Just watched Azizi's link to the Katie Couric interview of Glenn Beck. Fascinating!

Bear in mind that I've never heard Glenn Beck talk about anything before. This was my first viewing of the man. I see hardly a trace of the wacko nutjob that the mainstream media wish him to be known as. Most of what he says makes good sense, and he says it in a moderate and reasonable fashion. (He is definitely very naive about the USA's health care system, since he believes it's the best one out there...! It sure is not. However, such naivete is, I expect, quite common among Americans....so the fact that Glenn Beck believes it is not all that surprising.)

He correctly identifies the number one problem affecting the country: massive corruption at the highest power levels in the society, corruption which has been cooperated with by BOTH the Republican and the Democratic parties as soon as they get into office...although they get elected every time by promising to "sweep out the corruption in Washington". Ha. Ha. He correctly points out that the public gets betrayed by the Republicans whenever the Republicans are elected and by the Democrats whenever the Democrats are elected, because the politicians are listening to lobbyists of various powerful and wealthy groups in society rather than to the ordinary public.

Most of what he says is reasonable, correct, and quite understandable, although he does have a couple of ideas I would not agree with...such as his view that the USA has the best health system in the world....HUH????????????? Well, gosh...maybe Glenn should live in Canada or the UK or France for a bit and draw some comparisons. He might change his mind on that one. ;-) I also don't agree with him about abortion, although I fully understand his own views on it.

Katie Couric makes a bunch of attempts to get Glenn Beck to say something bizarre, outrageous, and politically incorrect that can be quoted again and again to prove what a terrible nutjob he is. He refuses to fall into these quite obvious set-up traps as she presents them in the usual dramatic sucker-question-requiring-brief- and-misleading-soundbite-that-will-come-back-to-haunt-you answer form.

Nope. Life in the real world just ain't that simple, and Glenn Beck knows it, so he refuses to provide the dumb soundbite. Katie surely knows it too, but she's playing the usual political entrapment game that every interviewer plays, so she doesn't care. Glenn refuses to be trapped. He delivers lengthy, carefully considered answers that looks at things through nuance and from different angles...rather than one stupid ill-considered soundbite.

Katie tries hard to pin something nasty on Glenn by zeroing in on the "White culture" thing. What is "White culture", she asks?

Well....DUH! We ALL know the answer to that one...and it's an insult to anyone's intelligence if someone else pretends they don't know the answer to that one. It's so bloody obvious what "White culture" means in North America that it's not even worth talking about, really. But, hell, I'll discuss it briefly...

"White culture" is what I grew up in. I grew up in a small-town rural Canadian milieu where everyone around me was White, all the heroes in all the comics and books I read were White, all the authors of those books were White, all my teachers were White, all the big actors and actresses in the movies I saw were White (except for the very occasional appearance of Sydney Poitier), all my neighbours and schoolmates were White, the kids in the "Dick and Jane" books were White, the people in the TV shows my friends all watched were White, and that's the way it was. It was Davy Crockett, Tarzan, the Three Stooges, the Marx Brothers, and Jungle Jim. Everyone who mattered in that culture was White. Things have changed much since then and the world is way different now than it was then, but we still all know damn well what "White culture" is and we know what "Black culture" is and we know what "Native American" culture is...and each one of those long-established cultural archetypes summons up an instant mental picture that touches on almost every aspect of life...and it's peopled by the particular people who fit that mental picture when it forms in your mind.

And you know darned well what it is.

Katie Couric pretends she doesn't know what "White culture" means in order to portray Glenn Beck as a racist. That has got to be just posturing on her part, because I know she isn't stupid. She's doing her job, that's all, and her job in this case is to get Glenn Beck to fit the bad guy stereotype he's supposed to fit...because he's challenging the ruling $ySStem. He's pointing out that the Emperor, who is served by the ReDemocraplublicant Duopoly, has no clothes. And I'm not talking about Barack Obama when I say that. Obama's not the Emperor, he's just temporary. It's the ruling $ySStem I'm talking about that is the Emperor, and it wants you to think in terms of a duality: Republican vs Democrat, Left vs Right, conservative vs liberal, Black vs White, Male vs Female. As long as you fixate on a duality, label one side as good and the other as evil, then the ruling $ySStem has you disempowered and it continues to divide, conquer, and rule you by setting you at each other's throats.

I'm very surprised by the whole thing frankly. This was not the madman Glenn Beck I expected to see at all. Look, folks, if we're going to look for stereotypical Right Wing nutjob monsters to hate out there and go berserk about in order to bolster our own sense of moral righteousness and have someone dreadful to cluck over and say "Oh! How awful!", then we're going to have to do way better than this. Where are Jackie and Dunlap (Red State Update) when you need them???

I post this fully expecting to be quite misunderstood and met with howls of outrage. ;-) Fine, fine. Go to it. And keep smiling, because it raises your frequency and is good for your health too.