Glenn Beck: The Making of a Persona

In 1979,  a boat capsizes in the waters of Washington's Puget Sound.  A divorcee,  Mary Beck,  drowns,  along with a companion.  Police rule out foul play,  and it is assumed this was an accidental boat capsizing and failed mutual rescue. 

 Mary Beck has a teen-aged son from her failed marriage.  His name is Glenn,  and in his adulthood he will come to insist that his mother committed suicide.  The tale is complete with details about a suicide note left for her son the morning she went boating.  Thus through this fabrication does Glenn's persona as celebrity begin to form.

Salon.com has a lengthy  3-part series by Alexander Zaitchik on Beck:  It is a winsome  and morose piece on the making of the cult figure and right-wing pundit we now know as Glenn Beck.  It is a stunning biography,  and raises many questions:   How much is the real man,  true ideology,  and how much a willful construction of grandiose proportions?    

Beck was never part of the counter-culture of the '70s,  Salon writer Alexander Zatichik tells us.  But he did smoke marijuana with a friend,  and once,  after falling,  swallowed his tongue and started to choke.  His friend,  a young DJ named Bruce Kelly,  saved his life by reaching back into Beck's throat and pulling his tongue out.  Beck was also introduced to cocaine in this period,  and would use it for a decade.   Beck befriended DJs at First Media twice his age,  ran a magic show  -  an eerie foreshadow of his 21st century role as pundit  -  and was an impresario of the air-waves almost from his beginnings. 

The man with the baby-faced boy-next-door blandness and all-American charisma was re-born in Texas,  under the tutelage of a Mormon Marine from First Media.  Bruce Kelly would later say that he "did not recognize"  his old friend Glenn Beck when meeting him again after this transition period in the mid-1980s. The coked-up era of zoo-radio and its rapid fire satirical ravings was a world unto itself,  and Beck is both off-spring  and symbol of that era. 

 Using Rush Limbaugh as the canvas on which to paint his own colors,  Beck knew that to surpass Limbaugh was to inherit him and to up the ante.  Using a blend of Top 40 morning show tricks, and blending in some Libertarian revolutionary ravings was the perfect formula.  Only,  the story of Glenn Beck is clearly  less about an ideologue and more about a celebrity,  along the lines of Detroit's Eminem.  One journalist did in fact liken him to a sort of former- coked white rapper of the post-Reagen,  post-Clinton era .  And this man,  it seems,  is able to cause quite some trouble for the Obama Administration.  Only in America,  as they say. . . 

The British author and quantum consciousness theorist Anthony Peake has a theory about the human psyche and the self:  A stunning theory,  I might add,  philosophically of great import,  and it grieves me that he is not yet more hailed here in the U.S.  for his colossal contribution to psychological and transpersonal theory  ( although he did receive quite a response on Madison Avenue this past August 3,  in a public reception in Midtown Manhattan).  

 I mention Peake because his dyadic concept of the dual self,  comprised of a transcendent "Daemon"  hovering over the daily,  empirical "Eidolon"  is so aptly and beautifully captured in this picture montage,  made by my 21 year old son,  of Glenn Beck.    These images are done up on photoshop,  rapidly,  without being able to explain in words what is being done.   But one can see that the Daemon,  in full color, is Beck's true self,  and it gazes softly,  bemusedly and a bit puzzled,   at the radio and tv celebrity,  which in soft focus black and white,  is clearly depicted as the lesser self,  the eidolon,  as in the Greek:   "idol"  or mere image.  

 And this indeed seems what Beck is most of all,  an image,  an Eidolon-idol of the 21st-century Heartland;   there  for the Daemonic projection of right-wing and Libertarian dreams of freedom,  imposed upon him and received in return from him,  in a back and forth evoke-response in which neither  pundit nor  audience understands the meaning of freedom,  American or otherwise.