Mixed Baggage

Beck gets no argument from me when he quotes African-American tennis great Arthur Ashe as saying that we have lost our dignity and morality, that now, “instead of settling on what’s right, or just, or moral, the idea is to get even.” And Beck’s prescription to address things gets ready agreement from me: “Good families require good parents. Good communities require good neighbors. And good countries require good citizens.” (Beck 97)

Beck goes on to criticize Obama for granting compensation to the AmeriCorps participants. While in his view that detracts from volunteerism, and it may, there is something else to say as well: Maybe economic straits for those people are so dire, that they need the boost. Many of them are not privileged kids of middle or upper class families, but near-destitute denizens of lower class communities.

I applaud Beck for criticizing both those who kill in the name of religion and those who, like Stalin and Hitler, kill for themselves. I also like his reminding me of Ben Franklin saying “that the most acceptable service we render to Him (God) is in doing good to his other children.” (98)

I don’t follow his reasoning that “Progressives” want religions at each other’s throats. And even if it were true, it doesn’t seem a possibility except for maybe Muslims vs. everyone else. And if that is the case, once again, why would Progressives want that? And “religions must be harnessed by the state or destroyed.” What and where is he getting that?

Beck says Americans do not know their history, and he is right, but he too often doesn’t know his all that well either. I agree here with sentiments of another teacher I read: Un-democratic conditions led to the desire of Americans for progressive reforms. American history largely agrees with Beck that progressives shaped America into the country that it is, or at least was. A once thriving middle class, with reasonably safe food and water, no child labor, forty hour average workweeks, etc.—yes, those were Progressive initiatives. If Beck wants to dismiss Progressives and their accomplishments and return fully to life under Presidents McKinley or Harding, with robber barons running the economy and the atrocious work conditions and products chronicled by Upton Sinclair in The Jungle, he’s no friend of the people.

I agree wholeheartedly with him that we must be on constant vigilance about the fundamental that our rights come from God, not from government. And that we need to remember we create the government by lending it our rights. And I think those things have been diluted since the National Security State arose, but it’s not at all clear to me that Progressivism is A prime reason for the dilution, let alone THE prime reason. While I agree with Beck (and Rosemond) that Americans have too often (and foolishly) abandoned common sense in favor of the opinions of asinine “experts,” it’s not clear to me that there is or was an overriding Progressive theme to all or even most of it.

Beck’s ascribing of Obama’s desire for the Golden Rule, for “dignity and respect for those who share this brief moment on Earth,” as a wish for state repression of some sort, seems wholly non-sequitir. I get his inordinate fear of excessive do-gooder-ism; I don’t get the connections when they go beyond that, especially when the state is so very weak now in comparison to corporate power.

Beck muddies things repeatedly. I applaud his saying we cannot preach tolerance and practice its opposite. I agree fully that a virtuous people are necessary for freedom to stay, and that people should regulate their behavior. I nod strongly when he says that hate and greed must be battled. But then he gets into self-sufficiency and his logic doesn’t flow. And then I am back to nodding again that freedom is such a precious thing, and our Framers were scared to death for us, because EVERY democracy and every republic had fallen back into tyranny at some point.

Beck says to leave whatever political party you belong to and focus on people. Agreed. He’s obviously read George Washington’s views on the subject.

I shout hooray for Beck’s call for us to educate ourselves.

I have great respect for the man in saying people should reject violent revolution, for his reading of history is sound: it is a bloody and uncontrollable path that rarely comes to a good end. The battlefront, he says, is ideas, and our weapons the rule of law, values, and our founding documents. I almost entirely agree.

I echo his words that one day we will face our children and grandchildren and they will ask us: what was more important than freedom? Homes and lifestyles and debts? They will turn away in disgust from us, and perhaps look out on a landscape where foreign and domestic creditors/masters force them into reward-less toil.

Oh yes, Glenn Beck, we do all know that something isn’t right. The courage to change. We need it.

Beck’s 9.12 Project generally seems a good one. 9 principles, and 12 values, and clever numbering to match up with his view that the day after 9/11 we were a better country than we have been in a great number of years. I loudly clap for his call for we Americans to learn more about our country and its history. And I clap just as loudly for his call for more personal freedom and responsibility.

