Is Glenn Beck the Orson Welles of Our Time?

By Alexander Zaitchik, AlterNet. Posted April 27, 2009.

Beck likes to brag about this new contract and to talk about money in general. Six sentences into his memoir, The Real America, and he is already mentioning that Stern and Limbaugh still make more money than he does. In a stage monologue about his conversion to Mormonism, recorded shortly after he negotiated his latest contract with Premiere, he tells a middle-class audience that, by the way, he just made $50 million. 

Of course, strong and even ruthless capitalist instincts are no mark of shame on the right. Beck views the pursuit of wealth as the duty of every "Real American" -- and Christian. His conservative fans no doubt agree with him. But Beck is not a lifelong conservative who happened to make a lot of money in the capitalist system he loves. For most of his adult life, he was, in his own words, "a bitter, hopeless [drug-using] alcoholic who hated people." He long ago started putting money before country, and there's every reason to believe that he still does. His metamorphosis into a right-wing values-crusader matches up neatly with the birth of his Wellesian/Limbaughsian dreams of national talk radio fame and entertainment empire.

He understood 15 years ago that the way to own a sprawling mansion estate in New Canaan, Conn., is to rant about the sprawling Malibu estates of Hollywood liberals. His on-air persona is a product of his own reinvention, even if he calls it "redemption."

Beck's obsession with getting as rich as possible also runs through his Mormon Christianity, which he adopted in 1999, which incidentally is the same year he got married and launched his talk radio career. In The Real America, Beck briefly describes his semester studying religion at Yale at age 30. (His enrollment was made possible by a letter of recommendation written by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn.). Here's Beck, theologian:

It's interesting to me that Jesus said, 'Inside my Father's house there are many mansions … ' That means that wealth and riches are not bad things … God believes you deserve a mansion. Do You? … There is a universe full of money. There are riches beyond your wildest dreams. God doesn't give you a taste of ice cream unless he's willing for you to have the entire cone.

Beck's pursuit of "the entire cone" goes far toward explaining his apocalyptic politics. Beck is the nation's best-known and most mainstream peddler of End Times fears and apocalyptic scenarios (excluding climate change). This obsession is epitomized in a segment on his show called "The War Room," in which panelists discuss various nightmare scenarios and how to prepare for them.

For Beck, the End Times shtick is literally pure gold. The precious metals dealer Goldline, whose fortunes rise on anxieties of social and economic collapse, has hired Beck as a spokesman and is one of his biggest sponsors. His Web site is also sponsored by Newsmax (another right-wing media fearmonger whose ad offers a "free emergency radio … [for when] terrorists attack.") and a company called Survival Seeds, which warns of imminent food riots. It fits that Beck's corporate logo resembles nothing so much as a radiation symbol.

Nothing is sacred in Beck's business strategy to grow his company by stoking right-wing anger, anxiety and paranoia. This is true even of those things he wants us to believe he holds most sacred. The poster for his upcoming comedy tour is the same Revolutionary War-era severed-snake symbol that Beck chose as the logo for his dead-serious "9/12 Project." He just swapped the words "Laugh or Die" for the original "Join, Or Die," then stamped it with his corporate logo.

This fluid, self-serving and multiplatform use of a hallowed symbol -- from teary-eyed professions of selfless "9/12" patriotism to the promotion of his crappy observational comedy -- is classic Beck.

So make fun of him all you want, but Glenn Beck is not crazy. He is a very wealthy and possibly visionary fraud, the Bernie Madoff of conservative anger and fear in the Obama era. He is laughing and crying right along with you, in the plush backseat of his stretch limo, all the way to the bank.

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Alexander Zaitchik is a Brooklyn-based freelance journalist and AlterNet contributing writer.

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