Catholic and Enjoying It!
One of the blessings of not having a TV is that I don’t have to endure professional hysterics like Glenn Beck. Apparently, a few days ago, in one of his regular frenzies, he decided to stop freaking out about fascist dimes and instead switched his subtle and probing intellect over to hysterical declarations that Obama was a “racist” with “a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture”. Prescinding from the entertaining question of what “the white culture” even is, I observe that this sort of mental illness, masquerading as journalism or information or whatever it is Beck does is but one of the reasons I find myself bothering less and less with corporate journalism in any of its odious forms. Beck, like all the others involved in our our corporate media circus, is there primarily to sell beer and shampoo, not to inform or enlighten. So he blathers hysterically. It’s his schtick.
The problem with this system, as Don Imus found out, is that now and then you cross a line and say something so stupid and repulsive that the manufacturers of beer and shampoo, partly out of a sense of common decency, and mostly out of fear of losing revenue, back away from you in revulsion. This is what has happened to Beck as a bunch of sponsors have decided to exercise their perfect right to say, “Don’t stand so close to me.”
Fools call this “censorship”. Normal people call it “spending my money however I want.” Glenn Beck has a perfect right to make an ass off himself. He does not have a perfect right to corporate underwriting of his asininity. People are, of course, free to boycott the companies who don’t feel especially anxious to touch crazy hysterics with a barge pole. That’s also not “censorship” but freedom. My only suggestion to all involved in the boycott-a-rama would be a) companies should perhaps really think about the actual quality of the pundits they sponsor *before* backing documentably unstable and nutty people merely in the hope that their nuttiness will attract viewers and b) people who want to champion a kook like Beck should really think about whether or not this is the most productive use of their time.
The working motto of the Left was, for years, “no enemies on the Left.” When nutty lefties were making hopeful wish fullfillment films about the assassination of George W. Bush or burning down Sarah Palin’s church, Righties were rightly appalled at the nutjobs on the Left while the Lefties kept mum.
I’m beginning to think that the Right, in its hysteria, is falling prey to the same thing, acting on the principle that so long as you say something negative about Obama, it doesn’t really matter whether it actually bears any relationship with reality and that, conversely, if you don’t take it as axiomatic that Obama is utterly without virtue of any kind and guilty of any and every evil of which you can accuse him, that makes you an “Obama supporter”. Such tribalism is as damaging to the country coming from the Right as from the Left. Indeed, I’m still quite flabbergasted at the people in my comboxes who could look straight at a picture of an armed man outside an Obama town hall speech with a sign reading “It is time to water the tree of liberty” (a reference to Thomas Jefferson’s remark that the tree of liberty must be watered with the blood of tyrants) and see nothing amiss. (Update: I had a quote here from a reader whom I took to be defending this. He insists he was not referring to to the guy with the sign, so I am deleting the quote with apologies.) Still, defenses of the guy with sign are not all that hard to find. He was “just exercising his rights” is the received meme for defenders.
Yeah. Right. Publicly calling for the cold-blooded murder of the President of the United States is all perfectly fine. Protected by the first and second amendments. Nothing to see here.
Ahem. Dale Price, one of my sane readers, replies to the whole “Forget Common Decency and Christian Charity and Embrace Legalism, Menace, and Crazy Talk” school of conservatism”:
I say this as an owner of three firearms who regards gun-grabbers with contempt:
Sure, he has the right to open carry at the protest. He also has the constitutional right to brandish a three foot dildo there, too.
But just as I wouldn’t recommend he do the latter, I also won’t endorse his doing of the former if the goal is to build broader support for your cause among people of good will. As opposed to showing off how the Bill of Rights protects manifold idiocies of unserious people with a cause.
It’s simple: Just don’t carry a firearm in these circumstances. Just. Don’t. Imagine your reaction if you saw a band of armed pro-choicers as you participated in a March for Life.
By all means–berate the hell out of our representatives and magistrates for their behavior on this issue, and others. But don’t tote a firearm to do it. All it takes is one vicious fool and this country will be headed for bleak days.
Oh, and to those who get all weepy about my lack of charity for those who make public calls for murder while hailing the Champion of Murder as bravely making “the statement that he is of no less import than the president, with his armed and extensive retinue. That is a Catholic (and an American) sentiment, is it not?”, just shut up, will ya? The last thing the Catholic Church needs is another idiot justifying calls for murder. We have enough Catholic Democrats doing that already.
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