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Worst American Birthdays, vol. 46

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Talk-show host and Incredibly Strange Man Glenn Beck turns 45 today. A former substance abuser and sufferer from adult-onset Mormonism, Beck vaulted into media prominence from the back of Terri Schiavo, whom he had saddled up nearly five years before the Republican Party discovered her in early 2005. After riding the Schiavo case to its inevitable conclusion, the triumphant Beck earned the chance to bring his unique version of methodological schizophrenia to a national television audience in the early fall of 2006. Since then, he has received numerous awards for his work, including the coveted Fistulae Prize for Most Hyperbolic Reaction Ever to Routine Hemorrhoid Surgery (Transparent Drug-Seeking Behavior Division).

On occasion, Beck has described himself as a “rodeo clown,” a comparison we might find apt if only rodeo clowns were known for their bizarre, racist tirades about immigrants; their evidence-free insinuations about the loyalties of Muslim Americans; uninformed, documentary-length hypotheses about science; or their dueling preoccupations with Hitler and Antichrist, which provide them with readily interchangeable frameworks to characterize people with whom they happen to disagree. Most rodeo clowns, moreover, possess the additional virtue of not weeping when they consider the life of George Washington, nor do they spend their non-Red/Nazi/Antichrist-baiting moments writing bathetic holiday novels about handmade sweaters:

I began writing this story with the intention of sharing it with just my family. But something happened along the way: The story took over and wrote itself. There are things I spent years trying, and eventually succeeding, to forget that just spilled out of me — events I never intended to share with anyone. It’s almost as if my sweater wanted its story told. Perhaps it had sat silent on a shelf long enough.

One might wonder if Glenn Beck’s talking sweater would be more or less of a douchebag than Glenn Beck himself. A living refutation of the principle that low ratings should pose an obstacle to career advancement, the erstwhile star of Headline News was recently offered a make-work position at the Fox News Channel after his contract negotiations with CNN foundered. As it happened, CNN was hoping to replace the late evening re-run of Beck’s program with a re-run of Lou Dobbs or — in a move that would have actually expanded the 8 p.m. audience — with a web cam trained upon a tub of guinea pigs.

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