It's been a busy week for Glenn Beck watchers. On Monday, the Anti-Defamation League released a report warning of the paranoia and stridency that increasingly define the conservative grass roots. It echoed an April report issued by the Department of Homeland Security, but unlike the DHS report, the ADL named names, and fingered Beck as the figure most responsible for the unhinging of the right.
"Beck has acted as a 'fearmonger-in-chief,' raising anxiety about and distrust towards the government [which] if it continues to grow in intensity and scope, may result in an increase in anti-government extremists and the potential for a rise of violent anti-government acts," the ADL wrote.
Amazingly, just after the ADL report's release, Sarah Palin responded to a question about a possible Palin-Beck ticket by refusing to rule out Beck as a running mate. She praised him effusively, describing him as "bold, clever, and very, very, very effective."
Effective at what, exactly?
Earlier this week, Sam Stein of the Huffington Post detailed several instances in which Beck has welcomed onto his shows guests with ties to groups that traffic in white supremacy, neo-Confederate secession, and anti-Semitism. Stein's reporting was a good start, but it would take a chalkboard the size of Idaho to fully map out Beck's racially paranoid guest list.
But Beck insists his critics are imagining things, that he does not engage in racial fear-mongering, that a string of guests with ties to hate groups do not form a meaningful pattern, and that he's not a racist. It occurred to me the other day that if you really want to know whether Beck and his guests are blowing racial dog-whistles, it's best to ask a dog.
I decided to reach out to Don Black, the avowed white nationalist who runs the Web site Stormfront.org, the country's leading "Discussion board for pro-White activists and anyone else interested in White survival." But Black hung up on me. I next tried to get in touch with David Duke, the former gubernatorial candidate and current head of the European American Unity and Rights Organization. Duke, too, had little interest in talking to me, likely because of my past association with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the activities of white supremacist groups.
Unable to get through to the highest-profile spokesmen of the racist grass roots, I took a page from the other side and trawled their Web sites for insight. I scanned Davidduke.com and Stormfront.org to see what they had to say, if anything, about Beck. Admittedly, this method is not scientific, and certainly folks on the left don't like it when righties cherry-pick an extreme comment from Daily Kos or the Huffington Post and pretend the whole site can be summed up by such extremism.
On the other hand, Stormfront.org isn't a media organization but a self-described discussion board. And when it comes to Beck, the discussions are fairly positive. On both David Duke's Web site and Stormfront, Beck's July 28 claim that President Obama harbors a "deep-seated hatred of white people, or the white culture" was met with attention and appreciation.
Duke was heartened by the discussion it generated, and placed it in a larger context. "A lot of stuff is happening in the world of race relations and little of it points towards a post-racial society," Duke noted. "Beck is steadily losing advertisers, but his viewers seem to be sticking with him ... White desperation is manifesting itself in various forms."
Beck's charge that the president hates white people sparked a more expansive discussion at Stormfront.org. Some participants saw Beck as an important ally in the White Nationalist cause. Others were skeptical, viewing him as a clueless conservative version of Lenin's "useful idiot." But some of Stormfront's most active members generally agreed that, whether he was fully conscious or not, Beck was nudging his audience toward an embrace of racial consciousness.
"Glen [sic] Beck can be useful," said one frequent Stormfront contributor who posts under the name SS_marching. "When Glen beck said 'Obama Has A Deep-Seated Hatred For White People' he is able to reach a much wider audience than we can. They will [be] predisposed to the idea and the next time Obama pushes an anti-white policy they will see it as such."
Stormfront member PowerCommander agreed. Beck, he wrote:
"seems to have ignited a flame under the asses of some folks with similar ideas by pushing the right buttons. It appears as if the current regime [is] directly blaming GB and fox news for throwing a wrench in their machine. Is Beck's rambling getting America fired up and ready to fight? Has Beck told enough of the truth to start something bigger? Even an engine needs a starter to get fired off and go down the road."
Thor357, a Stormfront sustaining member who has posted on the site more than 3,500 times, had this to say:
"Glenn Beck and Alex Jones [a controversial conservative media figure who believes 9/11 was an inside job] are the front line in the war of Ideals we grapple with, they are far from perfect and are somewhat compromised. But every person in the last 2 years that I have introduced to the WN [White Nationalist] Philosophy have come largely from Alex Jones, Glen Beck and the Scriptures for America founder Pastor Pete Peters ... Baby steps are required for people like these, but the trio Beck, Jones, Peters are the baby food that feeds potential Nationalists… Glenn Beck is not far behind as his Mormon background indicates to me as most Mormons I have met are not friends of Jews like the Church was years ago. Most Mormons I know are arming themselves, with guns, bullets and food."
