Politics

If You Read This, The Communists Win: An Evening with Glenn Beck

Mike Gormly

Would you pay $20 to watch a loud, unfunny man make jokes about the hilarious warning label he found on a bottle of dog shampoo? I didn’t. But on June 4th, 2009, I was surrounded by people who had. That evening, I sat in a movie theater and watched a simulcast of his new comedy routine, entitled Common Sense. Sadly, the only funny thing about this comedian is that he is the new leading light of populist right, Glenn Beck.

Beck is the latest right wing prophet to make waves on Fox News. After transforming himself into a household name on the CNN Family of networks, he jumped ship in October 2008. While Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity seem passé in the midst of America’s shift back to the center left, Beck is a new Virgil, guiding the American right back on course by transforming its battles with President Obama into a struggle against Communism and radical Islam. The wildly popular Beck is rallying his army of cable viewers for a long term struggle against any public policy proscription with even a hint of pink.

The astronomical success of Glenn Beck in recent years can be chalked up to his ability to roll with the political punches. The backlash against Bush didn’t hurt him. Beck asserts that he is a conservative, not a Republican. Like the Grand Old Party, he lauds small government, laissez-faire economics, and a well-funded military constantly at the ready to vaporize anyone who calls us dickheads. This makes perfect sense to anyone familiar with the time-honored Republican game plan. When they run the show, Republicans use the District of Columbia as a hub for transferring tax dollars to their corporate allies. Simultaneously, the party’s mouthpieces bray on about the pantywaist traitor du jour. When Democrats control Washington, the GOP shifts focus and instead bemoans America’s abandonment of small government. They attack every meagerly progressive bill proposed by the Democratic Majority with a vigor that suggests their efforts are the only thing preventing a looming Marxist revolution. O’Reilly and Hannity were the voices of the Republican Party in power. Beck is the voice of the GOP in the minority.

I was mildly enthusiastic when I caught wind of my local theater’s scheduled broadcast of Beck’s latest special. I say mildly because I caught his previous one some months earlier. That special, called The Christmas Sweater, which was based on his schmaltzy bestselling book (in stores now!), largely concerned Beck’s desire to teach us all about the true meaning of Christmas, all in the confines of a toxically sentimental, two-hour vanity project. I tapped out within thirty minutes, after Beck whipped out his best televangelist tears for the ninth time.

Common Sense looked more promising. Instead of a saccharine autobiographical yarn about how a gift sweater from his mom taught him about Jesus or some shit, promos for Common Sense promised to be nothing but irreverent comedy. Watching the ads, I had no doubts that this would amount to nothing short of a disastrous comedic failure. One of which, titled “Stall” (on Youtube now!) featured Beck crying in a bathroom stall for two solid minutes (because there’s no crying in comedy), which was apparently some kind of joke. I thought, if that’s the best Beck can do to get people to fork over twenty bucks, then perhaps Beck’s celebrity is in serious danger. Seeing his comedy routine bomb before the faithful, people willing to shell out good money to watch a man on the big screen they watched for free five nights a week already, was something I didn’t want to miss.

When I showed up at the theater, I found that the turnout was considerably smaller than that of The Christmas Sweater. Those in attendance seemed quieter too. There weren’t any conversational chestnuts on par with those I caught in Sweater. At one point before Sweater, a man walking up the aisle recognized the two people sitting next to me and said “What is this? A meeting of the Vermont GOP?” with a laugh. As I walked into Common Sense, a solitary middle-aged woman smiled at me, perhaps happy to see an outlier from the mean age of the group. Outside of that glance, I didn’t observe any other communication in the theatre prior to the previews.

The screen fired up for the simulcast at around 7:45. The typical pre-show bits imploring the audience not to smoke and to turn off their cell phones were interspersed with spots for the 9-12 Project, Beck’s well-advertised social movement. The 9-12 Project refers not only to the day after 9-11, but also a set of nine principles and twelve values he views as essential to reinvigorating the Republic. There were frequent mentions of the website where one can purchase wristbands and magnets commemorating all twenty-one of these principles and values.

Finally, 8:00pm rolls around, the house lights dim, and Beck takes the stage in Kansas City to raucous applause. In my theatre, there were a few noble attempts to get a standing ovation going. Once Beck got settled, he opened by saying “Well, I guess I should talk to you about what happened on The View.” He proceeded to talk about how he was on the subway and Whoopi Goldberg started stabbing a guy, while Barbara Walters, who had been sleeping upside down, flew around the car and began sucking the guy’s blood. Already I was confused as to what was supposed to be funny about this. It reminded me of the time I saw Date Movie and wondered if the film’s one-liners were intended as jokes. It was the same thing here, but in this instance the theater(s) erupted in laughter, just as they do when Beck revisits the joke three successive times.

