Great news everybody! CNN employee Glenn Beck has firmed up his identity as a millionaire elite infotainer this week. His tome An Inconvenient Book (which, in terms of format, borrows heavily from America: The Book will debut atop the New York Times Best Seller List - my purchase clearly being the one that put him over the top. So, Glenn: You're welcome, and I look forward to sitting down with a bottle of absinthe and reading it.
And, to America: you should really purchase this book! Just in time for the holidays comes the gift that everyone needed: a book with a grown man fellating the state of California on its cover. This would seem to indicate that Beck's great work would go to great lengths to savage the Golden State, but, alas, my initial skim reveals this may not be the case. And, sadly, Beck doesn't include an index, which is a shame, because I imagined I'd find entries that read, "California, doodyheads therein" and "California, wait, wait...how low are their property taxes again? (Cha-ching!)."
Beck, of course, harbors all sorts of grudges against the good people of California: Nancy Pelosi gives him agita, Hollywood movies make him sad, and the only thing that can cheer him up is the sight of the homes of heavily Republican San Diego going up in flames ("America haters," he calls these San Diegans).
All of which is surprising, given California's great contributions to the civic life and conservatism that Beck espouses. California is the home of Manifest Destiny, the Gold Rush, the terminus of the First Intercontinental Railroad. The state has given us the cinematic and political career of Ronald Reagan, and the far less cinematic career of Richard Nixon. Plus: Kirk Gibson's home run, Taqueria Cancun, American Graffiti, Queens of the Stone Age, Jack London, and the Song Girls. Plus, I'll have you know that it's a Californian, an "A. Huffington" from Los Angeles, that has promised to reimburse me for the purchase of this book.
And for my money, when it comes to standing up against Islamofascism, there is an event that takes place annually in California that serves as a stirring rebuke against the amoral tyranny of Islamofascism. An event staged by people for whom a clutch of Danish cartoons is just hopelessly insufficient at striking back at fundamentalist terror. When people say, "They hate us because we're free," this event is the first thing I think of. Naturally, I'm referring to San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair, in which brave citizens who know full well they'd be the first against the wall if Osama bin Laden took over the West, take to the streets with chips, dips, chains, whips, clamps, tramps, and more vulcanized rubber than you can shake a double-ended dildo at to say to the world, "We are a free people, we are unbowed in the face of our foreign enemies, and the afterparty is at the Twin Peaks Tavern!"
So does Beck harbor any good will toward California? At first glance, his cover image seems to say no. But if you take a closer look at his eyes, the expression on his face, you'll come to one inescapable conclusion: the man's no stranger to amyl nitrate.