Later in the same discussion thread, Thor357 added:
"I have talked to 6 people in two days because Glenn Beck woke them up, it's amazing how angry they are. They are pissing fire over Obama, this is a good thing. Now I educate them. If out of 100 of the Glen Beckers I keep 20 then I have won 20 more to cover my back side. I never lost the 80 as they never were."
Carolina Patriot, whose member picture features a kitten aiming an assassin's rifle, was conflicted but admiring:
"Every now and again when an infomercial takes the place of hunting or fishing, I'll turn over to Glenn Beck if he's on and watch his show. Sometimes it is amusing, sometimes it is informed, and sometimes, I think he comes to SF [Stormfront] to steal show idea's"
UstashaNY offered up an analogy to substance abuse, with Beck as the soft-stuff hook:
"Beck, Dobbs etc. are like gateway drugs. If it wakes up one person to learn something about whats really going on and that person does the research, looks deeper and deeper into WHO and WHAT is behind all of this, then its a win for the movement. NOBODY in the msm is reporting the stuff Beck does, let him keep talking. It will wake people up, believe me… He is more of a help to us then you may think. Until we have a REAL voice in the msm, guys like him and Dobbs are a stepping stone right into our laps. Its only a matter of time..."
Even those who don't think Beck understands what he’s doing appreciate his instincts. According to WhiteManMarchesOn88:
"There is no doubt that Beck is not a WN [white nationalist], but I have to agree that he does raise a lot of really good questions that do promote White survival. I'm sure he would go a lot farther with a lot of his questions, but ZOG [Zionist Occupied Government] would more than likely kick him off television if he did."
ZOG or no ZOG, Beck is clearly doing something right from the point of view of the average white nationalist.
"By no means do I think [Beck] is aware of the racial issue, and for the moment that is ok," wrote Stormfront member QHelios. "He is stirring the pot, and I thank him for that."
Leave it to Glenn Beck to come up with what may well have been the stranges -- even most disturbing -- reaction yet to Republican Scott Brown's victory in the Massachusetts Senate special election on Tuesday.
On his radio show Wednesday, Beck was on one of his standard us-verus-them, patriots versus radical, revolutionary left rants when he took a sudden turn.
"The most dangerous time in any regime, especially a radicalized regime, is when it is in collapse," Beck said. (The election results were bad news for Obama, to be sure, but how being down to a mere 59 out of 100 seats in the Senate counts as "collapse," I'm not sure. But such is the wonderful world of Beck.) He continued:
Watch the über-left. Pray that Obama moves to the center. If he does, pray that the Secret Service care for that man, and that man is never left alone. He has invited 9/11 Truthers into the White House and into his administration. If they believe that he is just "another one of these guys!" he is in danger.
There's not really much you can say about that sort of logic, is there?
With a hat-tip to Media Matters, the audio is below.
Somewhere, deep in the human genome, there's a code for a disturbing little trait that all too many of us share. Maybe there's some vital evolutionary reason for it, but at this point, it just comes down to this: The vast majority of us, passing a car wreck, can't resist the urge to stop and stare. How else do you explain the traffic on I-95? How do you explain so much of our entertainment today, built as it is upon the metaphorical sort of car accidents: Michael Jackson, Britney Spears, MTV's "Jersey Shore"?
Or, say, the combination of Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin.
The two were face-to-face for the first time ever on Wednesday, brought together by Palin's having just joined Fox News as a contributor on Monday. Colleague Bill O'Reilly got the first crack at the former Alaska governor in a prime-time interview on Tuesday, but now it was Beck's turn. And he'd put together something special for his guest. The interview wasn't held in the normal studio, but in a restaurant down on the tip of Manhattan -- ironically, one that serves that most Communist of salad greens, arugula -- so that the Statue of Liberty, out in the water not far away, could be constantly seen over his shoulder.
Beck had made this choice, he explained, because of what the statue symbolized. There was no time for anyone to stop and think: "What it represents? Oh, you mean mass immigration?" though, because the two had much bigger and even sillier fish to fry.
Like Beck's diary. Sure, it read like a parody of what an overeager teenager might think he or she was supposed to include in it, but the host still felt he needed to read Palin the entry he said he'd written the night before, which went as follows:
Tomorrow I meet Sarah Palin and her family for the first time. I'm actually a little nervous, as she is one of the only people that I can see that can possibly lead us out of where we are. I don't know yet if she's strong enough, if she's well-enough advised or if she knows she can no longer trust anyone. I don't know if she can lead and not lose her soul. That is where I'd like to go for the next hour: Find out if this is the woman that can lead us and not lose her soul.
