Another grown-up has gone home to be with God, leaving the children to throw spitballs at one another down here on earth.
We're on our own now, down here in the public square, where decent folk dare not venture. Not at night, not during the day. No time is safe, now that the grown-ups are leaving us to our own devices, and the neighborhood is flat going to hell.
The latest grown-up to be called home was Phil Johnson. For decades, he ran the newsroom at WWL-TV in New Orleans. He also delivered a nightly editorial, because the Jesuits who owned the station -- it was part of Loyola University back then -- "wanted the station to stand for something.” THIS IS WHAT Johnson said in that first editorial in 1962:
Good evening. Today a new voice speaks out in New Orleans. The voice – that of this station – WWL-TV. My name is Phil Johnson.
Beginning today, and every weekday hereafter, this station will present editorial opinion – a living, vigorous commentary on all things pertaining to New Orleans, its people and its future.
Commentary designed to stimulate thought, to awaken in all of us an awareness of our responsibilities, not only to our community, but to each other and to ourselves.
Commentary that will aim not to provoke but to educate. Not to offend, but to explain; not to mislead, on the contrary, to seek only truth.
We intend for it to be a vigorous commentary, strong, vibrant, full of the spirit that is New Orleans; yet, a literate commentary, cogent, sensible, fact-filled, complete.
It will not be a comfortable commentary – a voice such as this station reaches over a million people each week. Such a voice should lead, should stimulate thought, present new ideas, or remember the sound, solid old ideas. This we intend to do.
There is one question. Why? Why speak out? Why present editorial opinion?
The answer is simple enough. We think it’s necessary.
This station believes New Orleans needs another voice, another attitude, another opinion. But we further believe it should, it must be a responsible voice, a responsible attitude, a responsible opinion. This we intend to provide.
New Orleans, almost overnight, has found itself propelled to the very forefront of an incredible age of space. We need great leaders, we need men of ability, we need ideas.
Our leaders we elect, men of ability, we can train. Ideas are harder to come by.
It is the fervent prayer of this station, that the ideas we may project in our editorials can, tomorrow, next week, next month, through the years, help provide for this, our New Orleans, and you, our people, a bright, happy future.
Good evening.
AND THIS is what Phil Johnson, editorialist, said in 1963 after some hate-filled cracker in Mississippi pumped Medgar Evers' body full of lead:
THAT'S what it looked like -- long, long ago in a place far, far away . . . in oh, so many respects -- when the adults were in charge of our mass media. Well, at least for the most part.
Now, not so much. . . .
HOW IN THE WORLD did we get from Phil Johnson to this? What in the world will become of us now that the grown-ups have been called away?
I guess if you're Glenn Beck or one of his disciples, you'll look at this dispatch from India and wonder why these commie-pinko protesters weren't just shot in the street.
That's right, according to the Zenit news agency, the dreaded social-justice conspiracy has set its sights on subverting The Way Things Work in the world's second-largest country:
Numerous religious, including three bishops, were arrested for taking part in a demonstration near Chennai in defense of the rights of Christian and Muslim "untouchables."
The police detained hundreds of people on Friday including priests, nuns, Archbishop Malayappan Chinnappa of Madras and Mylapore, Archbishop Peter Fernando of Madurai, and bishop Anthonisamy Neethinathan of Chinglepet, UCANews reported.
Friday's manifestation was the culmination of a month-long demonstration in favor of the lowest social caste, known as the dalits or untouchables.
The objective was to make the population and the state authorities more aware of the marginalization suffered by members of this class of society.
Thousands of people participated in a march that spanned some 310 miles, beginning a month earlier in the southern city of Kanyakumari.
HELL, IF YOU'REthe crew-cutted one, you're probably wondering -- in between crying jags -- not only why the noble Indian authorities didn't shoot the Catholic bishops, but why they didn't drive a stake through their hearts as well.
It's tough being Glenn Beck. If only enough people could see . . . it's all so clear once you're actually inside the funhouse mirror.
It's no secret that Glenn Beck is a cynical buffoon whose stock-in-trade is scaring the crap out of people even more ignorant and crazy than himself. It also is no secret that Beck's boss at the Fox News Channel, Roger Ailes -- as well as his bosses at Premiere Radio Networks-- just might be the most cynical people in America. That's saying something.
But cynically ginning up outrage and paranoia among ignorant (and perhaps unstable) people is nothing new in American politics and public discourse. Dangerous, yes. Destructive of the commonweal, yes.
But, alas, nothing new. This is the tired and hoary work of minor demons inhabiting middling rings of the inferno.
CONVINCING GULLIBLE and paranoid Yankee Doodle whack jobs that "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land" is pure, uncut communism -- evil incarnate under the guise of "social justice" . . . collectivist subversion of freedom and democracy -- that, on the other hand, is the work of Lucifer himself.
The devil is on Fox News weekday afternoons at 5 -- 4 Central. His stage name is Glenn Beck.
And the devil -- er, "Beck" -- is a master at getting mere mortals to mistake good for evil and evil for a public-policy prescription.
"Blessed are you who are now hungry, for you will be satisfied"? Commie-libs are out to destroy individual initiative . . . by confiscating your income!
"Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation"? Implicit threat of violence against hard-working American achievers from totalitarian agitators in the highest ranks!
Woe to you who are filled now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who laugh now, for you will grieve and weep? If you remember your history, this sounds awfully like what Stalin did when he collectivized agriculture in the Ukraine! Communists want you to starve while they redistribute your food!
CALL IT biblical exegesis, as seen on Glenn Beck's TV. And heard on his radio.
Glenn Beck thinks that if you go to a church that believes that Jesus Christ meant what he said in the Beatitudes, you are in deep borscht, Comrade.
And Glenn Beck says red-blooded, market-oriented American lovers of freedom had better get out of any church that believes in that "social justice" crapola. No, really:
I recently received word through a new friend that The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good captured audio of Fox News’ Glenn Beck encouraging listeners to leave their church if it proclaims a concern for social justice on his March 2nd radio broadcast. Here’s the quote from Beck:
"I'm begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. If it lasts that long it will be the next year. I beg you, look for the words 'social justice' or 'economic justice' on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"
NO, PEOPLE, this is no everyday, happens-every-couple-or-three-decades, run of the mill American political and cultural crackpottery.
What we have here is a crew-cut, whackadoodle Mormon-convert antichrist who has been given free reign by his radio and cable-TV masters to preach apostasy to millions of lost sheep. This isn't Christopher Hitchens going on TV to tell a bemused reporter that there is no God, and believers are full of beans.
