Glenn Beck: The Making of a Persona

by smkovalinsky | September 25, 2009 at 08:17 am

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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.

Since launching his talk radio career in the late '90s, Beck has constructed a persona anchored in a biography of struggle and redemption. It is a narrative with shades of another haunted Washingtonian who found entertainment fame, Kurt Cobain. Both men hailed from broken homes in the drizzly Pacific Northwest. Both men would find youthful fortune behind microphones while struggling with drugs, prescribed and recreational. Both would contemplate suicide before their tethers finally snapped in 1994. That year Cobain would wrap his mouth around a loaded shotgun. Beck, after contemplating doing the same while listening to a Nirvana album, would not.
Over the course of many retellings, the tragedy of Mary Beck would become the cornerstone event in her son's personal narrative of redemption, and that tale of rebirth would became the cornerstone of his career. But the story Glenn Beck often tells about his mother is not quite the one recorded by the Tacoma paper. As Beck would later relate to millions of his listeners, his mother's drowning was no boating accident. It was a suicide, he claimed, explained in a short note written on that fateful dawn and left on the mantel. And he said it happened in 1977, when he was 13, not 1979, when he was 15 (even though newspaper obits and government records confirm that a 41-year-old woman named Mary Beck died in Puyallup in 1979.) In fact, Beck's first wife had never heard of Mary Beck's alleged suicide until years after they married, when she heard her husband discussing it live on the radio.

Whether or not some of its details are reliable, the story of how Glenn Beck the teenage DJ became Glenn Beck the cultural phenomenon has both political and personal significance. But is Beck's journey conservatism's post-millennial crack-up writ small, complete with a preference for faith over fact? Is it simply a classic showbiz success story? Or, as Beck and his loyal legions would have it, is it a tale of resurrection, of a born-again patriot rescued from nihilism and now destined to save America from liberalism?

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The_Cynic

at 09:32 on September 25th, 2009

Beck can't even answer the question "What is white culture?" The white culture that Obama hates apparently - he is nothing but a showman, carpetbagger and not a very good one at that.

Roy C

at 10:25 on September 25th, 2009

Well, even if that were true, Beck gets Obama to reject some of his prize czars, and that means that Beck has hit the mark.

As someone who grew up in and around the left from the mid-sixties onward, I do know the drill on the demonization of white, Christian, patriarchal culture. And, it is a demonization, as opposed to a thorough, balanced judgment based on a rational and honest analysis.

I will say that the establishment has a shadow, and the counter-establishment has a shadow as well.

Shadow is parts of our self that operate outside of consciousness, some good and some bad. When someone reacts to the evil he grew up with rather than overcome it, the reaction includes the complementary complexes, fixations and compulsions, and a new set of lies to go along with it.

That is the left, by and large, in today's world.

QueensHart

at 15:37 on September 25th, 2009

This question one for both Obama and Beck! How much is the real man, true ideology, and how much a willful construction of grandiose proportions?

It is said that boys abandoned (girls too) early on NEVER get over it. It is a hole that cannot be healed. It has to be managed . My ex lost his Mother when he was 7. Looks like Obama and Beck are two different archetypes here for this time in their lives I would say Beck actually knows some of his shadow , Obama not. Beck is a feeler..Obama not. Beck has had( with the little) I know two major entries into the abyss..not considering his prenatal development. It is interesting the different father figures they have both chosen to align themselves with. Obama the leftist radicals. Beck the conservative, religiious and they both crave being "looked at". One has the smooth elitist stance, the other the puppy, yuppy who just might bite the heels of the winged obama and bring him down despite the collective fondness of the smooth talking shister to the bumbling, awkward sherlock holmes.

Beck has most likely discovered the roots of an authentic spirituality thru a 12 step program. Obama chose the ranting, anti american political Rev Wright because of his "showmanship" until the world saw it in all its ugliness. They definitely are polar opposites of the masculine. Never underestimate the power of the fool.

Beck is to the elitist and lefties an idiot but he most likely will make it to the internal finish line of individuation. . When one is serious about their faith in the subtle body of the soul(which we believe we create thru our work)they do not care what other people think because it does not cause a chink in their armour for they have taken it off. Beck acts to me like he certainly is all over emotionally and at times it is difficult to watch him! However, it is said that a man who can cry will become whole...when it is not to say almost always in the second half of life. It can be understood more by reading The Fisher King Robert Johnson

n Transformation, Robert Johnson offers a new model to understand the stages of personal growth to achieve maturity and wholeness. Using three quintessential figures from classical literature-Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust-he shows us three levels development that are to be completed to experience the self-realized state of completion and harmony.

We are all Don Quixote, Hamlet, and Faust at various stages of our lives. They represent levels of consciousness that live inside us, vying for dominance, one winning one moment, another the next. Don Quixote is the innocent child in us all, unaware of life's pain. Shakespeare's Hamlet represents conscious imperfection, a man divided between the opposing forces within himself and full of despair in the face of the tragic nature of life. This is the state of the modern Western person-aware of one's shortcoming, anxious over what to do, neurotic and incomplete. As a result, modern Western culture has historically dismantled the more natural societies it has encountered, leaving entire populations stranded in the purgatory of this second level of consciousness.

The third state, conscious perfection-the state of the fully integrated person-is represented by Goethe's Faust. His is an awareness that has been gained by struggling with and working through the second level of consciousness-a journey that is both painful and dangerous and of particular pertinence to our contemporary culture. It is Faust who, through his own inner work, restores to wholeness the life he had torn apart to achieve the ecstatic, visionary, enlightened consciousness of which we are all capable.

Roy C

at 12:37 on September 25th, 2009

Great post, QH.

Obama smokes. I think, and I know that Queenshart thinks, that this addiction is a very strong sign of holding in major feelings of crying, anger, something where the lungs would be involved.

Beck was a drinker. Now he drinks in knowledge.

If you want to criticize Beck, then do what Beck does: prepare yourself with an army of facts and then present it all well.

Certainly finding out that Goldman Sachs people are in charge of the regulatory agencies that watch Goldman Sachs is not whackjob stuff. It is right on the mark.

Beck has his contradictions. I don't think he really cares if you smoke marijuana or not, but now he says he does, since coming to Fox. Before, in his more Ron Paul libertarian days, he was not against it.

In any case, play the game of representing yourself as Beck does- with preparation. Cannot be substituted for.

QueensHart

at 13:18 on September 25th, 2009

Thanks Roy, Yes smoking or sugar. Smoking suppresses rage.. Sugar too.. Judy Hollis said stay out of the treatment house often when women go off their sugars. They become raging bulls. Just think of all these women running around hungry ...if they are? Don't argue with them.

The belly is where some core feelings get activated that are anaesthetized with the good gooey food.

Learn about the energy centers. They are real.