The Damage that Time has Done

This is a follow-up to a post I wrote last week on civility, Hey, I Got Your Civility Right Here, Champ!, where I outline that we are uncivil because it pays.

Over the last couple of months a really smart guy, James Rucker, put a web site together to bring the Forces of the Civil to bear on one, Glenn Beck.  The man got tired of the racist rants being put forth by Glenn Beck and did something about it.

ColorOfChange.Org asked web surfers to lend their names to a list after reading a call to arms about Glenn Beck.  Travel the link and lend your name too, if you like.

I like this guy.  He is a stand up guy who has gotten folks to see his point of view.  Better yet, he has the ability to lead people to do something to change their condition.  This is a man to reckon with.

The result is that a number of big ticket sponsors have left the Beck echo chamber and the main stream media has double clutched.  This is fairly old news.

However, as we the people, start to flex our vocal chords and change our spending habits, Time Magazine has done a complete cover package with Glenn Beck sticking his tongue out at the rest of us.

Hence, the title of this post  (and you thought it was about the conflict between my expanding waist line and my modified Atkins Diet (anything that moves is fair game for lunch…)).

Time has, in the name of The Almighty Dollar, undone what Mr. Rucker has set to do by giving Glenn Beck this forum.  This is the beginning of a rehab job for Beck.  Time is trying once again to make it okay for people to sponsor this “person”. 

Yes, the cover of Time, as they like to tell all of us who will listen, is for really important people or subjects.  This gives Beck credence where he should be reviled.  (I guess this is where I can say Time has had Hitler, not only on the cover a number of times, but as Man-of-the-Year 1938.)  Beck is controversial and confrontational for the same reasons as Jerry Springer and Nancy Grace, to make a buck.

Beck is a right wing demigod and is dangerous because he is creating the same environment that Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon created prior to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin.  As you may recall, Rabin won the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize for trying to solve the knots that bind the Middle East from attaining any sort of peace.  Rabin sought real solutions to problems that still exist in the region.

The right-wing of Israeli politics created a similar environment where it was okay for a demented Orthodox law student to take matters into his own hands and kill Rabin after a rally in November 2005.  The eventual political beneficiaries of this act were Netanyahu and Sharon.  These are people who have stalemated the process over there for the last decade and a half.

Am I putting Beck and Time at the same level as the ultra-right-wing of Israeli politics?   In my opinion, yeah, they go there.  These people are creating a dangerous environment that saying it is ok to be racist and carry on like our country is being destroyed, and giving them a warped intellectual license to do something about it.  Seeing guns at forums where the president is speaking scares the daylights out of me.  These people are creating the American Taliban. 

The over-acted emotional soliloquies that Beck performs could eventually have the effect of creating the space for an American Yigal Amir, the right-wing nut job that killed Rabin.  Time, by it's irresponsible journalism, is providing gasoline for this arsonist.

But can any one person be held responsible for what we are seeing unfold before our eyes right now.  It will be like the accident scene that took Princess Diana.  A lot of idiots on cable will cluck their tongues saying how the paparazzi drove the Princess into the wall while the other parts of the media pay big bucks for the pictures.

I am not saying that I want Time to be censored by the government, I am saying I want Time to be censored by you, in the marketplace.  Just like James Rucker has stood up to a bully like Glenn Beck.

We are still at a point where we can do something about this.  We all see where the road is going.  If you want to do something about this here are some starters:

• Find your voice.  When in conversation and somebody is making the goofy remark, nicely, and I mean nicely, challenge them on their facts.

 

• Email Time:         [e-mail].  Let these guys know what you are thinking.  When I send my email to them I’ll be posting a link to this article once it posts on the site, with a little note to say that Time is acting irresponsibly in its coverage.

 

• Copy what you send to some of the sponsors of Time’s web site.  It is especially effective if you are an AT&T, or Sprint, or Comcast, or Liberty Mutual customer and let them know how you feel. 

 

• Comment here with some other ideas.  I am not that smart, help get me a clue.  I'll incorporate the best ones with names and dates into the text of this article.

Imitation is the sincerest for of flattery, it’s time to do the James Rucker thing.

<<<<<<

Addendum:  I just got out from under a rock.  Katie Couric is now celebrating this person, giving him the same rehab job as Time has.  Please include a note to CBS News on their feedback page... http://www.cbsnews.com/htdocs/feedback/fb_news_form.shtml

>>>>>>

 

Comments

[KOSMOCITIZEN]

Thank you Joe.. for bringing up the Israel perspective here
Mainstream Israelis said this about Palestinians '''Your hate towards Israel is bigger than the love of your children '''
meanwhile the extreme wing of Israelis fall in the same category with the extreme Palestinians....

