Feb 20, 2010



Glenn Beck's key note speech at the CPAC conference caught the spirit of so many strands of American life and mythology. America, home of the brave and the unbrave. Willie Lowman's America. Where buffalo roam, along with the alcoholic; the psychotic, the hallowed out, the fascist, the founder, the failer, the enabler, the denier, the sinner, the spinner. It was the old moral majority returned, that old fear and anger, and that relentless old nostalgia to hear Ronald Reagan one more time, and see that awshucks-we're-America-shake of the head, to hear him pitch 20 Mule Team borax and the GE Theater hour. Sure, everything's gonna be okay. It's the desire for a mother, for a family no matter how dysfunctional. It's not the desire to live free or die, or even for smaller government, but just to be noticed at all, to be taken into the bosom of the past, into the lap of mother courage, as she strokes your forehead and tells you a bedtime story from when the family first came to America. When America was great and women worked in the B-29 factory and Dad was safely off Omaha Beach. Glen Beck is the master landscape painter of sentimentality and sanctimony and just pure nonsense, and anger that's not only deep but fun as hell to flaunt.

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