Instead, this is one of the most popular hosts on the most popular cable-"news" channel, telling his viewers that Jesus preached evil, historical Christianity is a bunch of socialist agitprop and they should flee any church that believes in such things, because that church is a clear and present danger to the republic.
It's kind of like Lenin through the looking glass, actually.
A pretty neat trick, if you can pull it off. And we know just the malevolent entity for the job, don't we?
A Tea Party Airlines flight made a scheduled stop in Austin, Texas, today, destroying offices of the Internal Revenue Service.
It was a one-way trip. The pilot, disgruntled software engineer Joe Stack, punched his own ticket, according to The New York Times:
The authorities identified the pilot as Joseph A. Stack III, 53, and said his body had not yet been recovered from the building. The other person who was still unaccounted for was described by officials as a federal employee. A long, angry note posted on the Internet, on a Web site registered to Mr. Stack and signed “Joe Stack,” appeared to have been written by the pilot, though authorities had not confirmed the connection. By midafternoon, the company that hosted the site had taken the note down, saying it was acting at the request of the F.B.I.
The note related a long history of financial difficulties and frustrations with the nation’s tax and health care systems and with setbacks like the sharp decline of defense-related employment in southern California in the 1990s and the disruption of air travel after the Sept. 11 terror attacks in 2001. It ended with passages strongly suggesting that its author expected to die on Thursday, including a reference to Feb. 18, 2010, as his date of death.
“I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different,” the note concluded. “I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.”
The F.B.I., which set up a command post near the scene of the crash, has a small satellite office — part of the bureau’s San Antonio field office — in a different part of the office complex where the crash took place.
Bill Carter, an F.B.I. spokesman, said the criminal inquiry was in its early stages. “It’s a fluid situation that’s under investigation,” he said, which was echoed in a statement by Texas Gov. Perry. “There are a lot of indications but nothing definitive yet.”
As for Mr. Stack’s apparent suicide note, Mr. Carter said, “That’s being looked at by our San Antonio office, if that is a real note by this individual.”
OK, PERHAPSI'M being unfair with the Tea Party Airlines crack, though it's tough to pass up a line like that about such a confederacy of paranoid and angry dunces.
But on the other hand, while not all of Stack's rantings in his manifesto of a suicide note match up with what we take to be the "tea party position" (as amorphous a concept as that might be), enough of it sounded familiar enough to make an instant connection.
From Stack's website . . . before the Federal Bureau of Investigation ordered it taken down:
We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.
While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.
(snip)
I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.
I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of s*** at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.
I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.
THERE'S ENOUGH in Joe "Blow Your" Stack's dispatch from around the bend to have the "progressives" and the "patriots" arguing forever over who gets to claim him. Me, I lean toward the teabaggers because of one important thing.
They're the ones combining some nasty demagoguery with barely cloaked insurrectionist rhetoric. They're the ones trying to tell you that you're living under tyranny, and that President Obama is Joe Stalin in blackface.
They're the ones -- too many of them, at least -- getting into bed with the "patriot" movement as the far-right "militias" lurk in the shadows.
They're the ones painting any government big enough to deal with a 21st-century nation of 300 million as big enough to be an inherently wicked proposition.
They're the ones with the "Don't Tread on Me" flags from the American Revolution. They're the ones talking about a "new revolution." They're the ones prattling on about "The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
Yes, Thomas Jefferson was the first to say that -- in 1787. His slave and mistress, Sally Hemings, didn't know nothin' 'bout no tree of liberty, however -- she was the personal property of Mr. Freedom.
I'M JUST FINE with heaping blame on the tea-party crowd because they've not been particularly particular about the sort of nuts with whom they jump in bed. I mean, what's one more, right?
Maybe I'd feel differently if they were more uncomfortable with the loons. Or if they didn't think their being mad as hell was the basis for anything other than being mad as hell.
Or maybe it was just those "THANK YOU GLENN BECK" signs when they were marching on Washington. Then again, it could have been all those instances of teabaggers trying to see how close they could get to Barack Obama while carrying firearms.
Whatever.
It remains that the tea-party movement once again has mainstreamed the idea of open insurrection against the United States' constitutionally mandated government, and thus has given a homicidal fruitcake like Joe Stack reason to believe his kamikaze mission would somehow be ennobled.
What scares me about Tea Partiers isn't that they're pissed about what's become of their country -- hell, I'm pissed too (though for somewhat different reasons).
What scares me about Tea Partiers is that they're akin to unguided nuclear missiles -- God only knows who, what or where will be consumed by the fireball. This is not a "smart bomb." WHAT ALSO scares me is that the last time the country was in this kind of turmoil, all we had to worry about were the Hippies, the Yippies, the Weathermen and the Black Panthers. This go around, I fear there are a lot more nuts like those described in this New York Times article than we had Hippies, Yippies, Weathermen and Black Panthers combined the last go 'round:
The ebbs and flows of the Tea Party ferment are hardly uniform. It is an amorphous, factionalized uprising with no clear leadership and no centralized structure. Not everyone flocking to the Tea Party movement is worried about dictatorship. Some have a basic aversion to big government, or Mr. Obama, or progressives in general. What’s more, some Tea Party groups are essentially appendages of the local Republican Party.
Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn to a new reality. Some have gone so far as to stock up on ammunition, gold and survival food in anticipation of the worst. For others, though, transformation seems to amount to trying on a new ideological outfit — embracing the rhetoric and buying the books.
Tea Party leaders say they know their complaints about shredded constitutional principles and excessive spending ring hollow to some, given their relative passivity through the Bush years. In some ways, though, their main answer — strict adherence to the Constitution — would comfort every card-carrying A.C.L.U. member.
But their vision of the federal government is frequently at odds with the one that both parties have constructed. Tea Party gatherings are full of people who say they would do away with the Federal Reserve, the federal income tax and countless agencies, not to mention bailouts and stimulus packages. Nor is it unusual to hear calls to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. A remarkable number say this despite having recently lost jobs or health coverage. Some of the prescriptions they are debating — secession, tax boycotts, states “nullifying” federal laws, forming citizen militias — are outside the mainstream, too.
At a recent meeting of the Sandpoint Tea Party, Mrs. Stout presided with brisk efficiency until a member interrupted with urgent news. Because of the stimulus bill, he insisted, private medical records were being shipped to federal bureaucrats. A woman said her doctor had told her the same thing. There were gasps of rage. Everyone already viewed health reform as a ruse to control their medical choices and drive them into the grip of insurance conglomerates. Debate erupted. Could state medical authorities intervene? Should they call Congress?