Though Palin's face seemed to betray a bit of displeasure at hearing parts of this read to her on national television, its themes ended up being the basis for much of the interview. The pair focused a concept of a reluctant politician, one who doesn't really want power but will accept it if the people cry out for them to take it. Could this just be a ploy, a hint that if Palin does run for president, she'll try the astroturf "draft" campaign route more than a few politicians have gone before? Well, maybe.
"I would be perfectly happy to go back to Wasilla, Alaska with my five children and my grandson and raise a happy, healthy family, loving the great outdoors, doing the things that we do in Alaska," Palin said at one point. "But if I believe that in some capacity I can help this great nation, I'm gonna be willing to sacrifice and to change some things in my lifestyle in order to serve. That doesn't have to mean, though, top dog -- it doesn't have to entail having any kind of title."
Palin and Beck had come to this point because of a somewhat odd exchange they'd just had, one that started when the host asked his guest to name her favorite Founding Father. It seemed, for a time, as if Palin was reprising the infamous answer she gave when Katie Couric asked her what publications she reads and she responded, "all of them." That's exactly the answer Palin gave Beck at first, too. But when he pressed her, jokingly saying, "that's bullcrap," she settled on George Washington, since he'd been the Founding Fathers' leader. And she made it clear she knew at least a little about him, too.
"He didn't want to be a king. He returned power to the people, then he went back to Mt. Vernon, he went back to his farm. He was almost reluctant to serve as president, too," Palin said, adding, "And that’s who you need to find to serve in government, in a bureaucracy, those who you know will serve for the right reasons, because they're reluctant to get out there and seek a limelight and seek power, they're doing it for the people."
Of course, just because they'd been focusing on reluctant politicians didn't mean Palin and Beck couldn't make the exact opposite point when it served their purposes. Of healthcare reform, the former governor said, "When incumbents are even willing to give up their power, their seat, when they're saying, 'Hey, if it costs me my seat in Congress, it costs me my seat in Congress, I'm going to cram this thing through anyway,' that's a scary, scary thing to consider."
Did that have much internal logic, or any at all? Not really. But that didn't matter, because Beck was there to save her: "It's not if they're doing it on principles," he said. But principles and Democrats aren't two things that go together in his show's world, so he added, "It is if they're doing it for bribes, money, power, positions," something he regularly tells his audience they are.
That wasn't the only time a discussion of healthcare reform, or of the Obama administration, went off the rails. Referring, as always, back to himself, Beck took Palin briefly through his theory that the administration is deliberately trying to "spend us into oblivion" before asking if she agreed. This was the response:
I do. I do believe that -- because again, Glenn, we can't be so stupid as to not see these common-sense solutions: "Hey, government, quit thinking that the solution to the healthcare problem today is for government to take it over and run a system better than the private sector system." We see something like that, we scratch our heads and say, "Well, what are we missing?" It's a ridiculous notion that the White House has to take over healthcare and think that they can run it better. We cannot be missing something so blatantly -- it has to be purposeful, what they are doing. Otherwise, otherwise I would say, Glenn, that there is no hope, that there are no solutions.
For the record, of course, Democrats' efforts to change the healthcare system are probably purposeful -- you don't normally write a thousand-plus page bill by accident. Also, technically, telling government that it doesn't have a solution should probably not, by itself, count as a solution. But these are little details.
Besides, we already know what Palin and Beck would say upon reading the previous paragraph. That's because they also spent a good bit of the show complaining about their status as victims of liberal haters. But they did get an opportunity to mock some of those critics towards the end of the show, when they offered themselves up to NBC as co-hosts of "Saturday Night Live."
Palin, to her credit, was sure that NBC would be smart enough to take them up on the offer and watch the ratings roll in. Beck, though, was convinced that the network's left-wing bias would be too strong, that they would never say yes. But that's probably just his conspiracy theorist heart at work. NBC was, after all, dumb enough to bring Jay Leno back to his old 11:35 time slot; surely, it wouldn't need any political reason to make the mistake of turning down what would no doubt be the best smoking wreck on television for a night.