After his act achieves liftoff, Glenn articulates his primary thesis: there is no common sense left in America. Contrary to our (9) principles, the government is spending all of our money and its power is expanding, and it’s all Barney Frank’s fault. Well, not just him, but Timothy F. Geithner and Henry “Who looks like Lon Chaney” Waxman’s too. The two primary problems with America are “Spending” and “Them.” He rarely expands on what he means by either problem. When Beck talks about “Spending,” he says that the Democrats claim they can’t find anything to cut, at which point he observes that PBS and NPR could be cut, but fails to bring up anything else. He does bring up the military, but only as an example of one thing the Public Sector does well, before launching into why the Private Sector is always better (because private bathrooms are better than public bathrooms!). Beck goes on like this until he starts barraging the audience with every comedic idea in his repertoire (this is where the warning label jokes come in) before he takes a 15-minute break. Yeah, a 15 minute break. I’m surrounded by people who paid twenty bucks for a two-hour comedy show, which just ended with him reading warning labels he found around his house, and now they find it’s actually an hour and 45 minutes.

Yet nobody seems pissed or cheated. When I go out to the lobby to get a badly-needed cup of coffee, only about ten people get the same idea. The rest wait patiently in their seats as the intermission graphics count down the time, though they are occasionally interrupted by ads for Glenn’s upcoming book titled Glenn Beck’s Common Sense, complete with the tagline “Buy it, or the Communists win.” As far as I can tell, nobody is concerned with the fact that, in this economy, they may have made an unwise investment, because they’ve been chortling and clapping at the lot of it. The Tea Party Protest rationalizations (“We don’t usually protest, because we have….jobs!), the Modern Art critiques (“It was just a big canvas painted blue, and it was called….Blue”) or even the, ugh, Ah-nuld jokes, where Beck makes the totally edgy claim that the Governor of California may be an idiot.

When Beck reemerged, he came dressed as Patrick Henry, or was it Thomas Paine. It was tough to tell. He quoted them in tandem, bouncing from an opening “Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death” quote to a reference back to his Common Sense material. The colonially-attired Beck moved quickly to his next routine, an audience participation bit. At stage right, he positions a guy with the build of a junior college linebacker, who we are to understand represents tyranny, while at stage left he places a nondescript schmoe who represents anarchy. Between them he places, with a frankly uncomfortable amount of physical contact, a seven year old girl, who we are to understand represents America’s personal freedom. Beck places her just out of arm’s reach of Johnny Anarchy, suggesting that when our glorious nation was in its infancy, we were actually teetering on the fatal precipice of Lord knows what. However, our founding fathers eventually moved foxy blonde freedom a little further away, which was great. As time went on though, Lady Freedom found herself inching ever closer to Buck Tyranny. The point being that we, as a country, are marching ever closer, under the guise of helping our fellow man, towards Marxist Oblivion.

Beck and his audience are apparently unfamiliar with the Constitution’s expansion of freedoms for women or black Americans. Otherwise, it is unlikely Beck would have made the statement that this country is less free than when it started, a statement which drew extensive applause. The audience laughed politely when Beck returned immediately after that bit to his Whoopi and Barbara jokes.

Smarty-pants liberals might mock the idea that anything Beck says amounts to sense. Beck’s popularity suggests that his sensibilities are, if nothing else, quite common. Large numbers of Americans believe that the nation’s greatest problems don’t involve the quagmires in Iraq, Afghanistan, on Guantanamo Bay, or on Wall Street. Like Beck, they believe the problem is “spending.” It’s only common sense.

Beck closes the show by retelling the story of Paul Revere’s ride. It proves some point about how revolutions are made by all kinds of people from all walks of life. I look back through the audience of middle-aged white folks and realize that their uprising will made primarily at home, on the internet or while eating supper around the television. I wondered what happened to the “all-comedy” promise he made in the previews. The second half contained no more than ten jokes, two of which were repeats of his earlier Whoopi Goldberg jokes.

When I walked out of the theater, I thought back to other difficult viewing experiences I’ve had over the years. I took an avant-garde film class which screened all kinds of unwatchable cinema, including Stan Brakhage’s The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes, which consisted of thirty minutes of footage shot in a morgue. There’s all the Shakespeare productions I saw in high school. There’s the Phantom Menace. I felt a sense of solidarity with the audience in each of those instances. I was part of a larger group of people who shared my sense that we had all just sat through a train wreck. After my evening with Glenn Beck, I was surrounded by people wearing three dollar 9-12 Project wristbands bearing the slogan “We Surround Them.” Obama may have won in November, but the opposition isn’t lying down and taking it. They have found a leader, one who moonlights as a comedian.

Mike Gormly is a writer who resides in Burlington, Vermont.