As the meeting ended, Carolyn L. Whaley, 76, held up her copy of the Constitution. She carries it everywhere, she explained, and she was prepared to lay down her life to protect it from the likes of Mr. Obama.
Secondly, the trouble with basing one's "revolution" in part on the collected works of Ayn Rand is that every Randian fancies himself the real-life Howard Roark or John Galt. Unfortunately, all those übermen in waiting from sea to shining sea really are a lot more like Peter Keating.
Only dumber and less presentable.
And these delusional souls would be among the first to be eaten alive by the Darwinist social order they so desperately seek to build amid the hoped-for ruins of President Obama's "socialist order."
These self-styled "patriots" would have us think what they're up to is a new American Revolution against the forces of "tyranny." Evidence, however, would suggest something more akin to the French one.
And a lunatic Robespierre shall be their guiding light -- weekdays at 4 on the Fox News Channel.
You have to wonder whether he's going to try -- now that he has no more "network supervision" (for what little that's worth) to worry about -- to out-Beck the sine qua nutof the airwaves, Fox News Channel's Glenn Beck. Well, if he's going to try, he's gonna need a megaphone the size of the one he just left behind.
Over the past six months it’s become increasingly clear that strong winds of change have begun buffeting this country and affecting all of us, and some leaders in media, politics and business have been urging me to go beyond the role here at CNN and to engage in constructive problem solving as well as to contribute positively to the great understanding of the issues of our day. And to continue to do so in the most honest and direct language possible.
I’ve talked extensively with Jonathan Klein — Jon’s the president of CNN — and as a result of those talks, Jon and I have agreed to a release from my contract that will enable me to pursue new opportunities.
At this point, I’m considering a number of options and directions, and I assure you, I will let you know when I set my course. I truly believe that the major issues of our time include the growth of our middle class, the creation of more jobs, health care, immigration policy, the environment, climate change, and our military involvement, of course, in Afghanistan and Iraq.
TRANSLATION:I was fired.
Either that, or there's going to be a Dobbs '10 campaign for something. That would be interesting -- frightening, but interesting.
Still, you have to wonder what happened to Lou Dobbs. He used to be a straight-laced business reporter and anchor. And there was nothing wrong with his questioning politically correct orthodoxies about immigration, particularly that of the illegal variety.
But. . . .
Apparently, there wasn't anything Lou Dobbs couldn't take too far. As in Too Far. As in playing fast and loose with facts.
As in, sooner or later, lapsing into inflammatory rhetoric that -- in a saner day in TV news -- would have gotten him fired on the spot.
And then there was his whole fascination this year with Birtherism, and his refusal to drop the subject when it became painfully clear not only that President Obama was indeed born in Hawaii, but also that the Birthers (and by association, Dobbs) were a bunch of paranoid lunatics.
COME TO THINK OF IT, Lou Dobbs had been trying to out-Beck Glenn Beck even when Beck was just another radio talk-show blowhard.
Unfortunately for Lou, he lacked the blackboard, the tear ducts and the madman charisma to lead an armored division of nutwagons to ratings glory. Instead, Lou now has been relieved of his command.
Mobilizing the Unhinged Corps has fallen to a bolder general . . . a regular George Patton will lead that googly-eyed irregular army.
Because nobody out-Becks Glenn Beck. Enjoy oblivion, Lou; you earned it.
As I write, Glenn Beck probably is giving a Fox News Channel camera the crazy look as he misspells things on his chalkboard and says something like this:
"You need to look at who Barack HUSSEIN Obama surrounds himself with and realize that he, as we speak, is imposing a radical COMMUNIST agenda on this nation. . . .
"That's right, Barack HUSSEIN Obama is imposing a radical communist agenda on the United States. . . .
"I said IMPOSING a radical COMMUNIST AGENDA. As I speak. . . .
"The president, if he is indeed the president, is RIGHT NOW effecting a COMMUNIST TAKEOVER . . . RIGHT NOW . . . as I speak. . . ."
Glenn Beck is the kind of deep thinker appreciated by the sort who call it "guts" when DJs play Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the U.S.A." when we're bombing the crap out of crazy Arab potentates.
Hold the phone. Glenn Beck was the "morning zoo" host in Louisville who was "proud to be an American" on April 15, 1986 -- and "emotionally exhausted" from listeners phoning in to say yay or nay about his playing "Khadafy Sucks" the morning after American warplanes blowed the Libyan dictator's compound up good.
It must have been the caller who wanted to send Libyans down a razor blade slide into a pool of alcohol.
Whether Beck was tired or stoned that day, he was almost certainly depressed. Despite his creative freedom, local star status and high salary, Beck's mental state was on a slide. By his own telling, he was drinking heavily, snorting coke and entertaining thoughts of suicide. "There was a bridge abutment in Louisville, Kentucky, that had my name on it," Beck later wrote. "Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at 70 mph into that bridge abutment. I'm only alive today because (a) I'm too cowardly to kill myself ... and (b) I'm too stupid."
AS SALON.COM tells us in a three-part series on Beck's life as one of radio's "morning zoo" bad boys, Fox News Channel's newest sensation and the de-facto leader of the Great American Freak Out has had a little experience in the "freak" department. From "Glenn Beck becomes damaged goods,"Part 2 of Alexander Zaitchik's Beckian trilogy:
Beck's real broadcasting innovation during his stay in Kentucky came in the realm of vicious personal assaults on fellow radio hosts. A frequent target of Beck's in Louisville was Liz Curtis, obese host of an afternoon advice show on WHAS, a local AM news-talk station. It was no secret in Louisville that Curtis, whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. For two years, he used "the big blonde" as fodder for drive-time fat jokes, often employing Godzilla sound effects to simulate Curtis walking across the city or crushing a rocking chair. Days before Curtis' marriage, Beck penned a skit featuring a stolen menu card for the wedding reception. "The caterer says that instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn," explains Beck's fictional spy.
Despite the constant goading, Curtis never responded. But being ignored only seemed to fuel Beck's hunger for a response. As his attacks escalated and grew more unhinged, a WHAS colleague of Curtis' named Terry Meiners decided to intervene. He appeared one morning unannounced at Beck's small office, which was filled with plaques, letters and news clippings -- "a shrine to all that is Glenn Beck," remembers Meiners. He told Beck to lay off Curtis, suggesting he instead attack a morning DJ like himself, who could return fire. "Beck told me, 'Sorry, all's fair in love and war,'" remembers Meiners. "He continued with the fat jokes, which were exceedingly cruel, pointless, and aimed at one of the nicest people in radio. Glenn Beck was over-the-top childish from Day One, a punk who tried to make a name for himself by being disruptive and vengeful."