The staff and readers of Salon had a big debate over choosing Glenn Beck our "Crazy Person of the Year." As we stated in the introduction to "The Year in Crazy," we disqualified certain media stars -- Rush Limbaugh, Bill O'Reilly -- and some GOP leaders -- Sarah Palin and Liz Cheney -- whose crazy behavior was purely opportunistic. We rejected prominent people who had a crazy belief or two -- Whoopi Goldberg casting doubt on the moon landing -- but didn't seem driven by crazy.
Only one man was crazy enough to possibly trick us. Only one man stood on a media platform comparable to O'Reilly's and Limbaugh's, and delivered a crazy shtick that was so over the top that sometimes you'd say: He doesn't believe any of this, right? The tears, the shaking, the hysteria -- it's all an act, right? And sometimes you'd say, "Get the nets, Fox News!"
Yes, that man is Glenn Beck, and we come down on the side of "Get the nets!" An overview of Beck's career shows that his success is equal parts talent, timing, cruelty and crazy.
The man who would be King of the Crazies emerged when nut-job America really needed a leader. Since he started his career as a prank-and-smear shock jock with a bad perm, one who once called a rival DJ's wife on the air live to ask her about her miscarriage, it's clear Beck will do anything for attention. But, somehow, the anything always involves a big helping of crazy.
The kinds of statements and behaviors that got folks on our crazy list -- they're Beck's daily bread. On one recent Monday alone (thanks, Media Matters!) he claimed that on climate change, "America is now an Axis country ... on the wrong side of history" (for the young folks: Nazi Germany was an Axis power); that Democrats will "retain power ... in a way that Americans" won't "recognize" after their policies fail; that he was readying a healthcare exposé for his Monday Fox News show that would be a Van Jones-size coup. (It turned out to be that the husband of a congresswoman who supports healthcare reform went to jail for fraud -- and Beck claims he wrote the Democrats' healthcare reform from jail.) Of course, the Democrats actually don't have a healthcare reform bill (and they should probably collectively go to jail for their failure to produce one by now).
Of course, the mention of Van Jones, the White House green jobs czar toppled by Beck's combination of sensationalistic reporting and bullying (Jones signed a 9/11 Truth petition and flirted with extreme leftism in his youth), is a reminder that crazy has consequences. Beck's crazy has intersected with a broader social paranoia on the right, and it's clearly something to worry about, not merely mock. We also don't want to make light of mental illness, and given Beck's own confessions about his drug addictions and his mother's suicide, it's clear he deserves some sympathy.
But not much. There are great therapists, therapies and even some legal drugs out there that could help Beck, but instead he's chosen to funnel his crazy into stirring dangerous hatreds. Glenn, if you decide you need psychological help, we'll help you get it, but until then all we have for you is this ignoble award, the craziest person in this crazy year of 2009. Congratulations!
Below, a little fun for you all as we head off into the weekend: "The Daily Show" takes down Fox News' Glenn Beck, digging into how the tales of doom and depression he tells on his show seem to have at least a tangential connection to the fact that he's a paid spokesman for a company that deals in gold. Because, of course, gold just happens to be Beck's prescription for how his viewers can protect themselves from said doom and depression.
And if you missed it, Salon's Mike Madden has been over this ground before, with a fantastic piece he wrote back in October about how he made money by essentially investing in all the paranoia Beck's trying to sell.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Beck - Not So Mellow Gold | ||||
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When Fox News starts worrying about the impropriety of Glenn Beck's goldbug mania, you know that matters have gotten completely out of hand. At DailyFinance, Jeff Bercovici reports that Beck's prominent role endorsing coin vendor Goldline International may be running up against conflict-of-interest rules at Fox. Beck's on-air drumbeating for gold as the answer to an Obama-induced apocalypse doesn't help, (even if has made some money for at least one Salon correspondent.)
Ken Vogel has the definitive conservative-goldbug nexus story in Politico. But everyone who has investigated this issue seems to be missing a key point: Gold's popularity is a sign that apocalypse is being averted, not that it is nigh.
The standard theory is that buying gold is a hedge against a weak dollar. The dollar has been falling in value for months in part because investors fear that the inflationary consequences of all the liquidity that the Fed has pumped into the global economy to avert a second Great Depression. But take a closer look at that dynamic: the dollar is weakening not because there is any imminent sign of inflation now but because the fledgling steps towards economic recovery make people assume that eventually inflation will be inevitable. (And, as Matthew Yglesias points out, the dollar is only now back to where it was before the financial crisis began.)
Notice the contradiction? Economic recovery, not disaster, is fueling the gold-buying binge.
