savage or Ann Coulter comes out with another moronic, semi-literate volume of hate-mongering, fear-pandering, prejudice-pimping rot, and inevitably the book zooms to the top of the bestseller list.
I have to confess, I don’t really understand it. These people present no facts to support their opinions, mainly because they don’t have any: they are way too lazy to research the subjects they pontificate about, and besides, facts are for pointy-headed intellectuals. And they aren’t funny, or clever, or eloquent: they are at the same level as 6-year-olds on the school playground, who thumb their noses and yell, “Nya nya nya! You’re a big ol’ stinker, and I’m not!” Ever notice how they almost never invite guests with different views on their programs? (And if they do, how they shout their opponents down, drown them out, cut them off?) They don’t try to out-argue anyone, because they can’t.
Sublimely comfortable in their pig-ignorance, they babble on, to an audience as dumb as or even dumber than they are, a mutual admiration society of brain-dead, soulless schmucks.
Again, it amazes me, that there’s a huge audience for these fools, and more hordes eager to read their nonsense in print. Amazes and appalls: because when you cut to the chase, the secret ingredient in all of these programs and books is hate, pure and simple. Moslems, immigrants, African-Americans, women, educated people, gays, environmentalists, Hispanics, Europeans: all are scorned, feared, resented, scapegoated, mocked and threatened, over and over again, endlessly. Make no mistake, it’s ugly, ugly stuff, the summoning up of the demons of know-nothingism, prejudice and oppression, the spirits of the lynch mob, the book-burner and the goon squad.
A riff from a recent Michael Savage radio program is all too typical: “When I see a woman walking around with [sic] a burqa, I see a Nazi…. A hateful Nazi who would like to slit
your throat and kill your children… She’s doing it to spit in your face. She’s saying, ‘You white moron, you, I’m going to kill you if I can.”
When I hear this kind of thing, I think of the young Afghan-American woman I know,
a West Point graduate who’s now a Special Forces lieutenant, who has dedicated her life to protecting our nation from terrorism.
Beck, Coulter, Savage, Limbaugh and company and their fans wouldn’t understand; they don’t want to.
Live long enough in darkness and you fear the light and celebrate your blindness.
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