Beck and Hattrick began their show far behind Kelly's market-leading show on KZZP. As they continued to get clobbered, Beck grew obsessed with getting his name on the leading station. His first attempt to get Kelly to mention him on the air came shortly after his arrival. "I walked out to get the paper one Saturday morning," remembers Kelly. "When I turned around, I saw that my entire house was covered in Y95 bumper stickers. The windows, the garage doors, the locks -- everything. But I refused to mention Beck's name on the air, which drove him nuts."
Beck kept trying. When KZZP's music director held his marriage at a Phoenix church, Beck loaded up Y95's two Jeeps with boxes of bumper stickers and drove to the ceremony. As the service was coming to a close, Beck and his team ran crouching from car to car, slapping bumper stickers on anything with a fender. The service ended while Beck was running amok, and the KZZP morning team appeared just in time to see Beck jump into his getaway car. "Beck saw me standing in the way of the exit and gunned right for me. I threw a landscaping rock on his windshield and blocked him," says Kelly. When his old friend demanded he roll down the window, Beck reluctantly obliged. Kelly then unloaded a mouthful of spit in his face.
"Glenn Beck was the king of dirty tricks," says Guy Zapoleon, KZZP's program director. "It may seem mild in retrospect, but at the time that wedding prank was nasty and over the line. Beck was always desperate for ratings and attention."
The animosity between Beck and Kelly continued to deepen. When Beck and Hattrick produced a local version of Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" for Halloween -- a recurring motif in Beck's life and career -- Kelly told a local reporter that the bit was a stupid rip-off of a syndicated gag. The slight outraged Beck, who got his revenge with what may rank as one of the cruelest bits in the history of morning radio. "A couple days after Kelly's wife, Terry, had a miscarriage, Beck called her live on the air and says, 'We hear you had a miscarriage,' " remembers Brad Miller, a former Y95 DJ and Clear Channel programmer. "When Terry said, 'Yes,' Beck proceeded to joke about how Bruce [Kelly] apparently can't do anything right -- about he can't even have a baby."
"It was low class," says Miller, now president of Open Stream Broadcasting. "There are certain places you just don't go."
"Beck turned Y95 into a guerrilla station," says Kelly. "It was an example of the zoo thing getting out of control. It became just about pissing people off, part of the culture shift that gave us 'Jackass.'" Among those who were appalled by Beck's prank call was Beck's own wife, Claire, who had been friends with Kelly's wife since the two worked together at WPGC.
Their friendship soured, Beck continued with the stunts, some of which won the competition's begrudging admiration. The most elaborate and successful of these neatly throws a double-spotlight on both the juvenile nature of morning radio competition and the culture of pop cheese in which Beck marinated for 20 years.
Toward the end of Beck's time in Phoenix, KZZP sponsored a free Richard Marx concert at the Tempe El Diablo stadium in downtown Phoenix. Marx was at the time riding high on a triple-platinum album, and the show was a monster publicity coup for Beck's rival. But Beck was in no mood to let KZZP bask in the concert's glow without a fight. He and Hattrick arrived at the stadium early on the night of the show and gave the sound technician $500 to play a prerecorded Y95 promo moments before KZZP's Bruce Kelly was scheduled to announce the show. As an audience of nearly 10,000 waited for the show to begin, the KZZP mics were cut and Beck's voice suddenly boomed out of the stadium's sound system: "The Y95 Zoo team is proud to present … Richard Marx!" As soon as he heard his name, an oblivious Marx walked onto the stage and began to play. As the KZZP crew stood stunned offstage, scattered Y95 agents popped up and began throwing "Y95 Zoo" T-shirts in every direction to a cheering crowd.
"It was brilliant," remembers Kelly, who gave Beck his first lessons in the art of publicity. "Totally brilliant. He nailed us."
BECK THEN LEFT for Houston, where complete failure awaited. And then he drifted to Baltimore, where the drink and drugs tightened their hold . . . and more rating failure was in the cards.
Today, when Beck wants to illustrate the jerk he used to be, he tells the story of the time he fired an employee for bringing him the wrong pen during a promotional event. According to former colleagues in Baltimore, Beck didn't just fire people in fits of rage -- he fired them slowly and publicly. "He used to take people to a bar and sit them down and just humiliate them in public. He was a sadist, the kind of guy who rips wings off of flies," remembers a colleague.
EVENTUALLY, Beck sobered up after his marriage fell apart. Eventually, he shopped around for a worldview, became a Mormon and married anew. And he discovered talk radio in New Haven, Conn.:
By 1998, Beck realized he'd never be able to do what he wanted to do on FM radio, limited to talking fluff in between Britney Spears songs. Out of this failed experiment with Penn was born Beck's idea of "fusing" morning radio wackiness and political debate.
His talk radio identity still larval, Beck was already displaying the skills that would make him a talk-radio lightning rod. "He always knew how to work people and situations for attention," says Penn. "He could pick the most pointless story in the news that day and find a way to approach it to get phones lit up. That was his strong point -- pissing people off. He was very shrewd on both the business and entertainment sides of radio. He's built his empire on very calculated button pushing."
Not that this empire was imaginable back then. Mostly people noticed the button-pushing and wanted nothing to do with it.
"Anyone in Connecticut who says they knew Beck was destined to run an entertainment empire is full of s***," says one of Beck's former coworkers in New Haven. "The guy had dozens of enemies. People thought he was an annoying, washed-up has-been. When I see people today bragging that they knew him back then, I'm like, 'But you f****** hated him!'"
TODAY, WE FIND that Beck has pushed buttons all the way to the head of an "army" of the gullible disaffected. He has national radio and cable-news shows, and his devotees sing his praises at Washington rallies and use his words as brickbats against the dastardly "progressives."
Only in America. Or maybe Munich.
Of course, no one wants to discount the idea of redemption. No one wants to dismiss the power of God, and the power of the human spirit, to turn around a life.
No one wants to seriously believe that people cannot change -- sometimes quite fundamentally. I'd like to believe that of Glenn Beck.
It's hard, though, when the man refuses to give others the same benefit of the doubt that he demands of us. He vilifies Van Jones for a colorful political past, yet we are expected to give a former sadistic, washed-up and drugged-out disc jockey not only a pass, but also the keys to a populist uprising.
