Cockroach to Beck: You're no Thomas Paine

A friend gave me Glenn Beck’s Common Sense: The Case Against an Out-of-Control Government, Inspired by Thomas Paine. It’s interesting to read a political tract in which I am such an awful or scary guy. I’m a government employee, an academic, and worse, a political scientist, and I’ve been in the company of progressives. At various points, Beck refers to these kind of people as “cockroaches,” “enemies at the gates,” and “deadly masters.”

I won’t pretend to speak for all ‘deadly enemy cockroaches’ across the land, but here’s how one of them responds to Beck’s book.

As the subtitle informs us, Glenn says the book is inspired by Thomas Paine, and it includes Paine’s 1776 Common Sense. Beck does readers a service by including it—perhaps it will inspire more folks to read him (it is, however, widely available for free on various websites). I wonder, though, how many of his readers will actually read the Paine portion. Even if they do, they’ll find precious little to connect Beck’s text with Paine, beyond the phrase “common sense,” which Beck repeats, as if saying it lots of times will make it so. I think of common sense as referring to things like ‘Don’t pick up a hot cast iron pan with your bare hand,’ or ‘look both ways before crossing a street,’ or ‘don’t expect everything to end hunky dory if you sleep with your best friend’s girl- or boyfriend.' No, for Beck, his opinion is common sense.

And he’s not just delivering common sense. He’s the mouthpiece of God:

America has let thieves into her home and that nagging in your gut is a final warning that our country is about to be stolen. Our Founding Fathers understood that our rights and liberties are gifts from God. They also understood that WE are an intuitive people. If all that is true, then it only makes sense that He would alert us to our impending loss.

And now He is—shame on us for ignoring Him for so long.

The 'God-talk' is curious, for Paine was hostile to the Christian religion (see Paine's Age of Reason). But such selectivity is not surprising, and the passage above is pretty representative of what we get in the rest of the book. Drumbeats of fear. Pronouncements on US history of dubious veracity. Lots of caps because that’s what Talk TV and Radio hosts think wins arguments: YELLING. A jumble of different ideas thrown together in a single paragraph.

Amid the clichés, name-calling (“border-line sociopaths), the histrionics (“WE ARE NOT SHEEP”), the hyperbole (“The chains of economic slavery. . .are about to snap shut around the necks of our children. . .”), we get the standard conservative critique that I’ve been hearing since I started paying attention to politics in the mid-1970s: America is going to hell; we need to revive an idealized Leave it to Beaver American past; schools no longer teach “real history” and are instead brainwashing our kids; distrust “them,” you know, those “experts,” and get big government off our backs, out of our pockets, and away from our guns.

Along with this we have a walloping sense of marginalization: “The fastest way to be branded a danger, a militia member, or just plain crazy is to quote the words of our Founding Fathers.” That is so absurd that I can only guess that Beck misunderstands the criticism he’s faced. It’s not the material he uses. It’s how he uses it, and his delivery.

Take Thomas Paine. The Paine section includes an Introduction and four essays that give us arguments against monarchy and for a war for independence. Beck could have drawn analogies, drawing parallels between Paine’s indictment of monarchical rule and the increasing concentration of authority in the US executive branch. He could have mused over connections between his own call for a non-violent revolution and Paine’s efforts to mobilize support for the war for independence. And he could have adopted Paine’s tone. Here’s Paine’s opening passage from Common Sense:

In the following sheets, the author hath studiously avoided every thing which is personal among ourselves. Compliments as well as censure to individuals make no part thereof. The wise and the worthy need not the triumph of a pamphlet; and those whose sentiments are injudicious or unfriendly, will cease of themselves, unless too much pains are bestowed upon their conversion.

Beck, instead, gives us sophomoric wit:

Politicians, like cockroaches, are not stupid creatures. Both have an uncanny ability to survive, consume all things living or dead, and can apparently live up to one month without their heads—though I would argue that politicians can survive much longer than that.

Beck also gives us a big dose of conspiracy theory. Beginning with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, progressives, the new bogeymen, have been working patiently, cleverly, evilly, to create a fascist, socialist, or communist regime (the terms are interchangeable in Beck’s intellectual world). Beck says it’s not a conspiracy theory, but to borrow from another famous conspiracy theorist—‘If it walks like a duck. . .

That said, I can understand Beck’s conspiricist bent and his fear, even if I dislike his style and disagree with starting assumptions and his conclusions. In Real Enemies, historian Katheryn Olmsed argues that Americans are prone to developing conspiracy theories in part because the US government indeed has engaged in conspiracies. As the scope and size of government began to grow during and after WW I,

It gained the power to conspire agains its citizens, and and it soon began exercising that power. By the height of the cold war, government agents had consorted with mobsters to kill a foreign leader [Castro], dropped hallucinogenic drugs into the drinks of unsuspecting Americans in random bars [MKULTRA], and considered launching fake terrorist attacks on Americans in the United States.

As well, the government handed Americans conspiracy theories that they were to believe in, from a Japanese Fifth Column during WW II or, soon after, a State Department completely infiltrated by communists, on to the Al Qaeda-Saddam Hussein connection that the Bush-Cheney administration sold to the public.

With revelations of real government conspiracies, and with the US government trying to promote particular conspiracy narratives, and then spying on and harassing dissenters, you get an environment rich with conspiratorial possibilities. For example, during the Iran-Contra affair, the CIA turned a blind eye to Contra drug-runners selling crack in LA. While Olmstead thinks it’s preposterous that this was part of a government campaign to destroy the African-American population, it certainly makes more understandable why people might believe in such a conspiracy.

Finally, I can also understand Beck’s anti-intellectualism. We academics, for example, can be tremendous snobs, and much of our writing is inaccessible to the lay public (much of it is even inaccessible to me!). Still, his knee-jerk rejection of “experts” is also an awfully convenient way to protect his view of the world, and his arguments, from any evidence or reasoning that might contradict his own.