I haven't defended Beck "passionately" or "furiously," but I have defended him because, as I said, while not in a position to watch his current show regularly, I have seen it and know perfectly well that the true load of crap being shoveled here is the contention that this man is somehow different in any important way from what he ever was. He's "imperfect," "emotionally unstable," "cartoonish"–I've said all those things and more, based on my observation of the man. First question: Those characterizations amount to a furious defense? Second: Do you understand English?
The one concrete example offered by Rocketman, re Bush, I responded to in detail. He has not bothered to re-reply to that. That's ok. He's not obliged to. What's not okay is that, instead, he offers up some jumble about tire manufactures that is utterly incoherent. And I defy you to clarify it on the basis of the actual comment. If I don't understand Rocketman's latest illustration it's not because I didn't see the show.
Colin, Rocketman's diatribe, to which I was responding, is completely non-specific as to time. The only concrete reference he makes is to Beck's criticism of Bush–perforce the only thing I responded to or could–as being a "progressive." I'm pretty sure that that particular jibe is not of recent, i.e., post-CNN, vintage. Moreover, has Glenn Beck–his style, his mannerisms–changed dramatically in transiting to Fox? He was okay but then went off the rails? I doubt it.
"The fact that I do not in my present circumstances have access to Beck does not mean that I do not occasionally "catch" his show in other venues, at the local beach bar, for instance. A few years ago, when he was on CNN, I watched him with some regularity."
You're sprinting clownishly for the goal and you have no ball in your hands.
The fact that I do not in my present circumstances have access to Beck does not mean that I do not occasionally "catch" his show in other venues, at the local beach bar, for instance. A few years ago, when he was on CNN, I watched him with some regularity.
Come now, Das Kapital? How much may any man of flesh and blood address that slab of pernicious Hegelianism on a TV show? I'm afraid that simply listing the topics Beck addresses without supplying his opinions of them is inadequate. If they're intellectually threadbare–as I'm perfectly willing to admit in advance they might be–I don't have cable, so I couldn't say–but Glenn Beck is not running a Great Books seminar ala Mortimer Adler.
If Beck is unwilling or even unable to address the fine points of the labor theory of surplus value does that in itself require that he be ignored or scorned? Who the hell on earth understood Marx's sophomoric economics besides Karl Marx?
As to the one substantive illustration you provide, I yield to no one in my high regard for George W. Bush. The iron integrity he exhibited in Iraq and as regards committing the nation to the absurd Kyoto Protocol must be praised to the skies. We should all be eternally grateful, in my opinion. But George Bush was first of all a Christian conservative, and he hearkened to the gospel call to enact the so-called "corporal works of mercy"–you know, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison–insofar as it is in one's power to do so; and lest we forget, GWB was President of the United States for eight years, which interregnum provided him with ample opportunity to act upon that particular commandment, as he did numerous times with regard to Federal aid to education, AIDS in Africa, and, with less conviction or sense, subsidies for senior-citizen purchases of medicines.
So Beck's criticism of Bush, as simple-minded as it undoubtedly is, might only be a clumsy reminder of another, preeminently Christian admonition: Apodite oun Kaisaros Kaiseri, "Render thou then to Caesar what is Caesar's," kai to theo tou theou "and to God what is God's." Bush did not always adroitly separate the responsibilities of the man from those of the office.
What I am urging is that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, however, cartoonish and unsophisticated their policy prescriptions might be–and they are definitely not always so impaired–should not be contemned as if they were anything more than they ostensibly are: the product of cable television and AM talk radio rather than that of Charlie Rose or Alistair Cook. Their positions, however tendentiously proffered, may all be defended. The sometimes crazy uncle is still my uncle, and so I owe him at least an attempt to understand him that I do not owe, say, Barack Obama.
More piling on Glenn Beck because he is not John Locke! What pathetic rubbish. Rocketman, as is depressingly routine, does not pause to provide us with a single instance of what exactly is so "wrong about so much history and its CONTEXT," that "it’s frightening." Boo hoo. Rocketman is frightened, poor lass. Of what, for God's sakes? And then to add the spectacular imbecility that children must be prevented from viewing Beck!!! As if that were a blow hot struck for freedom of inquiry, when it is the most mindless form of pointless censorship that can be imagined. Glenn Beck is not a purveyor of pornography that a responsible parent must guard against. What faux and repellant high-mindedness. What–may I say this?–preening crap.
One major reason the Federal Government wasn’t a “presence” in the “daily lives” of Americans up to the 1930s would be sheer technological limitations.
