Washington Post Book Reviews
For You
Monday October 25, 2010
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TEARS OF A CLOWN: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America
Dana Milbank
Doubleday
ISBN 978-0-385-53388-1
261 pages
$24.95
Reviewed by David Oshinsky
All right, America, a show of hands. How many of you are tired of hearing your country torn down by a "big-nosed, cross-eyed freak" like Barbra Streisand? OK. And how many share my fantasies about poisoning Nancy Pelosi, shooting Michael Moore and bashing in Charlie Rangel's head with a shovel? Thank you. I'm humbled! And how many think your government may be planning concentration camps to handle political dissidents and death panels to dispose of grandma when she gets the sniffles? Right on! And how many have truly prepared for Armageddon by snapping up the gold coins and non-hybrid seeds that I'm pitching on my programs? You know why you need to buy these things? Because Barack Obama and his communist-Nazi-progressive gorillas don't want you to have them, that's why!
Such is the loony world of Glenn Beck, as described by Dana Milbank, a syndicated columnist for The Washington Post, in his droll, take-no-prisoners account of the nation's most audacious conspiracy spinner. The book's title, "Tears of a Clown," is also its hypothesis. Beck cries a lot in public. He can't help himself. He's just an emotional guy who loves his country too darned much to keep things bottled up inside. He cries about his family, and your family, and the daily perils we all face. He cries one day because America's on the brink of becoming Nazi Germany, the next day because it's morphing into Stalinist Russia, the following day because it's behaving suspiciously like (we've hit rock bottom here) France. "On this sea of tears," says Milbank, "Beck's boat has floated to the top of cable news and talk radio, and put him at the head of a mass anti-government conservative movement."
But is he a clown? About this, Milbank is a bit less certain. Wrestling briefly with the idea that Beck may be a true believer -- a kook honestly devoted to his cause -- Milbank dismisses him as a cynical entertainer whose only goal is self-promotion. There is ample evidence to support this view, much of it supplied by the subject himself. Asked by his Fox News colleague Bill O'Reilly why he does so much "whacked out stuff," Beck, who attracts about 2 million television viewers to his late-afternoon program, replied: "(You) don't get those ratings at 5 p.m. by being Charlie Rose." Whether this makes him a clown is a matter of interpretation. If so, he's in a class by himself -- the Emmett Kelly, so to speak, of modern broadcasting.
Milbank is pitch-perfect in describing a typical Glenn Beck performance. He has watched and listened to more Beck programs than I believed possible for the human mind to absorb. Listening to a Beck rant about American history, Milbank reminds us, is reminiscent of Bluto Blutarsky's legendary pep talk in "Animal House." "Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?" Bluto bellows. "Hell, no!" Milbank also is superb in describing how Beck manipulates his listeners by dredging up the nuttiest whoppers from the blogosphere, presenting them as serious alternatives to conventional truths, and then taking a perfectly neutral pose, a la "I'm not suggesting anything. I'm asking questions." In Beck's "all is possible" world, viewers learn that Obama may (or may not) have a secret "enemies list" and that his health care bill may (or may not) extend coverage to house pets.
In looking for comparative historical figures, Milbank likens Beck to Father Charles Coughlin, the fiery "radio priest" whose populist (and increasingly anti-Semitic) harangues during the Great Depression reached into millions of American homes. It's a stretch, to say the least. Coughlin, born and raised in Canada, led a movement calling for the redistribution of wealth and a looser money supply based on silver currency. Beck's sympathies are almost exactly the reverse. A better comparison, I suspect, is with Sen. Joe McCarthy, the Wisconsin Red-hunter, who is one of Beck's heroes. Both men created a highly suspect back story to their early lives -- McCarthy as a bogus war hero, Beck with disputed tales of pain and redemption. Both men mastered the art of conspiracy, both learned that bad publicity is far better than no publicity, and both produced the perfect enemy for their times: the shadowy liberal elites that "run" the government, the corporations and the media.