We're supposed to take his TV and radio shows seriously, and we're not supposed to think those who do are imbeciles with a tenuous grip on reality.
That's a tall order. Especially when Beck takes to the national airwaves to point out communist symbology at Rockefeller Center and the United Nations . . . all allegedly courtesy of the Rockefellers.
It's just as crazy as Beck stating that the entire concept of social justice is somehow inextricably intertwined with communist ideology. Talk like that shouldn't be taken seriously, unless the subject at hand centers on whether America's hottest talker is as abstemious as his church demands.
Glenn Beck the rich and popular talk-show host may no longer be the same monster as "Captain" Beck, the morning-zoo DJ. But that monster still lurks somewhere within (as, to be fair, it does for all of us).
And the more Mr. Hyde can manage to emerge from Beck's new, respectable Dr. Jekyll persona -- the one with the audience of millions -- the safer it becomes for all our nation's darkest demons to seek the spotlight once again.
No, above, we have the darling of the unhinged right's conspiracy-theorist section singing the praises of perennial presidential candidate and prominent "birther" Alan Keyes.
And Alan Keyes has got that Glenn Beck religion. Or is it that Glenn Beck has that Alan Keyes religion? Let's just say they both have that W. Cleon Skousen religion.
Watch.
I'LL BET the Catholic Keyes was surprised to find out that having that old-time Skousen religion . . . makes him a pretty hardline Mormon.
On the other hand, the Mormon-convert Beck has no such problem.
Which is good, because Beck loves the works of Skousen, who viewed the world through the eccentric lens of Mormon theology and saw a grand conspiracy of the "super rich" and the communists, working toward a "one-world order." To that end, the State Department handed Eastern Europe to the communists after World War II, and we abandoned China to Mao Zedong.
IT'S ALL those damned "secret combinations." The Rockefellers are selling us out to the commies, and ol' Dwight Eisenhower was a comsymp, too. Ike gave Cuba away to the Russkies after forcing Fidel Castro onto the Cuban people, who didn't want him.
Hell, don't you know that it was Harry Hopkins -- that longtime adviser to Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman -- who gave the Russians not only the plans for the atom bomb, but a cache of enriched uranium, too?
What, you don't know that? Obviously, you've been "brainwashed." So said Skousen in 1976, when the above recording was made.
And this brings us full circle to Glenn Beck, from earlier this month:
OY VEH. Swords into plowshares as a communist plot. Isaiah must have been part of a secret combination.
And then there's this, from today. W. Cleon Skousen, no doubt, would be so proud:
IF THE MASTER can come up with "Harry Hopkins gave the Russkies the Bomb," why can't the student come up with something as piddling as "Barack Obama hates the Constitution?"
There's a little problem though. Why in the world wouldn't the nation's first African-American president judge that the original document -- which not only did nothing to abolish slavery but went so far as to count slaves and Indians under U.S. jurisdiction as three-fifths of a person for apportioning purposes -- was objectively flawed in some way?
And, in fact, President Obama went on to expound upon the flaws. And Beck's staff at Fox News Channel edited that out -- rather badly, actually. I could hear the edits.
I'll take my leave by posting the unedited version of Obama's remarks. Glenn Beck and Fox News: Fair and balanced? You decide.
Glenn Beck, as he "war gamed" a coming American civil war with an expert panel, professed to be horrified by the mere prospect.
So why is he going out of his way to stir up mobs of cranks, nuts, racists and simpletons against the "socialist" and "communist" Obama regime, one full of czars and "oligarhs"?
Salonhas some answers for us. Short version: It's because he's a disciple of a dead Mormon nutjob who was so far right that J. Edgar Hoover's FBI considered him a national threat.
AND IF J. Edgar Hoover was scared, imagine how scared we should be. Read on:
In reality, however, the so-called 912ers were summoned to D.C. by the man who changed Beck's life, and that helps explain why the movement is not the nonpartisan lovefest that Beck first sold on air with his trademark tears. Beck has created a massive meet-up for the disaffected, paranoid Palin-ite "death panel" wing of the GOP, those ideologues most susceptible to conspiracy theories and prone to latch on to eccentric distortions of fact in the name of opposing "socialism." In that, they are true disciples of the late W. Cleon Skousen, Beck's favorite writer and the author of the bible of the 9/12 movement, "The 5,000 Year Leap." A once-famous anti-communist "historian," Skousen was too extreme even for the conservative activists of the Goldwater era, but Glenn Beck has now rescued him from the remainder pile of history, and introduced him to a receptive new audience.
Anyone who has followed Beck will recognize the book's title. Beck has been furiously promoting "The 5,000 Year Leap" for the past year, a push that peaked in March when he launched the 912 Project. That month, a new edition of "The 5,000 Year Leap," complete with a laudatory new foreword by none other than Glenn Beck, came out of nowhere to hit No. 1 on Amazon. It remained in the top 15 all summer, holding the No. 1 spot in the government category for months. The book tops Beck's 912 Project "required reading" list, and is routinely sold at 912 Project meetings where guest speakers often use it as their primary source material. At one 912 meet-up I attended in Florida, copies were stacked high on a table against the back wall, available for the 912 nice price of $15. "Don't bother trying to get it at the library," one 912er told me. "The wait list is 40 deep."
What has Beck been pushing on his legions? "Leap," first published in 1981, is a heavily illustrated and factually challenged attempt to explain American history through an unspoken lens of Mormon theology. As such, it is an early entry in the ongoing attempt by the religious right to rewrite history. Fundamentalists want to define the United States as a Christian nation rather than a secular republic, and recasting the Founding Fathers as devout Christians guided by the Bible rather than deists inspired by the French and English philosophers. "Leap" argues that the U.S. Constitution is a godly document above all else, based on natural law, and owes more to the Old and New Testaments than to the secular and radical spirit of the Enlightenment. It lists 28 fundamental beliefs -- based on the sayings and writings of Moses, Jesus, Cicero, John Locke, Montesquieu and Adam Smith -- that Skousen says have resulted in more God-directed progress than was achieved in the previous 5,000 years of every other civilization combined. The book reads exactly like what it was until Glenn Beck dragged it out of Mormon obscurity: a textbook full of aggressively selective quotations intended for conservative religious schools like Utah's George Wythe University, where it has been part of the core freshman curriculum for decades (and where Beck spoke at this year's annual fundraiser).
