Fascinoma

Glenn Beck is living proof that the driving passion of hatemongering assholes is kitsch. He recently went on another one of his crying jags, this time grieving for the loss of the simpler time and with anticipation of the tough love "Dad" is going to have to inflict on the chirren of America because they went to a pot and beer party they shouldn't have (not kidding here -- this is the metaphor he tearfully hyperextends). And now it's time to atone, according to Glenn -- and it's gonna really really hurt.

Christ Almighty. Every day the man sets a new world record for assholery -- and Rupert Murdoch is paying him millions to do so.

Among the many weird elements in this segment are the video nuggets he uses to emblemize the Golden Age of Pure Simplicity for which he sobs: two old commercials. Beck replays the old Coke commercial where a little white boy (what? no speckled puppy? no red wagon?) give his Coke to Ed "Too Tall" Jones eliciting a smile from the giant black football player. This doubtless touches the Beck's racist-shithead heart because it conjures a harmonious universe where 'we all get along' and yet it also encapsulates his Klansman's fantasy -- black folk jus' happy to be entertaining us and also happy with whatever trivial crap the whites are kind enough to toss them.

Then Beck cues up the tiresome Paul Anka song "Remember the Times of Your Life" (which might better be as jingle of anti-Alzheimer's elixir) and explains how it was a tag written for a Kodak commercial "and that commercial became so iconic that he went back and wrote the whole song" (Funny, I seem to remember most of the iconic stuff from them days, and I don't remember any such commercials.) and then we get to watch Beck watch some old home movies "from U-Tube" (or so he claims) and these, lo and behold!, do contain speckled puppy and red wagon. Holy Shit -- he went there.

Then Beck tells us, his voice cracking with emotion, "America has never been a perfect place... But we used to be united, we used to be united on some basic things. If a politician told you right now that he could make that happen again, that you could go back to those simpler times when people were together, you'd do it in a heartbeat, wouldn't you?"

Well Glenn, no, I wouldn't. I'd reach for my wallet and make sure it was still there because I'd know that anyone espousing a simpler time when people were together was a charlatan or delusional and probably both. There's a name for people nostalgic for a simpler superior past: fascist. What you call people who find the proof of that imgained past in carefully confabulated marketing stratagems I'm not quite sure, unless of course it's fascist assholes.