Table of Contents
For Mom and Pops
Sentimentality, the ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel; the wet eyes of the sentimentalist betray his aversion to experience, his fear of life, his arid heart; and it is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.
James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son
Introduction
The Man with the Plan
History will record that on the third Saturday of November 2009, Glenn Beck unveiled his hundred-year plan to save the republic at a golf-cart retirement community just north of Orlando.
The day began at a highwayside Borders Bookstore in Tampa, a short drive up the road from the Clear Channel studio complex that incubated Becks talk-radio career in the final year of the Clinton administration. A shorter drive in the opposite direction blinked the purple neon lights of the citys most famous strip club, Mons Venus, against which Beck waged a culture war as a younger man.
Monuments to Becks past were everywhere in the sleepy midsized Florida city, but the hosts schedule brooked no appointments with nostalgia. The ground-rules flyer handed out in the Borders parking lot explained that Beck was too rushed even for chitchat with his longest-listening fans. Another bullet point instructed the assembled not to expect personalized autographs. Those in line would receive a mere scrawl of their heros initials. Photographs were allowed, but no posesand be quick about it.
Glenn Becks devotees understood. Although it was clear that not everyone would reach the signing desk, a neat line of one thousand snaked patiently through the massive lot and then onto the sidewalk along the six lanes of Dale Mabry Boulevard, quiet with Saturday morning traffic. Armed with books, the waiting were happy just to be there. Stretching out before and behind them was proof of something that Beck had told them again and again: You are not alone.
After two hours of signing books and issuing curt hellos, Beck boarded his Arguing with Idiots tour bussporting a two-sided mural of the author as Colonel Klinkand headed north to the days main event. Throughout the hourlong journey up I-275, the bus passed colorful caravans of cars and trucks owned by members of Becks conservative civic initiative, the 9.12 Project. The 9.12 vehicles were easy to identify: U.S. flags flapped in the wind, cardboard signs denounced socialism from the backs of trunks, and messages announced in soap and shoe polish, WELCOME HOME GLENN!
More than just a homecoming, Becks Florida visit had been billed as a personal culmination and a national turning point. At the sprawling retirement community known as the Villages, Beck was scheduled to unveil the future of Glenn Beck Nation. Beck had been methodically teaspooning out the hype for weeks. His legions had been led to expect something very big and possibly epic, a historic proclamation to redirect the course of human events. It would have to be. Only something approaching the level of the Rapture could have capped what had been a breakout year for the forty-five-year-old host.
Since launching a revamped Glenn Beck on Fox News on the eve of Barack Obamas inauguration, Beck had become an unlikely power broker at the intersection of national media and politics. For his bombast, biliousness, and brio, the former Top 40 radio deejay was the talk of the nation, reviled or revered by millions of Americans on each side of a yawning cultural chasmthe Glenn Beck divide. It had been a remarkable journey, completed in just ten months, from cable news curio in professional limbo to Time magazine cover subject and named public enemy on Whitehouse. gov. Among conservatives, the polls showed Becks influence ranking second only to that of Rush Limbaugh, whose mantle he now stood poised to inherit.
But all this was just for starters. With his speech in the Villages, the host promised to unveil the next stage in the evolution of Glenn Beck: the media brand, the political movement, and the psychosocial demographic. To those willing to join him and make what he called hard sacrifices, Beck would offer a role in the crusade to rebuild, to refound, the republic. In the language of dispossession that defines the new conservative grassroots, he would show them how to take their country back. Thirty thousand people made the Beck pilgrimage from across Florida and nearby states to receive the word.
The site of the revelation was a gazebo in the Villages shopping district. If the scene bore a strong resemblance to nearby Disney Worlds Main Street attraction, its because retiring to Disney is how residents refer to their golden years in the Villages, a manicured suburb that markets itself as Americas friendliest hometown. It is best known for its twenty-four golf courses, 99 percent white population, and two registered Republicans for every Democrat.
Developed by GOP megadonor Gary Morse, the Villages is a Potemkin village poetically suited to Becks Potemkin populism. Dripping with the ersatz trappings of simpler-time nostalgia, its streets are designed not for cars but for the towns preferred mode of transportation: golf carts, known locally as club cars. The main shopping drag hosts pricey quilteries and crafts stores, a club car dealer, a Johnny Rockets diner, and a Hallmark store. The local galleries do brisk and redundant trades in the oil-painted homilies of Thomas Kinkade.
Beck is no stranger here. The Villages has long been a favored stop-over for conservatives on book tours. The host last visited the previous November, when he descended by helicopter into the Barnes & Noble parking lot to sign copies of his bestselling fiction debut, The Christmas Sweater. Now, one year later, the town handed its entire commercial center over to Beck, welcoming him with everything short of trumpets. Beck to announce plan to Save the Republic, declared the front page of the Villages Daily Sun.
It was a fine day to start a second American revolution in a retirement community. The temperature, like most of the crowd, hovered in the low seventies. A sound system set the mood with upbeat patriotic jukebox anthems, including a double helping of an old Beck favorite: Lee Greenwoods God Bless the USA. It was to Greenwoods song that Beck arrived at the scene twenty minutes late. To the sound of cheers, the star emerged from an underpass separating Lucky Charm Antiques and Starbucks.
Although he flew to Florida on a private jet, Beck wore the coach-class outfit he favors for speaking events: jeans, Converse, and an untucked baby blue button-down. Flanked by a heavy security detailthere had been the usual threatshis soft six-foot-four frame moved slowly through the adoring throng. There was no sign of the bulletproof vest he is rumored to wear on the streets of New York City.
Glenn Beck for President! they screamed. We love you, Glenn!
Beck beamed under the love, his face flush and caught in a toothy, winsome grin rarely seen on Fox News. This is why bands tour even when they no longer have to, the former Top 40 deejay might have been thinking. Except for the gray at his temples, he could have been an overgrown thirteen-year-old, lumbering through a gymnasium on his way to accept an eighth-grade achievement award. The ovation only grew louder after Beck took the stage, where over the noise he slowly allowed his grin to fade. He opened with a joke: Is this the ACORN rally?
