Glenn Beck

You know that feeling where you have a band that’s small and relatively unheralded, but you think there’s something special about them? And then they get big, and you’re happy for them, but you miss when they were yours?

Sure you do. Maybe it’s not a band, but everyone knows that feeling. And that is exactly how I feel about Glenn Beck.

See, before he was America’s crazy, he was my crazy.

Other liberals would say, “Oh, you have to listen to Rush, he’s really the most powerful right wing guy,” or, “You know, Liddy is just unbreakable.” They might say, “Savage has the most entertaining show,” or “Hannity and Fox News set the agenda. It’s required listening.”

Sure, I’ve had good moments with these other guys. Liddy, likening women in the army to sending a dog to MIT to learn astrophysics? Good stuff. Laura Ingraham? She’s ai’ght. She introduced me to the Mosquitos and I feel like she and I could definitely sit down and talk music (she loves Tom Waits and other quality singer-songwriters, after all.) Hannity and Rush are almost self-parody, and I just could never get into them. Too big of an operation, too cumbersome.

Glenn Beck, on the other hand, made great right wing radio for a niche audience. He just did it better. For about two years, my daily radio lineup was:
Laura Ingraham, 9-12
Liddy, 12-2
Beck, 2-5.
Drive home: Hannity.

And Beck's show was always the highlight of my day, in terms of radio programming. At the time, Beck was just a small timer, a Philly-area novelty with a unique zest for the theatrical. And he occasionally took very principled stands (like when the Abu Ghraib photos came out, he unequivocally criticized any kind of behavior resembling torture, though of course he subscribed to the “bad apple” theory which holds that nothing that happened at Abu Ghraib was sanctioned by anyone meaningful.)

And more so than the other radio types, Beck could get confessional and explicitly emotional. He seemed to want to demolish the line between himself and the audience, and he had (probably still has) great microphone skills. In a rant, he might shout or whisper, pause for seconds at a time, sigh, and that break into a galloping paragraph of right wing indignation. It was hypnotic.

But now, Glenn Beck is no longer my crazy. I knew something was up when I checked back in after a lengthy absence and found out that he was broadcasting from New York. "Uh oh," I thought. "We've gone national." And now that he's been on CNN for a few years, he’s truly America’s crazy.