But more interesting than the contents of "The 5,000 Year Leap," and more revealing for what it says about 912ers and the Glenn Beck Nation, is the book's author. W. Cleon Skousen was not a historian so much as a player in the history of the American far right; less a scholar of the republic than a threat to it. At least, that was the judgment of J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, which maintained a file on Skousen for years that eventually totaled some 2,000 pages. Before he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen's own Mormon church publicly distanced itself from the foundation that Skousen founded and that has published previous editions of "The 5,000 Year Leap."
As Beck knows, to focus solely on "The 5,000 Year Leap" is to sell the author short. When he died in 2006 at the age of 92, Skousen had authored more than a dozen books and pamphlets on the Red Menace, New World Order conspiracy, Christian child rearing, and Mormon end-times prophecy. It is a body of work that does much to explain Glenn Beck's bizarre conspiratorial mash-up of recent months, which decries a new darkness at noon and finds strange symbols carefully coded in the retired lobby art of Rockefeller Center. It also suggests that the modern base of the Republican Party is headed to a very strange place.
Willard Cleon Skousen was born in 1913 to American parents in a small Mormon frontier town in Alberta, Canada. When he was 10 his family moved to California, where he remained until he shipped off to England and Ireland for Mormon missionary work. In 1935, after graduating from a California junior college, the 23-year-old Skousen moved to Washington, where he worked briefly for a New Deal farm agency. He then began a 15-year career with the FBI, also earning a law degree from George Washington University in 1940. His posts at the FBI were largely administrative and clerical in nature, first in Washington and later in Kansas.
After retiring from the FBI in 1951, Skousen joined the faculty of Brigham Young University, the Latter-day Saints university in Utah. He then enjoyed a tumultuous four years as chief of police in Salt Lake City. During his tenure he gained a reputation for cutting crime and ruthlessly enforcing Mormon morals. But Skousen was too earnest by half. The city's ultraconservative mayor, J. Bracken Lee, fired him in 1960 for excessive zeal in raiding private clubs where the Mormon elite enjoyed their cards. "Skousen conducted his office as Chief of Police in exactly the same manner in which the Communists operate their government," Lee wrote to a friend explaining his firing of Skousen. "The man is a master of half-truths. In at least three instances I have proven him to be a liar. He is a very dangerous man [and] one of the greatest spenders of public funds of anyone who ever served in any capacity in Salt Lake City government."
During his stint as police chief, Skousen began laying the groundwork for his future career as a professional anti-communist. He published a bestselling expose-slash-history called "The Naked Communist." In the late '50s, America's far right began to bubble with organizations peddling stories about the true state of the Red Menace. Groups like the Church League of America and the John Birch Society organized to channel, feed and satisfy Cold War paranoia. Members of these groups were the original postwar "domestic right-wing extremist threat." Then as now, they were very much on the government's radar.
After his firing from the police force, Skousen became a star on the profitable far-right speakers circuit. He worked for both the Bircher-operated American Opinion Speakers Bureau and Fred Schwarz's Christian Anti-Communism Crusade. The two groups competed in describing ever more terrifying threats posed by America's enemies, foreign and domestic. As the scenarios became more and more outlandish, the feds grew concerned. In an internal memo, the FBI described Skousen's friend and employer Fred Schwarz as "an opportunist," the likes of which "are largely responsible for misinforming people and stirring them up emotionally ... Schwartz [sic] and others like him can only do the country and the anticommunist work of the Bureau harm."
How did Skousen become an expert on communism? He claimed, as his apologists still do, that his years with the FBI exposed him to inside information. He also boasted that he worked closely with J. Edgar Hoover. But both claims are open to question. Skousen's work at the Bureau was largely administrative, according to Ernie Lazar, an independent researcher of the far right who has examined Skousen's nearly 2,000-page FBI file. "Skousen never worked in [the domestic intelligence division] and he never had significant exposure to data concerning communist matters," says Lazar.
When Skousen's books started popping up in the nation's high-school classrooms, panicked school board officials wrote the FBI asking if Skousen was reliable. The Bureau's answer was an exasperated and resounding "no." One 1962 FBI memo notes, "During the past year or so, Skousen has affiliated himself with the extreme right-wing 'professional communists' who are promoting their own anticommunism for obvious financial purposes." Skousen's "The Naked Communist," said the Bureau official, is "another example of why a sound, scholarly textbook on communism is urgently and badly needed."
(snip)
By 1963, Skousen's extremism was costing him. No conservative organization with any mainstream credibility wanted anything to do with him. Members of the ultraconservative American Security Council kicked him out because they felt he had "gone off the deep end." One ASC member who shared this opinion was William C. Mott, the judge advocate general of the U.S. Navy. Mott found Skousen "money mad ... totally unqualified and interested solely in furthering his own personal ends."
When Skousen aligned himself with Robert Welch's charge that Dwight Eisenhower was a "dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy," the last of Skousen's dwindling corporate clients dumped him. The National Association of Manufacturers released a statement condemning the Birchers and distancing itself from "any individual or party" that subscribed to their views. Skousen, author of a pamphlet titled "The Communist Attack on the John Birch Society," was the nation's most prominent Birch defender.
With Glenn Beck, it's not about Van Jones. It's not about the "green" adviser to President Obama at all. It's about proving Obama a communist. That and the spirit of Dallas . . . and of right-wing nutism.
The bloggers and detractors can say I'm targeting Van Jones, but too many things have been happening in this country that just don't make sense. Amazing things like President Bush telling us he's all about security, but leaving our borders wide open. All the way down to the latest: Medicare and Medicaid are broke, so let's double-down and have an even bigger system modeled on that.
It doesn't make sense. During the campaign, the president said, you want to know what my policies are, look to the people I surround myself. So we did.
Van Jones said the same thing: "personnel is policy." What does this tell us? Well, in the case of Jones and several others in the administration, it says the president has an agenda that is radical, revolutionary and in some cases, Marxist.
We've laid this all out in their own words, for weeks. But, for the last 24 hours, everybody has been talking about the Republicans instead. Apparently what's captured the notice of so many people since we played the video on Wednesday, is the fact that Van Jones called Republicans a naughty name in February of this year.
Well, Jones has apologized. He's sorry he said the A-word about Republicans.
He is not sorry however, about any of these things:
— That he's an avowed communist
— That he believes we need a "whole new system"
— No apology for his campaign to free communist cop-killer Mumia Abu-Jamal
— Not a word from Van Jones about being a member of the revolutionary, communist group, STORM
— He has not apologized for his radical past as a black nationalist
There's been no apology for saying that we should redistribute wealth to Indians:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONES: No more broken treaties. No more broken treaties. Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
He's not sorry for that.
