Starting thoughts on Glenn Beck

Limiting the scope

"Glenn Beck," of course, is an amalgam of texts: Beck's television and radio shows, his nonfiction books, his fictional work, the guests he has on his show (among them fiction writers): it is nearly impossible to limit or delineate the range of places where his ideas--and those of his audience--circulate. Of course, as literary theorists have argued for years, Diaz's text is similarly hard to limit, as it incorporates not just the some 400 pages of his novel, but also the interviews Diaz has given about the novel, the reviews published on the novel, Diaz's other work, the work of other Latin American writers, the documented lives of people like Oscar (whom Diaz has cited in interviews), the works influencing Diaz, and so on. "Glenn Beck" and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, then, exist as texts with which to identify in complex, multifaceted ways. And if the identifications around Beck at first seem stronger than those around Diaz's novel, such an assumption likely underestimates the powerful role fiction--particularly Pulitzer-Prize winning fiction, and particularly ethnic fiction--plays in the lives of its readers, and shapes how these readers view themselves and their world.

Racism in the era of post-whiteness

It's difficult, in some ways, to frame Beck in the language of race and racism, since these charges have been endlessly circulated and defended against around the Tea Party movement. It's likely true that racism is simply too overdetermined in the case of an African American president, or that the present context is one of, in Mike Hill's words, after whiteness, where even the most regressive organizations must play lip service to egalitarianism, or, in an even more extended sense, where every organization, and every American, imagines themselves beyond racism by virtue of Obama's election. It's likely, too, that something similar has occurred with gender, that, like the Promise Keepers, Beck and his crew (hardly anti-woman, given the prominence of Michelle Bachman and Sarah Palin) present themselves as beyond gender relations as well. Though hopefully my analysis here goes beyond simple questions of Beck's misogyny, any question of gender identity is complicated by the disavowals--and easy targets--presented by Beck and followers.