Glenn Beck’s meta-reality

Everybody should watch this a few times, and some of us should be made to — Glenn Beck lost in the miasma of his own reactionary daydreams, lamenting the loss of the greatness that America once was, openly and tearfully (he mists up like a bride’s mom) mourning the America represented best, he thinks, by a few 1970’s network TV ads, one for Coke (!) and the other for Kodak (!), and pleading with us to remember “how it felt!!”

America “used to be united!” he cries. And of course, he’s right — the nation used to be relatively untroubled by minority rights, women’s rights, immigrant rights, extreme economic disparity (for a time, anyway), and the other vast myriad of things that challenge the hegemony of plump, wealthy white men like Beck. So he’s absolutely correct, and you can’t even tell him he shouldn’t be upset by the fact. But we can save our sympathy, I think, for bigoted, retrogressive demogogues, and perhaps dedicate it instead to the vast majority of citizens everywhere who never had so much to lose.

But the fact that Beck points to nothing so much as a pair of corporate TV ads as his deathless illustration of how “life used to be” is truly amazing — perhaps, because he lives in a warped, weepy, nutbag-covering TV world all his own, Beck doesn’t quite understand that those commercials were commercials. For products. Comprised of adman hucksterism and cheap-shill sentimentality. They aren’t real, Glenn. And they weren’t real when you were a boob-tube geek kid, either.

Take Jean Baudrillard – please. One of America’s most-watched pundits posits a few moments of old contrived TV advertising as our great nation’s lost idealism? This is TV cheese earnestly crying about the state of perceived “reality” by comparing it unfavorably to a Coke commercial. A Coke commercial. We’re down the rabbit hole a little, it seems. And how many millions nodded with him, perhaps shed a tear or two as well? Wait, I’m faklempt. Talk amongst yourselves. 

Perhaps Beck is correct again — his constituency may have wholly lost the capacity to discern TV fantasy from what’s real. They vote and shop and recreate and even remember the way TV tells them to. And these aren’t kids raised on the Web, but old timers, those old enough to remember the 70s and pine for the days of segregation and all-white Presidents and restaurant smoking and women who knew how to bake. Or, more to the point, the days of Archie Bunker, the Wide World of Sports, and beer ads with honest-to-God jingles. Those were the good old days.