Missing from Milbank's book is how, exactly, the groundwork was laid for a character like Beck. When and why did our culture become so coarse? And who else is responsible for this dumbed-down blood sport we see daily on TV? Glenn Beck didn't arrive in a vacuum, and he's hardly alone. Watching him masquerade as Tom Paine, a leading Revolutionary-era patriot, may make one queasy, but it's no worse, really, than watching Keith Olbermann, MSNBC's leading blowhard, masquerade as Edward R. Murrow. Sadly, where cable news is concerned, there are plenty of tears to go around.
David Oshinsky, a Pulitzer Prize-winning historian, teaches at the University of Texas and New York University.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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THE BLACK NILE: One Man's Amazing Journey Through Peace and War on the World's Longest River
Dan Morrison
Viking
ISBN 978 0 670 02198 7
307 pages
$26.95
Reviewed by Tahir Shah
It was during the mid-'80s that I first got Africa under my skin. I was studying African dictatorships in Kenya, spending every spare moment hitchhiking through some of Africa's most dysfunctional lands. The lure was a place starkly at odds with the Occidental world I knew, a realm whose rulebook had been ripped up long before. In the years since those first heady days of close calls with vigilantes and stoned-out soldiers, with gold smugglers and gun runners, I have returned time and again to the place I hold so dear.
What I find so tragic, but in some ways wonderful, is that Africa doesn't change. I was reminded of this while reading Dan Morrison's new book, "The Black Nile." It's packed with narrow scrapes, humor and with brazen feats of sheer adventure, all set against a brilliantly described backdrop. Reading it, I found myself slipping into the world of a good Rider Haggard novel because, after all, Africa is the continent par excellence of rip-roaring adventure.
Overladen with questionable and unnecessary gear (including "a Wal-Mart tent the size of a surface-to-air missile"), Morrison and his best friend, a California bartender named Schon, set out on an epic journey. Their aim was to travel from the supposed source of the Nile at Jinja on Lake Victoria to the dazzling waters of the Mediterranean, almost 4,000 miles to the north. From the outset, there's an implicit homage to Alan Moorehead's classic narratives of historical travel, "The White Nile" and "The Blue Nile," both published half-a-century ago. But unlike Moorehead, Morrison trains his eye on the history of the moment. Having waited weeks for a plank-boat to be built, he and Schon finally take to the water, stop-starting their way up the first few miles of the longest river on earth. The description of the resulting journey is interwoven with recent history and with gritty, no-nonsense observations and peppered with a cast of vivid characters.
Traveling northward through Uganda, Sudan and then Upper Egypt, Morrison skillfully shows us the Africa we rarely glimpse in our mass-media world. "The Black Nile" gives a snapshot of ordinary life in the hamlets and villages along the waterway, lives shaped by hardship. The true value of the book is the way it reveals fragments of close-up reality, the micro rather than the macro.
Morrison's experience as a journalist shines through, as does his use of humor, which frames subjects of utter horror. These include intertribal conflict, pestilence, and the dams and the deforestation that have destroyed swathes of East Africa's ancient habitat. In the southern Sudanese town of Juba, Schon cooked up his last plates of oily spaghetti and came clean about not wanting to go on, especially since "on" was into the "malarial tinderbox" of the Sudd swampland, where "the war wasn't quite finished in Upper Nile state -- antagonistic militias stewed in camps while their leaders grappled for political power." After his childhood buddy leaves, Morrison continues alone, and, now that the author can turn his full attention to the landscape around him, the travelogue steps up a notch. What's impressive is how well he describes without judging. The Africa he depicts is a place where tribal rivalry complements religious and political friction; where illness, disease and utter poverty shape the lives of the majority, who lack the safety nets that so often catch Westerners when we fall.
As the journey progresses, it becomes much less of a whimsical jaunt and much more of a hard-edged report. This is Morrison at his best, lean and hungry in wild wastelands of Africa's Sahel. His description of the Sudanese capital is memorable : "A dense static of orange grit came screaming from the desert; it filled the sky and trapped Khartoum's eight million souls in a suffocating and radiant silica heat."
"The Black Nile," which will resonate with old Africa hands the world over, deserves praise for the way it considers the ordinary on a continent so often forgotten by the world at large. May it inspire the next generation of adventurers, luring them to understand that the journey is out there ready and awaiting them.
Tahir Shah's latest travel book is "In Arabian Nights: A Caravan of Moroccan Dreams."
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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