How Glenn Beck’s Perversion of Dr. King’s Vision is Proof Positive of Orwell’s Wisdom

I am lucky to have smart friends. My circle includes historians, philosophers, economists, psychologists and biologists–just enough high headed folk to make a fun salon. After watching Glenn Beck’s abuse of history on Saturday I had to ring up a historian. Specifically, one who can connect the dots from Beck, to Hitler’s Germany, and America at the end of Empire in ways that I could not. For your enjoyment, my colleague Werner Herzog’s Bear (of the great blog I Used to be Disgusted, Now I Try to be Amused) shares his thoughts on Glenn Beck’s most recent abuse of history.

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As I am sure many of you know, Glenn “Lonesome Rhodes” Beck is holding his big rally today at the National Mall on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous address to the March on Washington. In the past few weeks Mr. Beck has been defending this apparent attempt to associate himself with Dr. King by claiming rather histrionically that “black people don’t own” King, and that he somehow stands for the true meaning of the civil rights movement.

This is the latest, and perhaps most insulting of all Beck’s many flagrant abuses of the historical record. I’ve come to the conclusion that what he is doing is just nakedly Orwellian: destroy the truth in order to advance his ideological agenda. Any consideration of the actual historical record is totally absent from his musings on the past. In fact, it is irrelevent, since he seeks only to attack his enemies and try to make his extremist ideas respectable. In his renderings of history up is down and down is up: he deems the Nazis Leftists (despite the fact that socialists and communists were Hitler’s first victims), FDR a fascist (despite leading America to victory against Hitler), and his show features a dope dressed like Thomas Paine attacking the separation of church and state (even though Paine himself was a notorious unbeliever.)

Without getting into too much detail, it’s easy to see how the associations Beck is making with the civil rights movement are presposterous. In the first place, King and the SCLC grew out of a Christian tradition of social justice, something Beck himself has continually attacked on his show. His version of religion and that of King and other ministers who fought for equality could not be any different. The participants in the freedom struggle faced lynchings, cross burnings, brutal beatings, attacks by police dogs, water hoses, rape, the loss of their jobs, and had every kind of insult shouted at them. Beck’s supporters, on the other hand, are the ones hurling the insults and spittle today (just recall the mob tactics in evidence when the health care bill was passed.) There were attempts on MLK’s life before his untimely death, and his protests landed him in prison. Instead of standing with the support of a massive multimedia empire at his back, King was at the mercy of the petty whims of the bigoted Southern authorities.

King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is also notable for his embrace of non-violence and reconciliation even after enduring time in jail that same year in Birmingham. He truly believed in the Gandhian ideas of non-violent change, and in his famous speech he hopes that racial barriers can finally be broken down so that blacks and whites can live as “brothers and sisters.” Considering the violence and discrimination that King and other African-Americans were facing on a day-to-day basis, his pleas for coexistence after being subjected to such hatred were not mere empty words. If I were treated that way, I don’t think I would be able to resist the desire for revenge.

Beck, on the other hand, continually pontificates on doomsday scenarios, spreading fear and implying a violent future. His chalkboard antics purport to show shadowy forces at work undermining the nation, and implies that they must be rooted out and destroyed. His followers have been connected to acts of violence, most recently a man who decided to take down the TIDES foundation. Instead of calling for racial reconciliation he has very dishonorably whipped up white racial resentment.

This here is where things get truly Orwellian. Beck, the man who claims the mantle of a leader committed to peace and coexistence, made the flagrant statements that Barack Obama “hates white people” and “hates white culture.” I think these words say much more about Beck’s bigotry than they say anything about Obama. His preposterous claim is nothing more than an attempt to exploit the resentment and racism of whites against blacks and to craft a victimhood narrative for whites that would be laughable if its consequences weren’t so serious.

So how on earth do conservatives try to connect their movement to that for racial equality? Beck, like many other conservatives have done for years, enjoys taking one famous line from the speech out of context: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” These words are continually used to argue against affirmative action, as if that were something King was opposed to (he wasn’t.) By harping on that one line, over and over and over, which they think means that it’s wrong even to recognize race, they seek to eliminate every other thing that King himself ever said or did.

Unfortunately, Dr. King is the victim of his own great reputation. Because he has been elevated to the status of national hero (and rightfully so), the radical content of much of his message has been drained away. This in turn enables the distortions. Here’s how it works in the minds of a lot of people: “Glenn Beck is a patriot, Martin Luther King was a great American, ergo he was a patriot, therefore we’re on the same side.” The facts that King was a public opponent of the war in Vietnam, continually lectured America on the failure to live up to its high ideals, and that he was arguing very loudly for economic justice at they end of his life have been completely left out.

Of course, the reason that ideologues like Beck, who are the polar opposite of King, like to associate themselves with him is that their historical antecendents really aren’t all that appealing. Most people don’t really care for the John Birch Society, Joe McCarthy, Father Coughlin, and Strom Thurmond. Conservatives have built up a big cult behind Reagan, but the vast majority of non-consertatives don’t really hold him in high regard. As a professed libertarian, I imagine Beck would have been on the side of libertarian godfather Barry Goldwater in 1964, who voted against the Civil Rights Act. After all, it violated sacred things like private property and states rights, didn’t it? Shit, Tea Party favorite Rand Paul made these arguments this year! Back then another conservative godfather, William F. Buckley, essentially argued that since whites were the superior race, there was nothing wrong with the Jim Crow South.

Ann Coulter and other conservatives have tried to rehabilitate Joe McCarthy and some of their other intellectual forebears, but Beck has gone in another direction. He has taken the much savvier, and even more morally repugnant route of claiming progressive heroes like Martin Luther King as his own, never mind the fact that they are about as different from each other as two people can get. One stood for social justice, peace, coexistence, freedom, and equality, the other stands for avarice, ignorance, opportunism, divisiveness, and bigotry. To my mind one represents that which is right with America, and the other what is so horribly wrong and getting worse in our troubled political times. You can guess who is who.