Mean Streak
by digby
Media Matters interviewed Glenn Beck’s biographer:
Q. What surprised you the most from your research?
I wasn’t prepared for the depth of Beck’s mean streak. He’s still known for personalizing disagreements in a vicious way. This is something that goes all the way back. Along with his ambition, it’s another striking constant in his life and career. This is a guy who called a competing deejay’s wife live on the air and mocked her for having a miscarriage. More than one former colleague described him as a “sadist,” the kind of guy who enjoys humiliating people, who pulls wings off of flies. I don’t doubt that he could enjoy hurting animals. He still sells a shirt on his website that features a picture of a baby polar bear with a target on it and the tagline, “Drill through their a** for cheaper gas.”
The idea that Glenn Beck “became a better man” when he found Jesus is one of two major self-serving myths out of which he’s built his brand. The other being that his public super-patriotism is reluctant and full of self-sacrifice.
Q. There is much discussion of past emotional problems. What exactly occurred and how has that affected Beck’s actions?
A. Beck had his share of tragedy in his youth. A divorce followed by the death of his mother. Then a half-brother killed himself. How much these things contributed to the Beck we know today, I have no idea. But Beck is clearly full of hatred to this day, for himself, for the world, for his political opponents. More than one former colleague believes he was diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder in the 90s, likely bipolar, and that he took lithium on top of his recreational drugs and booze until he went clean in mid-90s. So you start with that as a baseline, together with a history of depression, throw in some megalomania and ADHD, for which Beck takes Big Pharma speed, sprinkle it with some dry drunk fairy dust and an instinctive paranoia, and you have a recipe for a freak show.
Q. Is this related to his crying, or is that even real emotion?
A. Beck has been fake crying for at least a decade. At his Top 40 station in New Haven, his ex-partner told me he’d get emotional, cut to commercial, dry up to order a bacon-and-cheese, then start crying as soon as he was on-air again. One of his colleagues in Tampa told me the same thing. This is not to say that Beck is not an emotional wreck who cries a lot. He definitely does. But I think the way he incorporates it into his performance is a combination of embarrassingly deep emotional neediness and a shameless desire to manipulate his audience, which apparently is willing to give him a pass on the crying because they think at bottom he is authentic. And it’s worth noting that the neediness seems to cut both ways. Often Glenn Beck feels like nothing so much as an episode of Mr. Rogers.
There’s also a bit of a Mormon thing going on with regard to the cheap theatrics and tortuous sentimentality in Beck’s shtick, which I talk about at length in the book.
I can’t wait to read it.
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