Glenn Beck's March on Washington

I know I should ignore him. It's always wise to follow Eugene Robinson's advice, he's smart and a Pulitzer Prize winner. But I can't resist commenting on Glenn Beck's Restoring Honor rally this weekend on the National Mall. I promised, several years ago, to stop using profanity on my blog. To live up to this promise I have resisted saying anything more about Michele Bachmann. But I am profoundly tempted to curse and stomp my feet and rage over this provocation by Beck. And it can't be anything more than that. This isn't historic. Beck is an entertainer. Like Lady Gaga. Would a performance on the National Mall by Lady Gaga be historic? No. What if 250,000 people showed up? It would be a remarkable indication of her popularity. But it wouldn't be historic.

Yet Beck is portraying his event on the Mall as a history-making event. The comparison I made with Lady Gaga isn't as strange as it sounds. Beck, like Lady Gaga, is in the middle of a national tour. He'll appear in Chicago - well, really, Hoffman Estates - at the Sears Arena in a couple weeks. Is that appearance historic too? For those who want a little more bang for your entertainment dollar, Beck is teaming up with Bill O'Reilly for a few dates too, including a stop at the Mohegan Sun Casino in Uncasville, Connecticut. Will that be historic? Dude, a decade ago I saw Dylan touring with the Dead. That was freakin' historic!* Beck and O'Reilly at a casino? Not even close.


Okay. So Beck's appearance at the Mall is a show. Why am I letting this bother me? I can't help it, this is the type of hypocritical sham that always makes me fume. Beck said:

This is about the things Martin Luther King stood for. The content of character, not the color of skin.

I doubt, really, that Beck has any grasp of what "Martin Luther King stood for." What Beck aims to do here, in the closing days of what one friend has called the Republicans' summer of racial resentment, is to question whether race has any relevance at all in our national conversation. The right wants to argue that it doesn't, that America is a place where race shouldn't matter. A portion of their audience - Tea Partiers for example - believe that anyone standing up to talk about race is playing on White guilt to get stuff. Seventy-three percent of Tea Party sympathizers think blacks could be just as well off as whites if they just worked harder. This is the dog whistle Beck is blowing when he positions character alongside race. If more African Americans were hard-working Americans, they wouldn't need to worry about their race. I don't know if Beck believes that, but his supporters do.

As I pointed out in any earlier essay, Sarah Palin, who will also speak at the rally this weekend, has complained that those who emphasize our differences - how African Americans are still discriminated against, how gays and lesbians are denied equal protection of the law - are damaging the nation. She, and Beck and the Tea Party crowds they will speak to, believe that the Constitution should be honored, and loading it down with amendments, like that awful 14th Amendment, or hanging Supreme Court decisions on it that, in their opinion, can't possibly reflect the framers' original intentions, weakens us. For Beck and his fans, the nation's character is embodied in our Constitution. It reflects the Christian, Anglo-Saxon principles of its authors. And when we compromise on those principles, to appease blacks and gays and other whiners, we undermine our foundations.

But for Martin Luther King, race mattered. And so did social justice. And it doesn't matter how Beck wants to twist King's speech, or reimagine its meaning, it is inescapable that King wanted us to address inequalities that had plagued us since the nation's founding. When King spoke in 1963, he wanted to draw our attention to the fact that African Americans lived "on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of prosperity," and that they were still languishing "in the corners of American society." Will Beck or any of the speakers at this weekend's conservative Lollapalooza talk about the persistence of poverty in an age of deepening economic inequality? Will he talk about the marginalization of people of color, including immigrants, in a summer devoted to making Latinos and Muslims feel like outsiders, whatever their citizenship? I very much doubt it. If not, his claim that he is in some way standing up for the things King cared about is a lie. King was about transforming America. Beck and everyone he is dragging along on his conservative revue want to reproduce America, in all of its pre-civil rights inequality.


* Admission of truth: I didn't see that tour. I was too into indie rock at the time to spend my entertain dollar on a couple of dinosaur acts pairing up for an obvious cash-grab. But now, heck yeah, I'd line up to see Dylan play with anyone.