What is it that makes Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin so appealing to a certain segment of American society? According to this assessment by columnist Julio Valdeón Blanco of Spain’s El Mundo, it is a native desire to recapture a past that exists only in the minds of demagogues and the ‘uncultivated’ people that always tend to follow them.
For El Mundo, Julio Valdeón Blanco writes in part:
Behind Beck’s words lurks a personality well-suited for show business, a comedian turned journalist, or rather a journalist who, far from being interested in giving an account of what has happened, is far more interested in rewriting the past, altering reality, and making that into history. Having dug deep into the nation’s self-consciousness, he knows how to choose a sliver of news and present it wrapped in phrases that sizzle.
It’s a mythical country, with covered wagons crossing prairies or neon gas station signs that light up when he evokes them on behalf of the middle class. Beck knows how to excite his audience. He knows well the source of its melancholy, its nostalgia for paradise lost. With his own junk, fast-food intellectualism, he has led a renaissance of an extremism that has never gone away, even while insisting that his event on Saturday be apolitical.
With the summer slowly simmering through the party primaries, the U.S. has rediscovered the wild seasoning at its essence. It’s the umpteenth return of those who see the state as a hunting ground for the idle. Beck serves as the prophet and Sarah Palin, the commander-in-chief.
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