No clearer evidence of this could be asked for than the data offered by today's markets -- the dollar strengthened and gold fell, as investors worried that the downgrade of Greece's credit rating, along with disappointing industrial production numbers from Germany and more problems in Dubai, signaled that the global economy is still in peril.
When real danger threatens -- where do investors put their money? Back in the dollar.
WASHINGTON -- There is, it turns out, something far more terrifying than Glenn Beck, political philosopher. On Thursday night, the world met Glenn Beck, empathetic life coach.
Beck took the night off from his venom-laden, paranoid Fox News Channel talk show Thursday, and instead broadcast, to movie theaters around the country, his 2009 Christmas special. Like last year's show, it was based on his heavy-handed, vaguely autobiographical 2007 novel, "The Christmas Sweater."
Actually, that's not quite accurate; most of Thursday's show consisted of Beck airing a rerun of last year's special, in which he took his already mawkish novel, ratcheted up the melodrama and turned it into a one-man stage show featuring, well, Beck. The new addition this year came only after the tape rolled, when Beck -- now live, not recorded -- brought out four people whose lives had been touched by his work and chatted briefly with them about what it's like to overcome adversity. One guy was apparently on his way to the drug store to buy an overdose of sleeping pills to kill himself but changed his mind when he heard Beck on the radio and found the strength to keep going on.
Anyone who had just sat through the "Christmas Sweater" show, though, might have identified better with the man's original impulse. But in the theater where I watched the program, on the top floor of a high-end shopping mall near the D.C.-Maryland border, there weren't that many viewers to see it all go down. Beck simulcast his little pageant from a packed house in lower Manhattan, but 15 minutes before showtime in D.C., there were only 10 people in the audience with me. The crowd didn't grow much by the end of the night, either. The theater told me they sold fewer than 30 tickets, at $20 a pop. (That turned out to be the rule rather than the exception, according to anecdotal reports of small crowds all over.)
The show got started with some weird, spacey music, as if Beck was trying to prepare his audience for an alien invasion. Then the host took the stage (accompanied by a mostly black choir singing Christmas carols). Signs for Napa Auto Parts, the program's sponsor, hung incongruously in the wings, visible whenever the camera shot Beck from the side. "Two years ago, I wrote a book called 'The Christmas Sweater' because I knew that a storm was coming," he said. What inspired him to write the novel was a memory of his own storm. One Christmas, back before he became a Mormon and got sober, Beck found himself drunk, depressed and too broke to shop for his kids' presents anywhere but at CVS. "I felt like a loser," he said, tears welling up in his eyes.
Those tears would turn out to be the leitmotif of the night, especially once the replay of last year's show got going. Acting, à la Glenn Beck, apparently consists mostly of choking up -- with sadness, with rage, with fright, with anything. The staging of his performance didn't help, either. Wearing a microphone taped to his head and at least three T-shirts (all of which he wound up sweating through by the end of the show), Beck stood in front of six video monitors, which flashed images and colors to help suggest scenes. An orchestra played along from the side of the stage. Beck played every character in the show -- from Eddie, the little boy who's clearly supposed to be Beck, to his mother and grandparents, to Russell, the story's Jesus figure. (Because what good is a Christmas story without a Jesus figure?)
The plot goes like this. Eddie's father has died, which we learned, in the stage version, through a hokey series of voice-overs, and his mom is struggling to pay the bills and raise Eddie. Though Eddie has his heart set on a shiny, red bike with a black leather banana seat for Christmas, his mom can't afford it, and she knits him a sweater instead. He freaks out and throws it on the floor of his room, saying it's itchy and he doesn't like it. They go visit Eddie's grandparents, and Eddie sulks the whole night. Instead of staying over on their farm, he makes Mom drive him back home through the snow. He falls asleep in the car. So does Mom! They crash, she dies, he goes to live with Grandma and Grandpa.
