At Saturday's rally, attended by dozens of people, Glenn Beck claimed the mantle of "religious leader".
Behind the scenes, he has worked to form what he calls the "Black Robe Regiment," a coalition of Christian leaders to foster Christian values in American society. Sounds kinda icky, almost like the KKK in a photo negative.
Or Hitler's Sturmabteilung, the Brownshirts or volunteer stormtroopers of the Nazi party.
The weird projection behind all this is Beck is nominally a Mormon (yes, I checked to make sure I put that second "m" in there). Mormons are to Christianity what the "Real Housewives" are to American families: unrelated and an exaggerated overly dramatized example.
Goodness knows, this nation could stand a little moral fibre in its national diet: Bankers ripping off the poor by charging high interest rates and then pulling the rug out from under them, megamall insurance companies charging too much to heal the sick (if they can manage to dock their yachts long enough to sign a form or two), entire industries making a mockery of God's decree that we should steward the earth, society as a whole beating up on two people who merely want to express the love that Jesus himself said was the Golden Rule.
What we don't need is a hypocritical scam artist wearing funny underwear to dictate our morality. Societies evolve, and the first rule of evolution is evolve or die off. Beck's wasted effort promoting a religion he himself does not support or profess will drain energy from true moral progress in this country. While this might seem like a good thing, you know, thinning the herd, it's not.
We are at a critical stage in human development. We have the chance, the opportunity and the means to move forward to our destiny: to explore and to create. We as a species have an opportunity no other species on this planet has every had. We have the chance to ensure our immortality.
This requires an expansion of our horizons, not a contraction. This demands the ability to take ourselves out of ourselves and to see the bigger picture.
An unintelligible intellectual slut like Beck will try to prevent that. He can't, but he can hamper the effort and the beauty of what could be, which are the saddest words in the human language. His hatred of humanity manifests itself daily and his yeoman efforts to recruit others to his cause, as feeble as the rally numbers were (according to AirPhotosLive which has no dog in this hunt, some 75,000 people made it, even tho millions listen to him and watch him on the TeeVee), suggests there's a ready audience of Brownshirts, I mean, Beckites, ready to hate right alongside him.
That could be a problem. As Beck himself would try to (feebly) point out, a tyranny of the minority is a dangerous thing. Only in the progressive case, the "minority" is only trying to secure the blessings and bounties of freedom our Creator endowed us with and has made strides in that direction because it's the right thing. In Beck's case, the minority is a rabid know-nothing mob hellbent on destroying society and ultimately doomed to failure because it's the wrong thing.
The good news, of course, is that hate as a driving force is short term, like a hurricane. Ask Ann Coulter, who's relevancy has put her almost permanently on freakshow status. It blows itself out, as the primaries this season indicate. And without a plan to administrate and govern afterwards, leaves an angry population turning on itself and its leaders. Again, history in the form of Robespierre gives us guidance.
And Beck is a history "fan," altho I suspect his history education was as idiotic and narrowminded as his "Christianity". I doubt the name Robespierre holds much meaning for him. Maybe Oliver Cromwell would be a better example. Or Leon Trotsky, since he claims such familiarity with socialism.
He is a scam artist who has grabbed hold of the mane of a raging lion and is riding it for all its worth. But the lion will soon realize the rider is there.
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