Where Did Glenn Beck Get His Act?

-by NOAH

When I wrote my recent sarcastic post on how the Crackpot Party was viewing President Obama’s then upcoming inspirational talk to school children, I included a paragraph that was “inspired” by Soupy Sales. As I looked for the clip of Soupy that appeared at the end, I also found one called Soupy Sales: “Words Of Wisdom.” It instantly reminded me of old Bugeyes Beck’s nightly “Reasonable Questions.” It wasn’t just the eyes, the facial expressions, the hand gestures, talking to people off camera, and the overall body language! There was also, of course, the blackboard! There are also the seemingly random tangents that both go off on to consider.
 
In the first clip (linked below) you will see Soupy using his blackboard to ask his version of a reasonable question. This might even work better (and make the Beck clip easier to watch) if you just turn off the volume on your computer and just watch the eyes, hands, etc. Beck’s recent pathetically inaccurate and completely unhinged insanity about the murals at Rockefeller Center, where he also works-- he failed to mention that-- also provides fodder for comparison to Soupy (absolutely no offense to Soupy intended or guilt by association implied!). Remember, though, Soupy’s fans were children. Their intellectual faculties were in the developmental stage. What the hell excuse do Beck’s fans have? Will Beck end up introducing cartoons on a Saturday morning kiddie show? Is that where he belongs, or, is he just too dangerous? And, what if he just starts crying in front of the children? Or, screaming “Get off my phone” at some 7 year old?

Is Glenn Beck channeling Soupy Sales? Check out the second clip and decide for yourself. But my opinion is that the original is still the greatest. Soupy just makes more sense. Soupy is more likeable, too! I doubt that any relative was ever embarrassed by Soupy. His parents probably never even thought about stuffing him in an attic closet, away from family and public alike.




UPDATE From Howie's Breakfast Reading

I sat down with my shale this morning and re-read a couple of pages from Charles Pierce's wonderful book, Idiot America after Noah had sent me the above post. Let me share Pierce's thoughts on another source of inspiration for the demented Beck:

Rush Limbaugh brilliantly created the template. He constructed an entire universe with himself at its center, and he sold memberships to it, every day for four hours, on the radio. With his listeners self-identified as "dittoheads," Limbaugh created a place with its own politics (where Hillary Clinton may have had Vince Foster snuffed), its own science (where tobacco has no connection to lung cancer), and its own physical reality (Rush is a roué who makes Errol Flynn look like a Benedictine monk). He created a space for vicarious reality at its highest level, and lesser hosts [Beck, Savage and Hannity certainly come to mind first and foremost] have been scrambling to keep up ever since. And he sold it like the radio pitchman he once was.

(In fact the track record indicates that when the world he's created comes into contact with reality, Rush fares rather less well. His TV show was a debacle. A guest shot hosting Pat Sajak's late-night show ended with him nearly booed into the Pacific and seating like a whore at high mass. And he had a brief stink as an NFL analyst on ESP that foundered when he divined a liberal conspiracy to promote the career of Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Donovan McNabb. You see, McNabb was black and all the baby John Reeds in press boxes throughout the NFL were pushing him out of some devotion to affirmative action. This wasn't any more loopy than most of what Limbaugh said about the Clintons, but football analysts are a harder sell than most political editors, and Limbaugh was laughed off the air. He has since largely eschewed events not of his own devising.)

Pierce's careful deconstruction of Limbaugh gets even better-- I recommend reading the book-- but our point today wasn't to talk about drug and sex addicts on radio, but about how Glenn Beck wound up chanting his racist epithets on national TV and where he found the pieces to put together a truly destructive and anti-American values program that Fox has been able to sell to a paranoid, self-righteous audience of low information television viewers-- though fewer and fewer advertisers. (Yesterday Aegon, Ashley Furniture, Humana, Luxottica Retail, United States Postal Service and Wyeth Consumer Healthcare all joined the advertiser boycott of Beck's racist Fox show and brought the number of national advertisers refusing to allow their ads to run on his program to 62.)


UPDATE: And Who Still Underwrites Glenn Beck's Hate-Filled Act?

This is what's left:

* Lear Capital

* Legacy Publishing Company (The Total Transformation Program)

* The Foundation for a Better Life

* News Corp. (the Wall Street Journal)

* Carbonite

* LifeLock

* Mortgage relief hotline 1-888-336-5967

* Ashley Furniture

* Rosland Capital

* National Review

* Conservatives for Patient's Rights

* Merit Financial

* Superior Gold Group

* Loan modification helpline 800-917-8549

* IRSTaxAgreements.com

* Clarity Media Group (The Weekly Standard)

* Roche Diagnostics (Accu-Chek Aviva)

* Zero Technologies (ZeroWater)