Not so fast. Newspapers were far more important in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In many communities two, three, and four or more papers appeared every day in multiple editions, which were avidly read, debated, and disseminated (Toqueville remarks on that somewhere). The telegraph started linking the nation in the late 1840s. The country had all the technology and media it needed to learn about doings in DC had there been one-one-thousandth going on there that impacted them, that could take their money or by changing a law or introducing a regulation put them out of business and out of work.
As to "presence" versus "influence," same practical diff. I don't care which you use. But the use to which you're putting influence here is too broad to be of much value in that it is hard to see how it distinguishes Kansas sodbusters from us or any other American who has ever lived since colonial times with respect to the government. We are all "influenced" by government in this thoroughly trivial way: the Federal government is a fact, like the height of the Empire State Building. But in a million ways never dreamed of before the 1930s, Americans are living with the demanding presence of federal rules and regulations if only in the mountains of paperwork that businesses of every stripe must fill out sometimes monthly, sometimes weekly, sometimes even daily under penalty of fine.
[I]it takes a stupendous and all-embracing amnesia to miss the fact that from, say 1880 to 1920, or from 1850 to 2010, unimaginably vast simultaneous and interconnected transformations in all social, cultural, political, and economic realms, vastly disturbing as well as vastly expansive and innovative, were occurring. The new demands on inherited institutions of self-government were equally vast.
That is an expectoration of fact-free hand waving that is in some opaque manner meant to illustrate the necessity of so-called progressive political innovations. When in history do we witness the absence of those tiresome vastnesses? From the founding to the Civil War an entire continent was settled. Roads were built, canals dug, and the railroads spread to every town in America east of the Mississippi. By the 1880s at the latest the US had surpassed Britain in industrial might. The electrical grid and gas-lines were being laid down. From the cotton gin to the telephone, inventions cascaded and were quickly put to use on a mass scale. Overseas trade was exploding, with American manufactures traveling everywhere. Yet the Federal government remained, until the 1930s, a rather distant presence in American society and American business. The country also had several times experienced definite ups and downs. Judged by the drop in economic activity alone, the depression of the 1870s was worse than that of the 1930s. Neither FDR nor a New Deal was required to remedy matters.
So sorry about the misspellings. I can't explain them, since I've correctly spelled "MacLeod" dozens of times before.
No particular event of the ones I cited constituted an act of despotism, true. But that's part of the frog-in-hot-water problem the country faces. Jefferson spoke of a long train of usurpations. But were they even that, and were They–a constitutional Crown-in-Parliament government–intending despotism? They certainly didn't think so. The colonies had non-voting representatives in Parliament (Benjamin Franklin was one, I think). George III was not remotely like Louis XIV or even Fredrick Wilhelm IV. There are more people residing in American territories today (I'm one of them) than inhabited all of British North America in 1776, excluding the Indians, but we have no more than non-voting representatives in Congress. We do not consider ourselves despotically treated; nor are we in any way that pertains to our status as residents of territories. It cannot be solely the fact of this or that level of consensual involvement with "abuses and usurpations" that determines the reality of the danger perceived by Glenn Beck (or myself) but their nature and if they do in fact demonstrate a clear and unsettling trend.
By the way, although the court acted in 1913, didn't the actual legislating of the income tax wait until 1916? Nor, in that regard, do I think that the absolutely unforeseen, unannounced, unanticipated (then), and pervasive expansions of the income tax, along with that nasty innovation called withholding, are really addressed by saying, matter-of-factly, "Oh well, it was legally passed, so what's your beef?"
Despotism introduced by a sequence of governmental self-aggrandizements rather than in one fell, tyrannical swoop is still objectively despotic to those in its path.
I've as much as admitted that what we are witnessing is not textbook dictatorship. So what is the purpose of your series of rhetorical questions? To refute a claim that's not been made? You're pushing on a rope here.
Of course one must vote, rally, and so on. The substance of the post seems to me to be the inadequacies or failings or outright stupidities of Glenn Beck, as well as Sarah Palin for applauding him. But Beck's approach to persuasion is just another way of going about the politics of the matter, one suited to a mass audience.
I've no idea really what the hell "high horse" you're babbling about, unless seeing the issue in constitutional terms reflexively qualifies as overreaching. I don't think so. Whether the Federal government has presumptive or derived rights to intervene so often and so massively–and with coercive power, mind you–in decisions better addressed by the States or, God forgive me for bringing this up, by private citizens, is a constitutional matter. The Supreme Court of the US had to be invoked to license several of the interventions I mentioned, so there's that; with persistent effort, it could be brought to reconsider them. In fact, with health care and the proposed EPA regulations intended to intimidate Congress into legislating a radical energy policy, it may very well come to that. So, I'll stick to my high horse, thank you. You're welcome to rock to and fro on yours.
