A few random things left over from watching Glenn Beck's Tent Revival Meeting and Hoveround Demonstration this past Saturday in DC:
1. What the fuck was that? No, really. Before it happened, Beck was promising nothing short of a "miracle." Instead, what we got was a Very Special Episode of The Glenn Beck Show, starring Glenn Beck as the lovable lump Glenn Beck, featuring the Glenn Beck Minstrels. It was terrible and boring and old and white. It wasn't frightening, as some liberals have said. It was pathetic, like watching a parade of freaks from a Fellini film. And Beck's hour-long speech was absolute fucking nonsense. The Rude Pundit's seen actual tent-revival preachers who have been awe-inspiring and scary. Fuck, he's seen scabby homeless guys screaming about Armageddon on the street corner who were more coherent.
2. You can't spend every day of your life making broad, awful, confrontational political statements in order to get an audience and then say you're gonna have a big damn life-changing rally but it won't be political. No, motherfucker. It's political because you're political. You can wave your hammy arms at the different memorials in DC like the most enthusiastic tour guide in history, you can yell about a magical sky wizard, but it's political. And people who think it wasn't political are the blind fools who always follow the deranged sociopath right off the cliff. It was political because it was specifically Christian, specifically putting American history in a Christian context. (Yes, he trotted out a Jew.)
3. The best analogy the Rude Pundit can come up with for the whole goddamn ridiculous waste of time is the Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca. For what was this but a journey from across the nation of Christians going to the city of our stone holy sites in order to pray.
4. Advice to unthinking Beckerheads: Just because one says something with fervor and volume does not make it true. However, a good con man has to act as if he believes the lie and act accordingly. (So, you know, kudos, Glenn.)
5. Fun juxtaposition:
Glenn Beck, speaking on Friday at the Kennedy Center, just before raping a kitten, using his tears for lube: "We are 12 hours away from fundamentally transforming the United States of America."
Sarah Palin, speaking at the Beckture: "We must not fundamentally transform America, as some would want."
6. Neither Beck nor Palin nor the crowd nor his own niece understood a goddamned thing about Martin Luther King, Jr. Beck has reduced King to "the content of character, going so far as to say on Fox "news" the next day that King's actual ideas on economic justice are "racial politics." Using "racial politics" as a pejorative against King is like using "touchdown" as an attack on the skills of Peyton Manning. Beck perverted King, transforming one of the most confrontational figures in history into Dream Negro, the Care Bear.
7. If this was, as some analysts have said, like the Obama rallies of 2008, well, all one can say to the people there, "You've got one hell of a letdown coming your way."
8. And you follow someone who admits that he cries all the time and hears voices whose only advice to you is "Pray." Did you need to hear that?
9. In the end, Beck introduced a group of religious leaders (almost all Christian) who he called his new Black Robe Regiment, as if they were superheroes ready to fly off the stage and kick ass. They did not.
Query: If anyone can tell the Rude Pundit how that was an important or interesting event at all, please do it. Because, in all honestly, he's boggled and confused.
(For the live-tweets during the Beckture and the pre-Beckture, check out the Rude Pundit on Twitter.)
Query: If anyone can tell the Rude Pundit how that was an important or interesting event at all, please do it. Because, in all honestly, he's boggled and confused.
(For the live-tweets during the Beckture and the pre-Beckture, check out the Rude Pundit on Twitter.)
