DHS Editorial: Glenn Beck Is Right About Almost Everything

“Please sir, you’re destroying my establishment.” – Low Life Commoner
“We just created the greatest democracy on Earth, you low life commoner!” – Founding Father

The city of Washington was built on a stagnant swamp some two hundred years ago, and very little has changed.  It stank then, and it stinks now.  But yesterday, Glenn Lee Beck lead a rally to purify the air in that fetid cesspool.

We have lots of names for Glenn Beck: bum, deadbeat, loser, scum of the Earth.  We’d like to sweep him into the gutter, or to some other out of the way place.  Oh, we have our reasons.  He’s depressing, he wears ragged clothes, he’s “crazy”.  He smells bad.

This is where his fans, if not the great man himself, might object.  But wait, we’re going somewhere with this.  Because Glenn Beck is the truest of American heroes.  Hardly one man in a hundred is able to reach the plateau of patriotism that Beck has, that uniquely national place where his interests perfectly and seamlessly meld with those of America.  Pardon our French, but l’etat c’est Glenn.

Too many of us are easily distracted by the swirl and bustle of the media complex; caught up in passing fads and ginned up journalistic firestorms, we lose sight of the bigger picture.  Mr. Beck does not.  Out of the cyclonic, internecine fracas of modern discourse, he has discerned two immutable truths.  First, that the only genuine way to show faith in America is the purchase of capitalist gold.  Second, and the reason for this editorial, that The Simpsons is “the funniest show ever written on television”.

We can laud him for the first truth quickly.  It is self evident that the hoarding of a precious metal whose value increases with human misery is a patriotic duty.  Wags and pundits may cluck their tongues, stroke their beads and talk about the supposed hypocrisy of pitching apocalyptic investments while claiming to be on a mission to save the United States.  But Mr. Beck is playing a deeper game.  By calmly and civilly expounding on the potential horrors that await us, Beck is fighting against disaster while still preparing for it.  His self-effacing and admirably altruistic mission to bring the true teachings of Martin Luther King, Jr. to the prosperous, melanin-free portion of the citizenry that had initially rejected them is to be wholly commended.  An MLK who is anti-inequality and anti-war is the exact kind of vile “progressive” revisionism that Mr. Beck so routinely skewers with imperceptible logic and impenetrable reason.

It is on the second point where Mr. Beck makes a rare and uncharacteristic stumble.  It goes almost without saying that the rank debasing of fatherly authority on television was instigated by the cultural revolutionaries of the 1960s.  In turn, that led directly to the buffoonish, anti-American caricature of the television patriarch that is Homer Simpson.  Mr. Beck has the perspicacity to realize that this was not the result of nebulous and uncontrollable cultural trends, but rather an amply documented and maliciously directed decades long plot to smear the good names of Jim Anderson, Steve Douglas, and Ward Cleaver*.

Despite his usually keen ability to separate hard-nosed conservative wheat from effete liberal chaff, however, has Mr. Beck truly embraced the uncaring and irresponsible dervish that passes for Homer in Zombie Simpsons as the real item?  The snobbish superman on display in Zombie Simpsons is a perfect socialist fantasy.  He changes jobs regardless of skill or qualification, never displaying any thought for the economic prospects of his employers.  He has no regard for his own health or well-being, relying on America’s overly generous system of emergency rooms to cure him of all ills.  His deliberate and self-interested behavior at almost every opportunity is a socialist fantasy writ large: no responsibility, no consequences, and certainly no failure.  In Zombie Simpsons, every day is Everybody Gets a Trophy Day.

How a man as clear eyed as Mr. Beck can fail to recognize this ultimate expression of an obvious forty-year-old hippie plot is beyond the authors of this editorial.  Homer Simpson once stood for the deserved and perpetual failure of lazy, non-Randian slobs; he took comfort in un-luxurious housing, unionized job security, and the immaterial love of his family.  Failure to condemn those peasant-like pleasures is tantamount to condoning them.  For shame, Mr. Beck.

*Yeah, they were gay.