That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security [emphases supplied].
Sic scripsit Thomas Jefferson, 4 July 1776.
"[A]bsolute Despotism" is certainly provocative. The extent that it may apply to our current predicament, if it applies at all, is clearly debatable. Yet it's not unreasonable to ask just what might amount to cautionary flares, let's call them, sent aloft alerting us to a developing "long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object"? Could they, possibly, include the income tax of 1916, which exposed the resources of the citizen to confiscation as and to what extent might seem condign to the Federal government? Or was it the further mandatory confiscation of wealth entailed in the Social Security Act of 1935 or in the Medicare legislation of 1965? Each of those actions of Congress was popularly supported, no doubt. Nonetheless is there "a design," a political purpose, evident? When, as has recently transpired, a further intervention into the wholesale provision of health care was congessionally mandated without majority support, did a despotic design announce itself at last and more or less bald-facedly? Looking ahead, if cap-and-trade were enacted, with its contemplated relentless and minute meddling into the most mundane activities of everyday life, might that qualify at all as evidence for a political program intended to suffocate elemental economic freedoms?
Despotism introduced by a sequence of governmental self-aggrandizements rather than in one fell, tyrannical swoop is still objectively despotic to those in its path. If Glenn Beck is alarmed by the broad sweep of a "train" of events and draws attention to it in melodramatic ways, is it prudent to discount those events because of mannerisms? Glenn Beck functions in a mass medium. If he wants to use posters of the Founders and sentimental cliches to awaken citizens to what is occurring in Washington, he is doing no more than what the medium requires him to do.
Continually picking at the scab of unfortunate tone or problematic polemical gesture, as Colin has done, is decadent. Especially when, as he has on many occasions troubled to admonish those who disagree with him, what's supposedly important here are the votes of the undecided and even the sensibilities of persons unknown on the Left, who might, gasp, stop up their ears to a message they are already absolutely deaf to, a wholly tendentious argument that suggests to me no more than this: Colin K. McCleod is personally offended by Glenn Beck. The residual Leftism in Colin McCleod bristles at Beck's infelicities of expression; the larger public is merely being swept along by the powerful undertow created by CKM's personal doubts. In the context of an enormously consequential struggle to shape public opinion that sort of objection to the tactics of Beck and Palin rises no higher than a vain and, in this case, literally self-serving hypothesis.
@ CK MacLeod:
I haven't defended Beck "passionately" or "furiously," but I have defended him because, as I said, while not in a position to watch his current show regularly, I have seen it and know perfectly well that the true load of crap being shoveled here is the contention that this man is somehow different in any important way from what he ever was. He's "imperfect," "emotionally unstable," "cartoonish"–I've said all those things and more, based on my observation of the man. First question: Those characterizations amount to a furious defense? Second: Do you understand English?
The one concrete example offered by Rocketman, re Bush, I responded to in detail. He has not bothered to re-reply to that. That's ok. He's not obliged to. What's not okay is that, instead, he offers up some jumble about tire manufactures that is utterly incoherent. And I defy you to clarify it on the basis of the actual comment. If I don't understand Rocketman's latest illustration it's not because I didn't see the show.
@ CK MacLeod:
Colin, Rocketman's diatribe, to which I was responding, is completely non-specific as to time. The only concrete reference he makes is to Beck's criticism of Bush–perforce the only thing I responded to or could–as being a "progressive." I'm pretty sure that that particular jibe is not of recent, i.e., post-CNN, vintage. Moreover, has Glenn Beck–his style, his mannerisms–changed dramatically in transiting to Fox? He was okay but then went off the rails? I doubt it.
@ Rocketman:
"The fact that I do not in my present circumstances have access to Beck does not mean that I do not occasionally "catch" his show in other venues, at the local beach bar, for instance. A few years ago, when he was on CNN, I watched him with some regularity."
You're sprinting clownishly for the goal and you have no ball in your hands.
'Nuff said?
@ CK MacLeod:
The fact that I do not in my present circumstances have access to Beck does not mean that I do not occasionally "catch" his show in other venues, at the local beach bar, for instance. A few years ago, when he was on CNN, I watched him with some regularity.
@ Rocketman:
Come now, Das Kapital? How much may any man of flesh and blood address that slab of pernicious Hegelianism on a TV show? I'm afraid that simply listing the topics Beck addresses without supplying his opinions of them is inadequate. If they're intellectually threadbare–as I'm perfectly willing to admit in advance they might be–I don't have cable, so I couldn't say–but Glenn Beck is not running a Great Books seminar ala Mortimer Adler.
