The Da Vincification of Right Wing Punditry

courtesy of the Mighty Favog, here’s how Dan Brown Glenn Beck instructs us in how the Art of Rockefeller is the key to the Hidden History of our Time

on national prime time TV. And gets taken seriously. And gets defended as “educational” by Catholics who hoot and jeer (quite properly) at Dan Brown.

Yeah, that Isaiah was a commie alright. And there’s not a fascist dime’s worth of difference between Teddy Roosevelt, Robert LaFollette, J.D. Rockefeller on the one hand and Marx, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini and Obama on the other. Early 20th Century Progressivism is fascism is Nazism is Stalinism is Rockefeller capitalism is Obamaism. The art proves it!

The merriment continues as the scary and creepy music backs up Obama’s rather prosaic observation that the original Constitution was (gasp!) an imperfect document:

Golly. Why O why would an African-American think imperfect a document which declared him 3/5 of a person and left him a slave until it was only finally amended after the bloodiest war in our history? It can *only* be because he hates the Constitution! And what could it mean to say that the Constitution is a living document, the understanding of which changes as the interpretive community around it changes? The next thing you know, people are going to start writing evil books like Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine and suggesting that our understanding of the Holy Bible changes and develops over time! Is nothing sacred? After all, we are Fundamentalists! We know that the written word has one meaning and one meaning only! And now the secret cabal of Rockefeller fascist communist socialist dime minters has nearly succeeded in beatifying the monster who perverted our faith in Scripture with all this “living document” crap! O the humanity! The Conspiracy is even getting into heaven!

Oh! Wait. We’re Catholics. When we aren’t getting ginned up by right wing agit prop and ignorant paranoia, we know perfectly well that sola scriptura is rubbish and that both the tradition of the interpretive community and the magisterial judgments of the duly authorized authority have a colossal impact on how we read the founding documents of our Faith. So why should we instantly assume monstrous evil and “hatred” when somebody makes such a pedestrian observation about a merely human document like the Constitution.

Does that mean that the interpretation of the Constitution by the Court or the culture is necessarily sound? No. There is no charism of infallibility for the US Supreme Court or for our culture (as Roe amply demonstrates). But it is rubbish to pretend there is such a thing as sola Constitutiona for a merely human document when there is no such thing as sola scriptura for a divine one.

Oh, and by the way, here’s what Obama actually said before Beck got out his scissors:

Criminy. One of the most exasperating things about Dan Brown groupies is hearing people say, “Gosh! I read the Da Vinci Code and I learned so much! I have the same sensation listening to people go on about how Beck is “educating” them after seeing spectacles like the scissor job (and, even more, the ridiculous Dan Brown impression) above. There’s plenty to worry about with Obama without having to subject yourself to Dan Brownified American history and edit jobs that are as reliable as the evidence of Joe McCarthy.

And please, before somebody starts complaining that I am “demonizing” Beck, get real. I regard the fact that Beck is regarded as an Authority by millions of people as a grave symptom of how degenerate and desperate our culture is, not as a sign that Beck is monstrously evil. Indeed, the best analysis I’ve seen of Beck was in a combox over at Dreher’s site:

I have a theory that people like Beck, and probably this guy Skousen, are frustrated intellectuals who have an urge to understand things and are looking for ideas that will explain the world to them. (There are people like this on the far left too.) However, they haven’t gained the background knowledge or learned the habits of mind that temper this enthusiasm and turn it to good use: how to evaluate new ideas critically, what’s already been said about the issues in question, what the “state of play” is among those who have been studying society and history in a serious way for generations now, etc. These are the kinds of things you learn in school, and especially in the better graduate programs (which, to be sure, have lots of other faults, but that’s another discussion).

In the absence of that kind of discipline, unformed intellectuals are very susceptible to believing they’ve found the One Big Answer, the one book or author who finally Reveals the Secrets and Explains It All. But since there really isn’t one big answer that explains at all, these tend to be crank ideas and/or conspiracy theories. As I recall, Pat Robertson was partial to the ideas of some author of the 1920s who had been pushing antisemitic notions of a global conspiracy of Jewish bankers. Robertson’s books borrowed this person’s claims almost verbatim, but just changed the word “Jewish” to “British” or some such thing. Newt Gingrich also has a large streak of this kind of undisciplined curiosity and big-idea-ism, but in his case it’s kept in check by the fact that he wants to be taken seriously in mainstream politics and also that he’s not monomaniacally focused on any one issue. But he’s offered courses in which he’s presented himself as the explainer of everything and “Teacher of the Rules of Civilization” (I am not making that up).

As someone who appreciates eager and intellectually curious students, I feel some sympathy for the plight of such people, at least in this regard if not others. They needed to stay in school longer and/or have better luck with the teachers they got; Beck illustrates what kind of blithering idiocy you’re prone to if you get to middle age and are still questing for the One Big Idea. And of course this is not the only factor that goes into the making of a dangerous demagogue. Still, I think the solution to a problem like Beck is to lock him away for a couple of years in a seminar room where he has to engage a broader range of ideas and test his own against those of others. A one-way medium like TV is exactly the wrong medium for him. (In fact, it occurs to me that another place where you see similar kinds of fringey stuff is public-access television. Maybe the best way to understand Beck’s show is to think of it as a one-man public-access program that happens to appear on a big national network.)

In short, my read of Beck is that he is a troubled man who thinks he has found the All-Explaining Theory of Everything that will put his world in order. In this, he reminds me of no one so much as Bob Sungenis, who is likewise compelled to have All Explaining Theories of Everything which put all facts together in a Grand Synthesis. To be sure, his Interpretive Key is different (it’s all about Jooos and secularists for Bob). But the same pattern of the wannabe intellectual is discernible. For most of us, grappling with the huge “What’s it all about, Alfie?” questions happens in private and we either emerge from the struggle with some degree of wholeness and coherence or we don’t. Beck, however, is not in the position of most of us. While he grapples with his demons and tries to sort out his world with the use of the meager tools afforded him by Mormon conspiracy theorist quackery, his Dan Brown Art Decoder Ring, and a smattering of American history, he is doing so on national television in view of a huge audience full of populist frustration at elites that is anointing him a Leading Thinker and expecting him to guide them out of the dark forest they are in toward Illumination. He’s not a bad man, I think. But he is most emphatically not a stable one. And the All Explaining Theory of Everything he is trying to formulate to make sense of his world must–inevitably–collapse in ruins as All Explaining Theories of Everything always do. When it does, I worry about how big the flameout will be if he succeeds in convincing a lot of shepherdless sheep to follow him. And I frankly fear for how it will impact him personally. Dreher’s reader is right: A one-way medium like TV is exactly the wrong medium for him. And Catholic support for his quackery is nuts.