Then things start to lose the narrative thread a little bit. Feeling sorry for himself -- understandably, you'd think, since he's now a 12-year-old orphan -- Eddie lashes out at his grandparents, too. His life's been spiraling out of control; first his dad died of cancer, then his mom died in a wreck, and to top it all off, he never got the bike he wanted! So it's no wonder he starts hanging out next door, at an apparently abandoned farmhouse where he meets the mysterious Russell (whom Beck played with an exaggerated farmhand voice that he'd rip a liberal for using to mock hardworking Americans). Russell tells Eddie he has only himself to blame for his problems. So he gets back to sulking. Eventually, Eddie discovers that he was going to get that bike on the night his mom died, but his grandfather had hidden it to give to him the next day; when Eddie demanded to go home, he missed his chance to get it. He winds up taking it from the barn and fleeing the farm. Then he gets lost in a cornfield, the bike breaks down, and a massive metaphor -- er, storm -- blows up the road. Suddenly Russell appears out of nowhere, telling him he's got to weather the storm if he wants to get home. "Eddie, don't fear the storm," Russell says. "Fear the cornfield, don't fear the storm." Wise words, indeed. With more tears, some prayers and some repentance, Eddie survives the storm. Russell shows him around a heavenly meadow, and tells him his parents are there watching over him. Then Russell starts glowing white, and tells Eddie, "You are joy, Eddie! You are joy!" before turning into pure light. Eddie collapses, then wakes up ... back home at his grandparents' farm -- with Mom there! His sorrow has given him a second chance to go back and stop being such an ungrateful brat about the sweater. And everyone lives happily ever after.
For what's supposed to be an inspiration, the story is pretty dark. (Dark enough, in fact, that the children's version of the book, which came out this fall, ditches just about every part of the tale except that Eddie wanted a bike and got a sweater instead.) Some of it is based on his own life -- his mother did die when he was a teenager, though his father didn't, and he grew up relatively poor, like Eddie in the story. Beck's "acting" didn't help lighten the mood much; when he wasn't sobbing, he was practically screaming with resentment, turning lines that only needed a hint of sarcasm into sneers of outrage. At the climactic moment when the storm passes over Eddie, Beck collapsed into a fetal ball on the stage, crying into his hands, while a woman sang a hymn. The handful of people in the theater with me laughed at a few of his corny jokes, but mostly they sat there, silent and impassive, as the show dragged on for more than 90 minutes.
But as hokey and melodramatic as the staging of the novel was, the special added feature for this year's performance was worse. First, we watched Beck start to cry all over again, just remembering how sad it was for him to do the show the year before. Then, Beck's producers sent out four people who personified the themes of the book: a woman whose daughter had died in a car crash; a junkie, whose family rescued him from drugged-out despair; a woman who survived breast cancer in part because someone gave her a copy of Beck's novel during her chemotherapy; and the would-be suicide, who chose life because of Beck's dulcet voice on the radio.
"There is a storm in each of us," Beck said. "A storm is coming. We're all beginning to see it form."
That line woke me from the semi-stupor the show had put me in, because it was the first thing Beck had said all night that bore any resemblance to the deranged, paranoid conspiracy theorist on Fox News. Call Beck crazy, call him dangerous, but when he talks politics, no one could ever call him boring. When he's telling Christmas stories full of pathos and melodrama, though, he's excruciatingly dull. The strange voices weren't enough to overcome the overwrought narrative or the heavy-handed morals in the tale. There wasn't enough of the weirdness, the mania that drives Beck when he talks about how ACORN or SEIU are out to steal the country, or how all of President Obama's advisors are Maoist thugs. Even Beck's crying -- an over-the-top bit of preposterousness on the TV show -- got stale.
By the time Beck finished showing little videos introducing his guests, featuring epigrams from the novel that made clear how their story related to his, there wasn't much time to talk to them. He got them all to agree that life is very hard, and we all have storms to pass through. "I want a T-shirt that says, 'I survived 2009,'" he said.
And then he started talking about Tiger Woods, of all things. "He's a pretty good golfer, man, he's the best anybody has ever been at that," he said. "That's his job -- to play golf. And he's got half a billion dollars for playing golf. He's got a yacht, he's got multiple houses. He's -- well, he had a car, that's a fixer-upper at this point. He married a Swedish supermodel. And somehow or another, he was still empty inside." Tiger's story, apparently, was just another piece of Beck's. "Find out how to fill that emptiness, and it ain't with stuff," Beck said. "You can either be a victim, or a victor."
The choir sang us out of the theater, a little dazed, two and a quarter hours after the show had started. The few other people in the audience had loved it. "It was a great spiritual message, you know? Inspirational," said Barry Taylor, a professional magician -- yes, really -- from Rockville, Md., who watches Beck on TV and decided to come see the show after hearing him promote it endlessly for the last few weeks. "I've got a lot of shows coming up -- I'll be infused with just a positive energy."
It didn't take long for the theater to empty out. Beck is rerunning the whole thing again in a week, but the employees at the cinema seemed glad to get back to the usual fare in Theater One -- "The Twilight Saga: New Moon." Maybe next year, Beck can add a few vampires to the program. Sweaters alone, it seems, aren't quite enough to draw a crowd.
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