Right wing talk show hosts (cable and radio) have been garnering a lot of attention lately. Good for their ratings and their pocketbooks—granted.
Their attacks on Democrats and those who represent them or run for public office on their behalf, came to a deafening, vicious crescendo during the final months of the presidential elections.
More recently, radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh has pretty much hogged the limelight with his well-publicized hopes that the new President will fail, that our economy will fail, and with his “modest” denials that he is not the de facto head of the Republican Party. Again, his numbers and his audiences rose, and so did his revenues. Good for him.
While many of us have heard of conservative commentator Glenn Beck, he recently became a superstar when he got his very own prime time show on Fox News.
This week’s TIME magazine has quite a good article on this latest conservative phenomenon.
Author James Poniewozik starts his essay, “Fears of a Clown,” with this leader:
Weeping, joking and predicting an apocalypse, Fox News star Glenn Beck turns resentment into ratings.
He then proceeds to give a “fair and balanced” description of this latest “populist superstar,” highlighting Beck‘s love for “big visuals and low-tech explainer stunts,” such as his recent Jenga bit.
Obviously the essay was written prior to Beck‘s latest low-tech, low taste, lowbrow, but highly incendiary stunt where he pretends to be President Obama, douses an American with (pretend) gasoline, lights a not-so-pretend match, and stops just short of symbolically setting the man on fire.
Poniewozik perhaps anticipated this episode, by saying:
The new populist superstar of Fox News has made a refrain of predicting that government policies are leading to disaster — dark, ruinous, blood-in-the-streets kind of disaster.
And,
For Beck, [the previously mentioned] Jenga is a metaphor for the [toxic-bank-assets] plan’s risk. But it is also a metaphor for Beck’s show, which teeters from humor to predictions of apocalypse to self-esteem sermons to fits of weeping. (“I’m sorry. I just love my country. And I fear for it.”) This is what makes it so compelling: the breathless feeling that at any moment, everything could spectacularly collapse.
Referring to other right wing talk show hosts, Poniewozik says that while Beck embraces fear (after the immolation episode, one could say that Beck also embraces a very serious psychological affliction), “O’Reilly embodies anger and Hannity brashness.”
For some reason, Poniewozik—perhaps he does not want to have to grovel and apologize to the Great One, à la Michael Steele—does not include Rush Limbaugh in his essay.
When one adds hate-embodying Limbaugh to this triad, we get the clear and disturbing vision of four horsemen, just rearing to corroborate their vision of an American apocalypse.
Image: Courtesy pattayadailynews.com
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.