Here in America the extreme right wing hate so much Democrats and progressives that is O. K.
if this country become a Banana Republic...for crying aloud , Aren't those people have kids and loved ones. they want everybody live in misery and chaos because their ego ...
IF we don't fix health care,learn to conserve energy, reevaluate our capitalist system for the 21st century
and start working together and producing stuff we 'll be in trouble.

[gs-425]

DaNerd falls in line of the popular front.

[Joe The Nerd Ferraro - Huffpost Blogger]

I actually had this written last weekend, but was asked by the editors to tone it down a little bit. Which I was happy to do. Sorry I couldn't get the timing right for you, but the blog and their editors are going thru a great deal of growth, so a guy like me, on the bottom of the food chain, still needs to earn his spurs. I was trying to get ahead of the curve on this...

As for protesting Beck, I don't want the government steppping in to shut him down, I want market forces to do the job, it is much more effective. As I said, I like the ColorOfChange...

[gs-425]

I don't know if you have noticed, but this has been going on for longer than your supposed writing of a week ago. Never-the-­less....ba­ck in line comrade

[dhough1976]

Couric's and Time's coverage of Glenn Beck is likely part of a media blitz to resurrect his image after losing advertisers. In truth, Beck isn't about left vs. right wing, progressive vs. conservative, it is rampant cynicism, a trait common among extremists, but one Beck has mastered. He hates the 9/11 widows, then exploits their husbands' deaths for his self-aggrandizing 9/12 Project. He exposes the horrible U.S. healthcare system after having surgery, yet 16 months later it is a great system. He speaks for the common man against Big Government, but gives Big Business a pass to appease sponsors and lobbyists, ignoring the obscene wealth in corporate America's C-level suites, wealth built on the backs of the common man. Face it, Beck is more concerned with celebrity than anything else.
Consider this perspective. Imagine going into a coma shortly after 9/11 with the country stunned and angry at those responsible for the carnage. You awaken now and see Beck pretending to poison the Speaker of the House, calling the President racist, fomenting a violent uprising against the government, and promoting a project glorifying those frightening days after 9/11 with a Taliban like manifesto of intolerance, intimidation and rigid dogma diametrically opposed to our democratic principles. Would you suspect the terrorists had won, or had planted a provocateur in our midst? Beck is more an Al Quaeda sympathizer than he is a Patriot, and lending any legitimacy to him is shameful.
D. Hough

[Joe The Nerd Ferraro - Huffpost Blogger]

D. - excellent response. Have you contacted CBS or Time with this commentary?

[dhough1976]

Joe, I sent the comments to [e-mail], then when I saw your post and the link to CBS, did the same to Couric. I also posted a comment like this to her Facebook page. Thanks for providing a platform to speak out and spread the word about this jerk. I actually contributed to the boycott effort, and I'm willing to do more. While he can cry about it being unfair to try to muzzle him, fact is that's how the free market works GlennBo!

[TRYKER]

Once one has appeared on the cover of TIME, the decline follows. It has become nearly historic.
Sarah Palin was "covered" and within a year, she had resigned with but a twitter heard from her since.
This little boost to Beck is the last gasp of desperation. He is also being feted in Salon in a 3 part series. The over-exposure will bare him for all and his "mystique" will fade away.
Surely a change in occupation looms for Beck, but alas he belongs to the Mormon church which doesn't sanction lone evangelists out to make a buck, so he'll have to change religions if he wants to lead the sinners on his own.
How many more walls are there to bounce off...he has hit them all and come away rummy. Everyone, stand back, he's gonna blow!

[Joe The Nerd Ferraro - Huffpost Blogger]

so you are going with the Sports Illustrated Curse where he blows the figurative ACL on a broken pass play in his next game.

I wonder if he will be doing door-to-door missionary work? (I'll have to make sure that I don't feed the Rotweillers that morning.)

[seawolf77]

You want a society that lives breathes and dies by the profit motive, you are going to get a FOX News Netywork, a Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Bill O Reilly. You have to have the yellers and the screamers. You have to have their level of rhetoric to encite the masses. I see it in these people. Nothing makes them feel better than a party where they all get togther and bitch slap each other's backs the entire night congragulating themselves on being right , white and right. Or at the bars where they embrace each other , often times very nearly weeping tears of joy. They look deeply into each other deeply conservative eyes and yes they see the affirmation, the joyful, saluatation to the good.

[ginamarie101]

Bravo, Joe. I am in your corner. It doesn't help that Katie Couric has given him yet another frontline opportunity to schmooz public opinion. One can only hope it will have the same effect as her interview with Sarah.
I am drafting my email to Time straight away.
Good article, btw.

[Joe The Nerd Ferraro - Huffpost Blogger]

I always appreciate it, ty...

[Julie Murphy]

emailed and commented - this man drives me crazy grrrrrrr!