Word: becking
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Fear of what? Take your pick. Fear that the U.S. is on a long march to fascism. (As evidence, Beck cited - on April Fools' Day but apparently seriously - the inclusion of fasces on the Mercury dime in 1916.) That fat cats and bureaucratic "bloodsuckers" are plundering your future. That Mexico will collapse and chaos will pour over the border. That America believes too little in God and too much in global warming. That "they" - Big Government, Big Business, Big Media - are against you. Above all, that you, small-town, small-business America - Palinville - have been forgotten. Dismissed. Laughed at. Just...
...hard to identify a Beck ideology so much as a set of attitudes, sometimes contradictory ones. He channels anger against Wall Street but defends the bonuses for AIG executives. He devoted a segment to debunking a conspiracy theory about FEMA "concentration camps" but has warned that the AmeriCorps program "indoctrinates your child into community service...
What unites Beck's disparate themes is a sense of siege. On March 13, he served up a kind of fear combo platter - war, chaos, totalitarianism, financial ruin - with the 9/12 Project, a tearful call to viewers to rediscover the common purpose they felt after 9/11. In 2001, that common purpose involved cable-news talkers' dialing down the us-vs.-them shtick for a day or two; now Beck urged viewers to reject the notion that "they" have all the power. "They don't surround us," he declared. "We surround them...
...Beck's surround sound plays like a mix of colonial pamphleteering, Great Depression demagoguery and the movie Red Dawn. But is he serious? He describes himself as a "rodeo clown," and he is a talented TV showman - joking and self-effacing, with a gift for big visuals and low-tech explainer stunts like his Jenga bit. Unlike O'Reilly et al., he's not a shouter. He calls his program "the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment...
Then again, he recently devoted a "War Room" episode to gaming out an American economic collapse in 2014 - the result of debt and high taxes - including the rise of "Mad Max" militias and civil unrest. Because if anything spells laff riot, it's the breakdown of lawful society! Whether Beck is stirring up frightening social currents or just playing in them, his material and its resonance are deadly serious...