It's been almost seven months since Glenn Beck slapped his name on someone else's awful book. (That was Agenda 21 last November. Glenn Beck "with Harriet Parke." A nightmare vision of a world where the UN makes everyone walk on treadmills all day. Really.) But the wait was worth it. A new novel "by" Glenn Beck came out last week. It's called The Eye of Moloch and the extra time and care he put in really shows.
Of course, Glenn Beck doesn't get any closer to "writing" a Glenn Beck novel than Dolly Parton gets to running the log ride at Dollywood. Glenn Beck is the only name on the cover of The Eye of Moloch, but the title page says "with Jack Henderson" (Beck's ghost on The Overton Window), "special thanks to Kevin Balfe (Beck's ghost on The Christmas Sweater), Hannah Beck (Beck's daughter) Emily Bestler, and Kate Cetrulo" (his editors at Simon & Schuster). Editors don't take their thanks on the title page, traditionally, but if they want everyone to know what they did, that's up to them.
It takes a village to write a Glenn Beck novel.
"I don't write," Beck once told USA Today, explaining his team approach to literature. "I speak. I get bogged down in writing."
Think about that. Because even with five other people helping, The Eye of Moloch came out like this:
Domestically the stage was set for a plunge into total economic destruction with nobody's hands on the wheel.
The stage was set to plunge? Or are we plunging, because of the stage? Do you plunge into destruction? If you're in mid-air does it matter whether anyone is holding the wheel or not? Is it a flying car? Did a flying car cross the stage? Are we Chitty Chitty Bang Bang?
First, the great weakness of the enemy we face: there's no honor among thieves...
Six people. And they came up with "there's no honor among thieves."
And what they'd all forgotten -- the globalist elites, the predator class, the puppet-masters, the kleptocrats, the red-carpet mafia, call them what you want...
No. Pass.
-- what they'd forgotten about pandemonium is that once you set it loose to rampage you can't as easily whistle it back into the box again.
This is exactly why you never set a pandemonium loose to rampage. You think you can as easily whistle it back in, but you just can't. It's out the dog door and gone.
This line is vividly evocative all right, it's just not vividly evocative of anything in particular.
Do Beck, Henderson, Balfe, Beck, Bester & Cetrulo think a pandemonium is a monster? Should one of them have looked it up?
It was to be their boldest move yet, the endgame...
Gotta be either a move or an endgame. Can't be both.
... of a hundred-year scheme to crash the old and usher in their new world order, once and for all.
Once and for all. Six people on the payroll. Once and for all.
...They would wield fear and chaos as weapons as they always had, and demonize those who opposed them so the uninformed majority would misplace their blame.
I'll bet if I got six people together we could come up with a weaker verb than "misplace," or a less exciting phrase than "so the uninformed majority would misplace their blame." But it would take us some time.
Riots and food panics, incited uprisings...
Incited as an adjective. Not clunky at all.
... and sponsored overthrows...
Sponsored as an adjective. Overthrow as a noun. L. Ron Hubbard, here's your hat.
... blackouts, meltdowns, market crashes, hyper-inflation, depression, currency and commodity wars every bit as deadly as the shooting kind -- these contagious terrors were meant to drive the desperate people at the bottom to storm into the streets and cry out for the benevolent tyranny of a waiting savior from above.
Take that, English.
These tactics had proved tried-and-true...
Six people.
... through thirty centuries of repeating history, but this time their mayhem spread too fast and got out of hand early on...
It's like world's stupidest anchorman describing a car chase that's been going on forever. It's any three words he can remember that sound like a set.
... Spawn too many devils all at once and they'll soon start to organize, and then those dangerous servants can forsake their masters and awaken to ambitions all their own.
Beck did warn you: when he writes he gets bogged down.
An exercise. Try writing that thought like you're not six buffoons. Even if you straighten out who's doing what, it's just garbage. If you heard someone free styling it at a Halloween party you'd make them give you their keys.
The lit fuse on $1.5 quadrillion in bogus financial derivatives had now burned down to within a hair's-breadth of the powder...
Lit, modifying fuse. Because just saying "fuse" isn't fancy.
Spain and Portugal were at the brink of fiscal and social catastrophe. Greece was already on fire...
Kind of a Greece fire.
... its economy destroyed and teetering like the first domino in a fragile line poised to tear across Europe and then on around the globe...
Flaming dominos.
... And sure enough, sponsored revolutions...
Yep, "sponsored" again.
... igniting from North Africa to western Asia were revealing themselves to be only a foot in the door for a region-spanning rise of a virulent hard-line radical theocracy.
Yes, the fuse set off the powder that lit the flaming dominos that turned out to be a foot in the door. Try whistling that back into a box.
There's nothing right with this paragraph.
What would Fowler say? (Wait, I have it right here.)
To use this clumsy and incorrect construction in print amounts to telling the reader that he is not worth writing readable English for.
The bad guys inThe Eye of Moloch seem to be behind a huge domestic spy program to learn everything about everyone and take away their freedom. If Glenn Beck's against it, it can't be all bad.