He advocates a lot of things. Like Generation America, an organization he wholeheartedly endorses. An organization which says it is APPALLED that the oil industry may lose billions of dollars in subsidies and tax incentives. And Beck himself is so polemic about the new health care law that he resorts to trashing it by saying Medicare will go up in it for seniors, which is why seniors should oppose the law. Beck seems of two faces; he undoubtedly knows that the rise in Medicare costs is a reflection of reality regardless of what happens or doesn’t happen or what bill got passed or didn’t, and he conveniently leaves out that the majority of seniors who rely on Medicare won’t see much of an increase in costs at all; it’s the wealthier ones who will see a few hundred dollars per year difference, a few thousand for the very top wealthy. Yet he implies that the rise is on all seniors, instead of a very small group. Regardless of whether one agrees with the wealthy few paying more than the modest or poor many, Beck is being deceptive in not making the distinction. And independent analysts say that to keep Medicare solvent, something had (and still needs more) to happen. The new bill goes a good ways toward restoring solvency, although without some check on care costs, it will do little to really solve the flawed underlying premise (too high a demand on services from a too sick group) or that cost savings projections are not realistic given how doctors will not lower fees to that level, and often even can’t and stay in business.

I have diminished respect for Beck’s suggested reading list. It is a skewed list, designed to lead someone to accept without question certain precepts, certain perceptions, and certain dogma. I would have been more impressed if it had been balanced. Where are the books about being anti-neocon, which Beck claims in passing? Right now, the books are polemically anti-liberal/progressive only, with only a few being scholarly. Book listings from Thomas Frank, John Dean, David Cay Johnson, Paul Krugman, Jacob Hacker, Noam Chomsky would have given the book balance, although perhaps not coherence, but Beck even left out the harder to classify works of Daniel Kurtzman, Thom Hartman, Wendell Potter, and Arianna Huffington. And Beck’s list of sources is not very impressive and would not pass scholarly muster—at best it is selective, at worst it is slanted.

Beck’s book, like Obama’s, is well written in the readability sense. In each of the books you see the hand of a lawyer (Beck’s co-writer, Joseph Kerry; Obama, of course, is a lawyer) used to writing in crisp and relatively clear prose, in addition to strong reviewers and editors.

Beck blames unions and pensions of teachers, firefighters and policemen, that they are an entitlement. No, they were effectively defunded because those with the means stopped contributing TO society, and those with the strong hands and backs stopped laboring and started to be entitled. Beck blames only the one and not the other. It is deceptive.

Beck’s sources are more than just occasionally not very rigorous either. While he is to be applauded for pointing out inconsistency and hypocrisy of many in politics and decision making, the gaps in his sources point too much to slanting the argument. Examples: Goldberg’s book has been heavily criticized, rightly so in my opinion, for being so slanted and gap filled as to be classified at best a polemic. Focusing on Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s egregious excesses is good, but where are the articles about Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, and Citigroup? Curious but laudatory that he would mention Kohn’s book, for pre-eminent among those persecuted under the Espionage and Sedition Acts (another odious anti-Constitution period) was none other than the socialist Eugene Debs.

Milloy’s book raises a few valid points, but is so awash in skewed and narrow positioning while avoiding everything to the contrary, that it borders on deception. As the Guardian newspaper wrote on 19th September 2006:
"Milloy also writes a weekly Junk Science column for the Fox News website. Without declaring his interests, he has used this column to pour scorn on studies documenting the medical effects of second-hand tobacco smoke and showing that climate change is taking place. Even after Fox News was told about the money he had been receiving from Philip Morris and Exxon, it continued to employ him, without informing its readers about his interests."

Pestritto and Atto’s book puts Beck on more solid ground. It has a lot of solid scholarly things in it, and rightly calls into question a number of things on Progressivism, although not necessarily always to the extent that Beck infers. Rasmussen in his book, while his leanings are clearly a certain way, and he has received funding from that direction as well, is careful to use correct methodology in his polling. The Democrats would have been wise to listen to his data. Rehnquist’s book raises valid questions on our Constitutional rights in times of crisis. Schlae’s book is not groundbreaking as it is often made out to be, but does offer some mild corrective to a few commonly held assumptions. Since I am only part way through it, I will refrain from commenting on it to much further extent, but the supposedly revelatory determination that the New Deal did not end the Depression is not revelatory at all and has been common knowledge among economists and historians for a long time.

The Economist article on simplifying and flattening taxes is a good one, and gives the primary benefit—simplicity increases acceptance and compliance. Right now, the wealthy manipulate the tax system to avoid what progressive taxation is supposed to accomplish: fairness. With the wealthy avoiding taxation, they are actually paying LESS than many in the lower brackets. (By the way, the date of the article citation is off by 2 days). The Skousen book is in some respects a mixed bag, with some potentially incorrect inferences, but overall, the book is a good treatment of why we should value what we have in freedom and form of government. Smith’s FDR book, and Pestritto’s Wilson, I have not read, but both come recommended by American history specialists. Sowell’s book is disappointing. While I like Sowell in many respects, and he does lay out many worthwhile points, he draws conclusions which are at best incomplete, and probably lopsided. The Williams article is correct on the face, but his and Beck’s interpretation of the facts can be disagreed with.