BECK, BY HIS own admission, is using people like Van Jones to "prove" the president of the United States is a communist. Communist.
In the modern American lexicon, can there be anything worse than that? Communist. The word we can't say without a sneer.
Communist. The Soviet Union was communist. Ronald Reagan called it the "Evil Empire." For more than 40 years, we were prepared to blow up the world, if need be, to protect ourselves from it.
Communist. What can be worse than that in the all-American, pro-capitalist universe. Communist equals tyranny. Communist equals totalitarianism.
"Better dead than red." Better yet, "Better dead Reds," right?
This is the uniquely American context in which the unfortunately American Mr. Beck makes his accusations against Jones and the president.
When the right called Bill Clinton a communist, you always got the sense -- or at least I always got the sense -- that it was in the "hippie pinko commie lib" sense of the word. With Obama, I think people like Beck and his fellow travelers really, really mean it.
And you have to wonder how much of this is just an extension of the "Obama is a Muslim" paranoia accompanying the rise of The Other -- the rise of a black man -- to the pinnacle of American politics and, now, to head of state.
I think the last time the right was this unhinged -- and this serious with its "communist" talk -- was the ascension of another Other to the presidency . . . the nation's first Catholic in the White House, John Fitzgerald Kennedy.
We remember the kind of rhetoric unleashed against him, particularly across the segregated South. And we remember what happened to him, and how some on the right cheered that the fringe-leftist Lee Harvey Oswald got to the pinko first.
This is the kind of fire with which Glenn Beck is playing. Somebody's going to get burned.
And he left us with the film Network in 1976. Paddy Chayefskymay have been the last of the Hebrew prophets of God.
It's eerie, actually. Now that the Fox News Channel has its own Howard Beale -- really, just replace the fainting spells with crying jags, and you have Glenn Beale . . . or Howard Beck -- there's only one place for it to go.
If I were Glenn Beck, I wouldn't be worried that it's the Obama lovers lurking in the shadows, assembling a hit squad. I'd be worried about keeping my ratings high.
THEN AGAIN, if the flat-topped demagogue keeps up his Mormon incarnation of Father Charles Coughlin, we all may have bigger problems than FNC turning into UBS. See, Beck's problem -- and ours -- is that he's doing the shtick of another spiritual predecessor, Sen. Joseph McCarthy, and turning the volume up to 11.
McCarthy saw communists behind every bush and in every nook of the U.S. government, then set out to use legislative mechanisms to effect an internal purge. Beck, on the other hand, is telling us that the president is a communist -- that the Reds have taken over the whole government -- then says we have to do something about it.
And his followers are left to fill in the blank. It sounds to me like a chickens*** call to revolution -- ginning up the mob, then maintaining plausible deniability with a wink and a nudge.
THE LATEST "commie" Beck sees lurking in the Obama administration is Van Jones, the new special adviser on "green" jobs.
Beck thinks Jones is a commie. Beck thinks Jones poses a threat to the republic -- a threat to constitutional democracy.
A new system of what? Is he talking about more than just solar panels? Let's look again at the entire context of this statement — he's saying that this can't be only about new forms of energy:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONES: If all we do is take out the dirty power system, the dirty power generation in a system, and just replace it with some clean stuff, put a solar panel on top of this system. When we don't deal with how we are consuming water. We don't deal with how we're treating our other sister and brother species. We don't deal with toxins. We don't deal with the way we treat each other. If that's not a part of this movement, let me tell you what you'll have: You'll have solar-powered bulldozers, solar-powered buzz saws, and biofuel bombers, and we'll be fighting wars over lithium for the batteries instead of oil for the engines and we'll still have a dead planet. This movement is deeper than a solar panel! Deeper than a solar panel! Don't stop there! Don't stop there! We're gonna change the whole system! We're gonna change the whole thing!
(END VIDEO CLIP)
This is social justice.
Can we stop claiming that this man is just an average, everyday, capitalist American? Can we at least start having the necessary discussion of whether we want communists in the United States government as "special advisers" to the president? Do we even want communists to have lunch with our president?
Barack Obama did not campaign openly on "changing the whole system." He did, however, five days before Election Day, tell us this much:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
THEN-PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE BARACK OBAMA: We are five days away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) [sic]
Very few Americans paid attention then. Are you paying attention now?
If our founding principles are no longer relevant — if the system with which this country was founded is somehow unjust or unworkable now — and communism, Marxism or socialism is the right and relevant path, then let's have that discussion in America. But to subversively bring in a "new system" through the back door, in the middle of the night — no, that's unacceptable.
But this goes further than whether Van Jones is a capitalist or a communist. Look at what else Jones said at this conference: (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONES: And our Native American sisters and brothers who were pushed and bullied and mistreated and shoved into all the land we didn't want, where it was all hot and windy. Well, guess what? Renewable energy? Guess what, solar industry? Guess what wind industry? They now own and control 80 percent of the renewable energy resources. No more broken treaties. No more broken treaties. Give them the wealth! Give them the wealth! Give them the dignity. Give them the respect that they deserve. No justice on stolen land. We owe them a debt.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
Give them the wealth? Is that what you voted for?
Does that sound familiar at all?
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REV. JEREMIAH WRIGHT: We believe God sanctioned the rape and robbery of an entire continent. We believe God ordained African slavery. We believe God makes Europeans superior to Africans and superior to everybody else too.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
It may also bring to mind the man who gave the prayer at President Obama's inauguration ceremony, the man on whom President Obama just bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the Reverend Joseph Lowry:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REV. JOSEPH LOWRY: And in the joy of a new beginning, we ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to get back; when brown can stick around; when yellow will be mellow; when the red man can get ahead, man; and when white will embrace what is right.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
No? Let's try it again. Here's more from Van Jones — again, to be fair, this is from his "ancient history catalogue" — this past March:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JONES: What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about our immigrant sisters and brothers? What about people who come here from all around the world who we're willing to have out in the field, with poison being sprayed on them, poison being sprayed on them because we have the wrong agricultural system. And we're willing to poison them and poison the earth to put food on our table, but we don't want to give them rights and we don't want to give them dignity and we don't want to give them respect?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WHAT WE HAVE HERE is a delusional, paranoid "political commentator" -- or perhaps just a cynic for the ages -- who not only sees unfiltered social-justice rhetoric and thinks it's Marxist, but who also thinks the entire concept of social justice is a communist plot.
