“I really believe Chicago is the nicest city in America,” a grinning Glenn Beck said from the stage of the town's namesake theater Thursday night. “Now if we could just get rid of all the commies and progressives, we'd be set.” That stuff is red meat for his demographic and Beck knows it. He obliged with a quick endorsement of his 2012 dream team: Allen West (president), Michele Bachmann (vice president) and Ron Paul (secretary of the treasury). He proffered his fervent declaration that he would rather “scoop his eye out with spoons” than join in one of the fundraisers for President Barack Obama (whom he called a Marxist), that were taking place in town simultaneously with Beck's show at the Chicago Theatre. And although he walked out on stage dressed like a card-carrying member of the Local Two stagehands union, he took some obligatory licks at Al Gore and the United Nations.
But Beck's heart didn't really seem to be in that stuff anymore.
If Thursday night's mighty strange and thoroughly fascinating show revealed anything, it's that Beck is moving away from the political arena and toward the religious realm, albeit one of his very singular definition. The open question is how many of his followers from the Fox News Channel are ready to make the same journey. (The Chicago Theatre was less than half full Thursday, but then Beck was playing a town from which he only half-jokingly suggested that those who stand with him should move.) Beck, a far smarter man than many realize, clearly knows that it will be a tricky transition, economically and otherwise, and that it will require all his considerable charm and force of personality.
But you sense that Beck now has decided that it must be done. Come hell or high water. He doesn't want to be a pundit so much as a preacher.
“I had been feeling that a great chance was coming for me” he said, clearly not just referring to his recently announced departure from Fox.
Beck has, he told us, been spending time with the Reverend Billy Graham. In his two-hour show (one hour of Beck yakking, mostly extemporaneously, and one of his mostly taking pre-selected questions from the audience) Beck spoke much of God's purpose and human sin. Although he did not, tellingly, mention the name Jesus Christ.
“You don't have a single right,” Beck told a rather perplexed audience clearly very much invested in precisely those privileges of American citizenship. “They belong to him,” he said, pointing skywards. “There is an overarching plan that started with Adam and Eve. We were supposed to be the guardians, but instead we reached for the apple.”
And so the revival meeting continued. “There is a gate, a very small gate,” Beck said. “Your soul has to get through. Guard that gate first. ... You think it's hard now? You know what hell is?”
The reaction was varied: a few amens, a few nods, a few worried looks. The looks got even more worried when Beck declared himself to be a vegan, albeit for health reasons.
“I can't continue to do the chalkboard thing and say, ‘Look, it all ends with George Soros',” Beck said in the second half of his show, fighting back tears (or an inestimably fine facsimile thereof). “But somebody has to be the watch.”
The tears continued to flow as Beck said, in essence, that he was an unworthy vessel for this new calling.
“We are moving rapidly,” he said, sobbing. “I don't know how to do ... what I'm supposed to do. I'm a DJ. All I've ever been is a DJ, figuring it out as I go along. I don't want to do the job I'm doing now. I don't want to do this job that's coming.”
Beck has, of course, long been untroubled by self-contradiction.
“It's time for the world to stand as one,” he said at one point, despite have observed earlier that he “did not give a rat's butt about how the world feels about something.” He attacked New York, even as he described dining in one of its fine restaurants with — of all things! — a chalkboard. And he has a simply astonishing ability to snap in and out of his reveries. One moment, he seems consumed by a higher calling. The next he's cracking jokes with his staff. He hypes his new website, The Blaze, as the moral guardian of all that's good and right and a last defense against evil. And yet he promotes that site by having a staffer pop out on stage, dressed up a flame with big, jazzy hands. She looked rather like an apocalyptic M&M.
You could see Beck as an earnest fellow with a big following who has now found a new purpose and wants to carry his people with him on a spiritual ride. You could see his shtick as a sales job by a wealthy member of the media elite who knows he has to hang on his personal brand. You could see him as a master of good, old, all-American flim-flammery. He's probably a bit of all of those things.
And yet despite the tears, invective and religiosity, an evening with Beck has its charms. He is quite a decent stand-up and a shrewd self-deprecator. At one point, after a very wry description of what it's like to be a man whom many people consider to be insane, Beck did a killer impression of a recent moment when his pretentious nemesis Arianna Huffington wondered aloud if there were not something in the Constitution that could be called upon to silence Beck.
“I'm pretty sure there's not,” he said.
On that point, thank goodness, Beck is still on terra firma.
Poster Comment:
Beck has, he told us, been spending time with the Reverend Billy Graham.
That says it all !!! Another faker !!