Beck’s criticisms of Chavez betray over-simplicity. Yes, the gullible and ostrich-headed of Hollywood have become too infatuated with him and have ignored some troubling excesses, but the crowd on the other side of the political pole have dismissed him outright because he skewers a lot of sacred cows and dares to frequently point out that the emperor is not only naked but often repressive. Chavez, for all his many drawbacks and power-hunger, holds genuine appeal among a majority of working class Venezuelans because he has stood up for them.

Some of Beck’s sources curiously undermine his argument some, such as the Business Week article on health care, the Peter Singer cite, and the Tapper article, all of which paint a fuller picture than initially intimated, so I don’t know if his staff just threw some things in there to give it bulk and the appearance of solidity ,or if it is something I am missing.

I fiercely agree with Beck’s poorly expressed lament that we have lost sight of what we were supposed to be about: limited government, where individual states are mostly sovereign, government is decentralized, and individuals bear personal responsibility for their actions. And our Federal commons is effectively broke because everyone takes and tries to avoid contributing.

Beck’s interpretation of data is occasionally odd, or even skewed. Positions, definitions, results, etc. are often distorted. Frankly, it became annoying seeing partial truth, agreeing with it, and then filling in the (deliberate?) gaps. Like vouchers. Washington DC’s education and government systems are a Congressionally fumbled mess. The vouchers were not uniform. They would have abandoned large numbers, a phenomenon of “ignore the rest” all too common in such “solutions.” The Executive branch is minimally involved in the Washington DC educational issue, btw.

Beck touches on some hard things. Home schooling, for example, is a thorny issue. Often superior, it can also be both a contributing cause and contributing effect of our lack of community. Yet it is also a reaction to failures on multiple levels, of both education and society itself. We have a lack of sense of responsibility to state, nation, and public welfare.

But I agree we need far fewer professional bureaucrats in education. As for education in general, Beck is too simplistic about money. Teachers and students don’t get the money, even when there is some, which in resource-starved America, often isn’t the case. “More teachers who care” implies that people get into poorly compensated, overburdened teaching because…they DON’T CARE? Beck is wildly off on that one. And Beck offers no alternative proposals for how education should be carried out.

Yes Beck, we deserve derision for bigger/more, for, despite generally having smaller families, wanting bigger homes.

“Right combination of public opinion and judicial appointees” (Beck 95) is classic doublespeak nonsense.

Other sources are good as far as they go, but inferences are simply undemonstrated. FDR rightly takes a lot of criticism (from me too, especially for the latter years of his presidency), but the inferences that his programs were ALL failures because they did not lower unemployment significantly is non-sequitir. It is just as easily the case that they prevented deeper unemployment, and their public psychology stabilizing value goes unevaluated by these works.

I and another teacher agree that Beck has made some serious omissions. On page 17, for example, Beck paraphrases the well-known “You can’t save the poor by destroying the rich” quote from Reverend William J. H. Boetcke, and yet doesn’t give credit. This professor would call that plagiarism.

On page 61, Beck paraphrases Barry Goldwater’s (some attribute it to Gerald Ford) quote, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything you have,” and again he doesn’t even give the original speaker credit.

Beck is dismissive of any evidence that disagrees with him, and loose with his own evidence. When one digs deeper, it is not quite, and sometimes not at all, as Beck claims. So why do it? Is he just a moneymaker preying on the ideologically susceptible, as the non-ideological but cynical say? Does he prey on people’s ignorance in neo-conservative fear-mongering? Is he a stooge of Rupert Murdoch, a hit man of talented proportions, as his detractors claim? Or does he merely believe in doing well while doing what he believes in, which apparently is to take down government? Or is he really a patriot that, while you may disagree with him, honestly loves his country and wants us to wake up and be THE PEOPLE so eloquently written of by our Framers? I have read Beck, watched Beck, and I still don’t know; maybe he is a convoluted, somewhat schizophrenic, mix of all that. People do seem to either love him, or despise him and dismiss him.

I have to disqualify some of Beck for the reasons given above, and he deserves strong criticism for much of the rest, but he also deserves strong credit for the remainder. Mixed bag!

Obama, you’re up soon! :)