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My Mea Culpa on Glenn Beck: Immanentize the Eschaton!

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When you’re wrong, you’re wrong and it’s always best to face up to the facts and just admit it. Here goes: I was wrong, very wrong… I was OH SO WRONG about Glenn Beck in my post yesterday. I said that Beck was getting boring. Running out of steam. That his rants were getting repetitive.

In a word: HAH!

Oh, man, I really blew it, didn’t I? Turns out that there was merely a brief lull in the monkeyshines. Beck was just tuning up the orchestra before unleashing the grandest, most fucked-up (not to mention “supernatural”) conspiracy theory that he’s yet come up with in that fetid, rancid, over-heated little brain of his.

Last night’s broadcast, well, Glenn Beck made a fool of me.

Watch in disbelief as Beck uses information gleaned from a new crackpot Christian prophecy book called The Islamic Antichrist. Embraced by the batshit crazy WorldNet Daily crowd (natch), The Islamic Antichrist posits the theory that the Mahdi, the end-times Islamic redeemer/Messiah who Muslims believe will come to Earth to rid it of evildoers, the tyranny of kings and despots and, of course, the infidels, is in fact, the same fellow Christians call the Antichrist. (Their good guy = our bad guy. Makes sense so far, right? Except that the Koran says the Mahdi works WITH Jesus, keep that in mind and there is already a direct Muslim equivalent to the Antichrist known as Masih ad-Dajjal, “the deceiving Messiah,” although this character doesn’t actually appear in the Koran itself).

Within Islam, the Mahdi is often conflated or considered to be synonymous, with the 12th Imam (see Twelvers), who is prophesied to set up a worldwide Caliphate. The Islamic Antichrist, written by a guy calling himself “Joel Richardson” (apparently a pseudonym to protect him from seeing a fatwa put on his head—DO watch this video for more on this ass-clown) does appear to have some valid points (the Christian eschaton and the Islamic end-times stuff do have many parallels), but Beck being Beck, he takes what are in fact, “facts” about supernatural holy books from over a thousand years ago (interpreted by a fanatical modern day believer, of course) and then turns around and PARADES THESE “FACTS” ABOUT SUPERNATURAL PROPHECIES AS “CURRENT EVENTS ANALYSIS” ON WHAT IS SUPPOSED TO BE A “NEWS” NETWORK and not the fucking 700 Club. It would really be stretching it to call a book like The Islamic Antichrist, “non-fiction,” if you take my point, so what value would a “fact” about fiction (or a religious holy book, both are the same to me) have? It’s an empty calorie for most people. For Glenn Beck, it’s a motif whistled by his good old prophetic buddy Joel that he can turn into a conspiracy theory symphony of small-minded (albeit brilliant) religious bigotry that is positively Wagnerian—by way of Jack Van Impe—in its scope.

Fuck me… he’s good! It was a new, fresh low for Fox News, but a triumph, a tour de force, for Glenn Beck, personally.

Incorporating Biblical (and now Koranic!) “prophecy” into a wild-eyed, bughouse crazy conspiracy theory is EXACTLY the trick Beck needed to really draw the faithful back into his drama and shore up his ratings in the middle of a big dip. My hat is off to him: Glenn Beck, you are a MAESTRO of weaving together paranoia, bigotry, misrepresentation of history and wacko religious beliefs, and although the sight of you turns my stomach, I will say this: You are a genius showman. A genius. Your schtick is fucked up, corrosive to American civic life (or what’s left of it because of people like you) and I hope you’ll be raptured soon (on camera, if you can swing it). Still, as a person raised in a family of West Virginia born-agains who all vote Republican (and don’t even know why), I now have a grudging respect for your immense talents.

You’re an artist. No, an artiste! But you are no political scientist, Glenn. On that count you’re not much better than a tinfoil hat-wearing Ham radio conspiracy theorist living alone in a trailer somewhere in the Nevada desert with a cache of automatic weapons, saving his pee-pee in mason jars, but boy oh boy are you a master at coming up with plot-lines that Tim LaHaye, Hal Lindsay and Jack T. Chick would envy and turning it all into a personal fortune on prime time America tee-vee!  When it comes to taking crazy, fucked-up religulous bullshit and making it sound plausible for an audience of low IQ dolts who should be asked to take a test in critical thinking skills before they vote (or are issued a driver’s license), you are DA MAN!

The thing the kept going through my mind, though, as I watched this (other than wondering what Kirk Cameron thought of it all) is that Beck really seems to be setting himself up to become the next Salman Rushdie by explicitly welding Islamaphobia with Christian Eschatology in an insecure time. Who knows, maybe that would be appealing to his pathologies and his oft-admitted martyr complex?
 

Posted by Richard Metzger
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02.18.2011
03:24 pm
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