If Beck is unwilling or even unable to address the fine points of the labor theory of surplus value does that in itself require that he be ignored or scorned? Who the hell on earth understood Marx's sophomoric economics besides Karl Marx?
As to the one substantive illustration you provide, I yield to no one in my high regard for George W. Bush. The iron integrity he exhibited in Iraq and as regards committing the nation to the absurd Kyoto Protocol must be praised to the skies. We should all be eternally grateful, in my opinion. But George Bush was first of all a Christian conservative, and he hearkened to the gospel call to enact the so-called "corporal works of mercy"–you know, feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit those in prison–insofar as it is in one's power to do so; and lest we forget, GWB was President of the United States for eight years, which interregnum provided him with ample opportunity to act upon that particular commandment, as he did numerous times with regard to Federal aid to education, AIDS in Africa, and, with less conviction or sense, subsidies for senior-citizen purchases of medicines.
So Beck's criticism of Bush, as simple-minded as it undoubtedly is, might only be a clumsy reminder of another, preeminently Christian admonition: Apodite oun Kaisaros Kaiseri, "Render thou then to Caesar what is Caesar's," kai to theo tou theou "and to God what is God's." Bush did not always adroitly separate the responsibilities of the man from those of the office.
What I am urging is that Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, however, cartoonish and unsophisticated their policy prescriptions might be–and they are definitely not always so impaired–should not be contemned as if they were anything more than they ostensibly are: the product of cable television and AM talk radio rather than that of Charlie Rose or Alistair Cook. Their positions, however tendentiously proffered, may all be defended. The sometimes crazy uncle is still my uncle, and so I owe him at least an attempt to understand him that I do not owe, say, Barack Obama.
@ Rocketman:
More piling on Glenn Beck because he is not John Locke! What pathetic rubbish. Rocketman, as is depressingly routine, does not pause to provide us with a single instance of what exactly is so "wrong about so much history and its CONTEXT," that "it’s frightening." Boo hoo. Rocketman is frightened, poor lass. Of what, for God's sakes? And then to add the spectacular imbecility that children must be prevented from viewing Beck!!! As if that were a blow hot struck for freedom of inquiry, when it is the most mindless form of pointless censorship that can be imagined. Glenn Beck is not a purveyor of pornography that a responsible parent must guard against. What faux and repellant high-mindedness. What–may I say this?–preening crap.
@ Zoltan Newberry:
Zoltan, you Rapaholic, is that your work? It's got a good beat, Dick. You can dance to it. I give it a 10. Bravissimo!
Not so fast. Newspapers were far more important in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In many communities two, three, and four or more papers appeared every day in multiple editions, which were avidly read, debated, and disseminated (Toqueville remarks on that somewhere). The telegraph started linking the nation in the late 1840s. The country had all the technology and media it needed to learn about doings in DC had there been one-one-thousandth going on there that impacted them, that could take their money or by changing a law or introducing a regulation put them out of business and out of work.
As to "presence" versus "influence," same practical diff. I don't care which you use. But the use to which you're putting influence here is too broad to be of much value in that it is hard to see how it distinguishes Kansas sodbusters from us or any other American who has ever lived since colonial times with respect to the government. We are all "influenced" by government in this thoroughly trivial way: the Federal government is a fact, like the height of the Empire State Building. But in a million ways never dreamed of before the 1930s, Americans are living with the demanding presence of federal rules and regulations if only in the mountains of paperwork that businesses of every stripe must fill out sometimes monthly, sometimes weekly, sometimes even daily under penalty of fine.
@ CK MacLeod:
That is an expectoration of fact-free hand waving that is in some opaque manner meant to illustrate the necessity of so-called progressive political innovations. When in history do we witness the absence of those tiresome vastnesses? From the founding to the Civil War an entire continent was settled. Roads were built, canals dug, and the railroads spread to every town in America east of the Mississippi. By the 1880s at the latest the US had surpassed Britain in industrial might. The electrical grid and gas-lines were being laid down. From the cotton gin to the telephone, inventions cascaded and were quickly put to use on a mass scale. Overseas trade was exploding, with American manufactures traveling everywhere. Yet the Federal government remained, until the 1930s, a rather distant presence in American society and American business. The country also had several times experienced definite ups and downs. Judged by the drop in economic activity alone, the depression of the 1870s was worse than that of the 1930s. Neither FDR nor a New Deal was required to remedy matters.
@ CK MacLeod:
So sorry about the misspellings. I can't explain them, since I've correctly spelled "MacLeod" dozens of times before.