And on top of that, he has the gall to single out a living hero of the civil-rights movement -- Lowery -- and cite his inauguration benediction as further evidence of the "red menace" descending upon us.
Yes, there is a menace afoot that threatens our civil society and American democracy. It's not Van Jones . . . or Joseph Lowery . . . or even Barack Obama.
It's Glenn Beck and the right-wing, tinfoil-hat masses who take him seriously.
If what Van Jones said is evidence of communist intent, then color me red. (And can you believe Beck's disputing settled history that Native Americans were horribly mistreated amid an avalanche of treaties broken by the U.S. government?)
IF WHAT Beck excerpted of Jones' remarks is proof-positive that the man is a Marxist, then so am I. And so is the pope, and all the Catholic bishops of the world.
And so is every American Catholic who believes what the church proclaims . . . what Jesus Christ proclaimed.
Here is a lengthy except from the Catechism of the Catholic Church on (gasp!) social justice:
1929 Social justice can be obtained only in respecting the transcendent dignity of man. The person represents the ultimate end of society, which is ordered to him:
What is at stake is the dignity of the human person, whose defense and promotion have been entrusted to us by the Creator, and to whom the men and women at every moment of history are strictly and responsibly in debt.
1930 Respect for the human person entails respect for the rights that flow from his dignity as a creature. These rights are prior to society and must be recognized by it. They are the basis of the moral legitimacy of every authority: by flouting them, or refusing to recognize them in its positive legislation, a society undermines its own moral legitimacy. If it does not respect them, authority can rely only on force or violence to obtain obedience from its subjects. It is the Church's role to remind men of good will of these rights and to distinguish them from unwarranted or false claims.
1931 Respect for the human person proceeds by way of respect for the principle that "everyone should look upon his neighbor (without any exception) as ‘another self,' above all bearing in mind his life and the means necessary for living it with dignity." No legislation could by itself do away with the fears, prejudices, and attitudes of pride and selfishness which obstruct the establishment of truly fraternal societies. Such behavior will cease only through the charity that finds in every man a "neighbor," a brother.
1932 The duty of making oneself a neighbor to others and actively serving them becomes even more urgent when it involves the disadvantaged, in whatever area this may be. "As you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me."
1933 This same duty extends to those who think or act differently from us. The teaching of Christ goes so far as to require the forgiveness of offenses. He extends the commandment of love, which is that of the New Law, to all enemies. Liberation in the spirit of the Gospel is incompatible with hatred of one's enemy as a person, but not with hatred of the evil that he does as an enemy.
II. Equality and Differences Among Men
1934 Created in the image of the one God and equally endowed with rational souls, all men have the same nature and the same origin. Redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ, all are called to participate in the same divine beatitude: all therefore enjoy an equal dignity.
1935 The equality of men rests essentially on their dignity as persons and the rights that flow from it:
Every form of social or cultural discrimination in fundamental personal rights on the grounds of sex, race, color, social conditions, language, or religion must be curbed and eradicated as incompatible with God's design.
1936 On coming into the world, man is not equipped with everything he needs for developing his bodily and spiritual life. He needs others. Differences appear tied to age, physical abilities, intellectual or moral aptitudes, the benefits derived from social commerce, and the distribution of wealth. The "talents" are not distributed equally.
1937 These differences belong to God's plan, who wills that each receive what he needs from others, and that those endowed with particular "talents" share the benefits with those who need them. These differences encourage and often oblige persons to practice generosity, kindness, and sharing of goods; they foster the mutual enrichment of cultures:
I distribute the virtues quite diversely; I do not give all of them to each person, but some to one, some to others. . . . I shall give principally charity to one; justice to another; humility to this one, a living faith to that one. . . . And so I have given many gifts and graces, both spiritual and temporal, with such diversity that I have not given everything to one single person, so that you may be constrained to practice charity towards one another. . . . I have willed that one should need another and that all should be my ministers in distributing the graces and gifts they have received from me.
1938 There exist also sinful inequalities that affect millions of men and women. These are in open contradiction of the Gospel:
Their equal dignity as persons demands that we strive for fairer and more humane conditions. Excessive economic and social disparity between individuals and peoples of the one human race is a source of scandal and militates against social justice, equity, human dignity, as well as social and international peace.
III. Human Solidarity
1939 The principle of solidarity, also articulated in terms of "friendship" or "social charity," is a direct demand of human and Christian brotherhood.
An error, "today abundantly widespread, is disregard for the law of human solidarity and charity, dictated and imposed both by our common origin and by the equality in rational nature of all men, whatever nation they belong to. This law is sealed by the sacrifice of redemption offered by Jesus Christ on the altar of the Cross to his heavenly Father, on behalf of sinful humanity."
1940 Solidarity is manifested in the first place by the distribution of goods and remuneration for work. It also presupposes the effort for a more just social order where tensions are better able to be reduced and conflicts more readily settled by negotiation.
1941 Socio-economic problems can be resolved only with the help of all the forms of solidarity: solidarity of the poor among themselves, between rich and poor, of workers among themselves, between employers and employees in a business, solidarity among nations and peoples. International solidarity is a requirement of the moral order; world peace depends in part upon this.
1942 The virtue of solidarity goes beyond material goods. In spreading the spiritual goods of the faith, the Church has promoted, and often opened new paths for, the development of temporal goods as well. And so throughout the centuries has the Lord's saying been verified: "Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well":
For two thousand years this sentiment has lived and endured in the soul of the Church, impelling souls then and now to the heroic charity of monastic farmers, liberators of slaves, healers of the sick, and messengers of faith, civilization, and science to all generations and all peoples for the sake of creating the social conditions capable of offering to everyone possible a life worthy of man and of a Christian.
IF YOU'RE GLENN BECK, the compiled doctrine of Christendom's most ancient religion is just as good -- or bad -- as the Communist Manifesto. And 67,515,016 American Catholics apparently must be poised to reprise Mao's Long March -- this time straight through the U.S. Constitution, all the nation's running-dog capitalists and right into the Fox News Channel studios.
Beck passed from the realm of broadcast buffoonery long ago. Now he apparently fancies himself the leader of an all-American, pro-capitalist "counterrevolutionary" army.
Well, maybe he doesn't. The dangerous thing, though, is that he wants his audience to think he is.
IF AMERICA is indeed still possible, Americans will consign this present-day leader of postmodern Know-Nothingsto the ratings cellar and the ash bin of history.
