The Idea of Pie
I have to confess that I’ve never actually watched Glenn Beck. I’ve seen snippets, primarily on the Daily Show and the Colbert Report, which can be relied upon to make Beck look ridiculous. It’s not hard to make Beck look ridiculous. The snippets are taken out of context, certainly, but they are long enough to give Beck time to make a fool of himself in his own right.
I can’t understand the attraction–not of what he says–I’m talking about the attraction of Beck as a person. He (sorry, Glenn) looks pudgy, spineless, patronizing, fake. Shouldn’t a demagogue have charisma?
What about the attraction of what he says?
I started to write a long catty post about what Beck and the Tea Partiers were actually “reclaiming” today at the LIncoln Memorial. (This is written before the speeches have taken place.) It boiled down to dominance for white, or sort of white, people, who may not be exactly Christian but are not non-Christian.
But that’s not really fair. While some of Beck’s supporters may be bigoted, there are a lot who simply feel cheated. They feel as if they have played “by the rules” and deserve a certain pre-agreed reward (job, house, pension).
And now the rules have changed, have even disappeared; the expected reward certainly has.
In their anger, they look for scapegoats: somebody must be getting the pieces of pie that have been snatched from their mouths. It’s hard to understand that maybe the pie has gotten smaller, or was never actually slated for them, or that the rules have, in fact, been rigged for some time.
The Tea Party types do not like to blame the rich for the rigging of the rules. The stated view is that the rich are “pie-creators.” In saying this, they talk of small businesses; they don’t seem to realize how rich some rich are, how much of the pie they reserve for themselves, or how much pie they send overseas (reserving even more for themselves).
No, the Tea Party sees government as (a) the salivating wolf who (b) messes up all the recipes. (To some degree this may be borne out by negative experience with state and local government, which can have itchy fingers in lots of pies.)
And then, there’s Obama. The Tea Partiers suspect that Obama doesn’t even like pie. Also, it’s hard for Tea Party types to side with others whom the rules have habitually cheated – even when hurting, they do not want to put themselves in the same category as people of color, people who are different–they instinctively feel these people have not followed the rules, or at least not the right rules. (They may also, secretly, believe that their own lives were better when these people didn’t even expect pie.)
Obama, a person of color who is clearly sympathetic to the poor generally, and supports an over-arching fairness is seen as the worst kind of pie-snatcher–someone who doesn’t appreciate pie doling it out way too freely.
While in the meantime, pudgy Glenn Beck, the little Jack Horner, seems not to care if he despoils the national pie, as long as he’s personally banking plums. Ka-ching$ Kaching$
ManicDDaily 
More On Mosques – Reverberations of Obama’s Remarks – Freedom Tower
August 16, 2010Freedom Tower - What Will It Stand For?
An article today by Victoria McGrane and Siobhan Gorman in the Wall Street Journal today discusses the reverberations of Obama’s remarks supporting the rights of Muslims to build mosques in the U.S., including in downtown Manhattan.
One conservative blogger, Pamela Geller, said that the President “has, in effect, sided with the Islamic jihadists.”
I understand that many are upset at the idea of a mosque near Ground Zero. For some, it feels almost immoral – like a murderer inheriting under their victim’s Will. That discomfort may stem in part from President Bush’s original and unfortunate characterization of the events of 9/11 as the opening salvos in a war involving foreign statelike entities rather than as a crime by heinous criminals with no independent statehood. That backdrop has become such a part of the overly simplistic body politic that for some Americans, anything that seems to favor (or even to not disfavor) Muslims is deemed to give aid and comfort to a broad and amorphous enemy.
Putting that aside (which, frankly, is almost impossible for many), the current attacks on President Obama just don’t make sense:
5. Some object to U.S. mosques, when what they truly oppose are Muslims in the U.S. But their ire is misspent – freedom of worship for Muslims already here is simply a different issue than immigration policy.
Categories: New York City, news, Uncategorized
Tags: 9/11 Mosque, drawing of Freedom Tower, Gary Berntsen, Gary Sterntsen, manicddaily, Manicddaily pencil drawing, mosques in U.S. Mosque near Ground Zero, Pamela Geller on mosque, President Obama on Mosques, Wall Street Journal re Obama's comments on Mosque
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