No particular event of the ones I cited constituted an act of despotism, true. But that's part of the frog-in-hot-water problem the country faces. Jefferson spoke of a long train of usurpations. But were they even that, and were They–a constitutional Crown-in-Parliament government–intending despotism? They certainly didn't think so. The colonies had non-voting representatives in Parliament (Benjamin Franklin was one, I think). George III was not remotely like Louis XIV or even Fredrick Wilhelm IV. There are more people residing in American territories today (I'm one of them) than inhabited all of British North America in 1776, excluding the Indians, but we have no more than non-voting representatives in Congress. We do not consider ourselves despotically treated; nor are we in any way that pertains to our status as residents of territories. It cannot be solely the fact of this or that level of consensual involvement with "abuses and usurpations" that determines the reality of the danger perceived by Glenn Beck (or myself) but their nature and if they do in fact demonstrate a clear and unsettling trend.
By the way, although the court acted in 1913, didn't the actual legislating of the income tax wait until 1916? Nor, in that regard, do I think that the absolutely unforeseen, unannounced, unanticipated (then), and pervasive expansions of the income tax, along with that nasty innovation called withholding, are really addressed by saying, matter-of-factly, "Oh well, it was legally passed, so what's your beef?"
@ bob:
How is it you missed this?:
I've as much as admitted that what we are witnessing is not textbook dictatorship. So what is the purpose of your series of rhetorical questions? To refute a claim that's not been made? You're pushing on a rope here.
Of course one must vote, rally, and so on. The substance of the post seems to me to be the inadequacies or failings or outright stupidities of Glenn Beck, as well as Sarah Palin for applauding him. But Beck's approach to persuasion is just another way of going about the politics of the matter, one suited to a mass audience.
I've no idea really what the hell "high horse" you're babbling about, unless seeing the issue in constitutional terms reflexively qualifies as overreaching. I don't think so. Whether the Federal government has presumptive or derived rights to intervene so often and so massively–and with coercive power, mind you–in decisions better addressed by the States or, God forgive me for bringing this up, by private citizens, is a constitutional matter. The Supreme Court of the US had to be invoked to license several of the interventions I mentioned, so there's that; with persistent effort, it could be brought to reconsider them. In fact, with health care and the proposed EPA regulations intended to intimidate Congress into legislating a radical energy policy, it may very well come to that. So, I'll stick to my high horse, thank you. You're welcome to rock to and fro on yours.
Sic scripsit Thomas Jefferson, 4 July 1776.
"[A]bsolute Despotism" is certainly provocative. The extent that it may apply to our current predicament, if it applies at all, is clearly debatable. Yet it's not unreasonable to ask just what might amount to cautionary flares, let's call them, sent aloft alerting us to a developing "long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object"? Could they, possibly, include the income tax of 1916, which exposed the resources of the citizen to confiscation as and to what extent might seem condign to the Federal government? Or was it the further mandatory confiscation of wealth entailed in the Social Security Act of 1935 or in the Medicare legislation of 1965? Each of those actions of Congress was popularly supported, no doubt. Nonetheless is there "a design," a political purpose, evident? When, as has recently transpired, a further intervention into the wholesale provision of health care was congessionally mandated without majority support, did a despotic design announce itself at last and more or less bald-facedly? Looking ahead, if cap-and-trade were enacted, with its contemplated relentless and minute meddling into the most mundane activities of everyday life, might that qualify at all as evidence for a political program intended to suffocate elemental economic freedoms?
Despotism introduced by a sequence of governmental self-aggrandizements rather than in one fell, tyrannical swoop is still objectively despotic to those in its path. If Glenn Beck is alarmed by the broad sweep of a "train" of events and draws attention to it in melodramatic ways, is it prudent to discount those events because of mannerisms? Glenn Beck functions in a mass medium. If he wants to use posters of the Founders and sentimental cliches to awaken citizens to what is occurring in Washington, he is doing no more than what the medium requires him to do.
Continually picking at the scab of unfortunate tone or problematic polemical gesture, as Colin has done, is decadent. Especially when, as he has on many occasions troubled to admonish those who disagree with him, what's supposedly important here are the votes of the undecided and even the sensibilities of persons unknown on the Left, who might, gasp, stop up their ears to a message they are already absolutely deaf to, a wholly tendentious argument that suggests to me no more than this: Colin K. McCleod is personally offended by Glenn Beck. The residual Leftism in Colin McCleod bristles at Beck's infelicities of expression; the larger public is merely being swept along by the powerful undertow created by CKM's personal doubts. In the context of an enormously consequential struggle to shape public opinion that sort of objection to the tactics of Beck and Palin rises no higher than a vain and, in this case, literally self-serving hypothesis.