All in all, I think Glenn Beck's riff on my article was far more measured than I would have expected. Compared to the ad hominem attacks I've endured from many of Beck's followers in the comments sections of various blogs, Beck himself was comparably very civil and fair. A former student had emailed me saying he saw Beck mention me on his show so I checked it out. Beck said that the issues I raised beckons the kind of conversation we should be having in this country and I couldn't agree more -- it might have been the first time I've agreed with Beck on anything.
But he willfully missed the point of my article. First, I'm not a specialist on the founding of the American republic, but Gordon S. Wood is, whom I quoted. So Beck's beef isn't with me about the origins of the republic and Christianity, it's with Wood.
Second, I wasn't saying that the U.S. Constitution is no longer relevant in the 21st Century, far from it. I was referring only to the church/state debate not the checks and balances and divisions of powers and the Bill of Rights, etc. I was simply agreeing with Gordon Wood and other historians who believe that divining what the founders intended vis-a-vis the "wall of separation" between Church and State is layered with complexity and nuance and the passage of a couple hundred years of case law has made it impossible to nail down definitively, as the Wood quotation in my article implies.
Third, I was really commenting on how fascinating I found it that Beck, who now holds an honorary doctorate in the humanities from Liberty University, (and I think he likes the fact that I referred to him as "Dr. Beck"), engages in what I called "professorial playacting." In a state-of-the-art television studio with the most advanced whizz-bang computer graphics at his fingertips, Beck uses a chalkboard. That's interesting on many levels.
If I were ever to meet Dr. Beck I'd like to give him some historical examples from the periods with which I am more acquainted. For example, I'd point out to him that during World War Two the United States was fighting against Germany, which was led by a fascist monster, Adolf Hitler, who Beck loves to bring up. But then I would also point out that the United States was in an alliance at the time with the Soviet Union, which was led by a communist monster, Josef Stalin. (And the Russians certainly did their fair share in defeating Nazi Germany.) The U.S. was fighting for "freedom" in an alliance with a nation that was totalitarian. Now, I would only bring that example up to illustrate to Dr. Glenn that the real historical record is far more complex and nuanced than he projects to his viewers, i.e. his "students."
I'd also point out to Beck and his Republican friends that there are such things as empirical historical facts that are not "spun" or manipulated by historians although they sound quite "liberal" when acknowledged.
For example, contrary to the mythology that sometimes fogs President Ronald Reagan's overall fiscal record, the tax burden of working Americans increased during the 1980s, as did the national debt, and the overall size of the government. By 1986, the cumulative federal debt had reached $2 trillion, which was more than the United States had accumulated in its entire previous history. Throughout Reagan's two terms his defense buildup totaled nearly $2 trillion, and all eight of the Administration's budgets ran deficits. The smallest (in 2006 dollars) was in fiscal year 1982, which was $127.9 billion; and the largest was in fiscal year 1986, which was $221.2 billion. In 1983, the deficit reached a peacetime record to that time of 6.3 percent of GDP. The national debt went from roughly $900 billion in 1980 to $2.9 trillion in 1989, and the nonmilitary federal workforce increased from about 2.8 million employees in 1980 to 3 million when Reagan left office. Had the Administration's 1981 tax cuts stood without subsequent remedies the deficits would have grown even larger. Reagan and the Congress had set the nation on a fiscal course that was drenched in red ink, but through early 1983 the President continued to blame the deficit on his predecessor.
This Reagan example I bring up just to show Beck that historians deal with facts and sometimes the facts don't fit the Utopian conservative ideology that he pitches on his show.
I have hundreds of other historical examples where the facts don't support the conservative arguments or the choice was Niebuhrian: between the "immoral" and the "less immoral." What Dr. Beck does is cast history in a monumental frame with "good guys" and "bad guys" and we all know to whom he's referring: anyone on the Left (no matter how he construes it) is always the "bad guy." History doesn't work that way. So he is "monumentally wrong" about history in my view.
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It would seem that to start discerning the truth in history, in our current events, and in ourselves, that we must be willing to acknowledge that everyone is full of contradictions (capable of good and evil). That is after all our choice and, at many times, a difficult one since it is, often, difficult to determine what is good and evil without a compass. If anything, we live in a time when people, too often, have lost their compass.
Intelligent being need to learn to do short catchy headlines and phrases to compete.. simple as that.. attention span of most listeners, viewers, twitters etc.. is in milleseconds..
www.factcheck.org
www.politfact.org
www.people-press.org
www.opensecrets.org
www.snopes.com
Any and all of which, regularly dispense the punishment of facts for the lies told Americans by both sides.In media, government, and entertainment [ which actually describe the first two].
Odd!
Semper fi
Semper fi
The sad part is that the golden age alluded to never actually existed. The creation of the public safety net of services came about because there was a need for it--people weren't getting taken care of in that supposed "better time in which we lived." The elderly, in general, have benefited a great deal by having a mandatory retirement fund into which they have paid while working (Social Security).
The ignorant can teach their children little of use. The graduates of fifty years ago don't know as much about the world as graduates today, whether one compares those at the top of their respective classes or those at the bottom. The technological boom has left parents even more unsuited to teaching their children what's necessary for living as a functional member of a modern society.
Some of us would much rather deal with both history and current conditions as they are, learning from the former to address the issues of the latter. Simple-minded cries that we should return to a past that never was doesn't serve anybody well, at all. Indeed, that sort of nonsense is a major contributing cause to many of the problems that we now have to confront.
Semper fi
He will simply delete the information that does not support his ideology, and use or misconstrue a single fact that can be spinned to conform to his belief system.
Any group of people who can take the data from the entire history of science, and still delcare the earth is 6,000 years old, is simply a cult.
You got a crush on him, precious?
But how is a year measured? To us, 365 days.
But what if a year in the eyes of other beings, at other times had 1.2 million days in it?
Or 6.8 billion?
Then too, other cults exist for other reasons. Environmentalism, animal rights, celebrity status, and other purely non-secular regions can easily become cults when taken to their ultimate degrees.
So why does he have free reign on tv? Because he is a mere tool, a flunky, a medium, a puppet, a doodad.
Spotlighting on the "agenda" of those who let Beck use the medium to spew alternate reality is more significant in understanding the politics of our time, and yet it is exactly what's lacking in this historical discourse.
She said she didn't know that Monty Python still had a show.