Glenn Beck and Julian Assange represent two options for the American state of mind. Beck is a charlatan who preaches an alternate reality that affirms the untested, ahistorical and prejudicial assumptions and feelings of millions of Americans.
These are voting citizens who know little of what lies beyond their neighborhoods, but know absolutely how they feel. Beck tells them that their feelings really do correspond to the state of the world and so they avidly, loyally, listen to him.
We all like to be told that we are right. That makes Glenn Beck a source of ego re-enforcement for a significant segment of the population.
Julian Assange is a real truth-teller who shatters assumptions, calls into question feelings, and would force us all to look at the historically objective information that best represents how things are. What Assange is doing makes no one comfortable and reinforces nobody’s ego. He stands up and speaks truth to power but, as Noam Chomsky once pointed out, power already knows the truth.
If power bothers about the truth at all, it is to keep it largely secret. To do so it seeks the real truth-teller’s destruction while leaving the charlatan free to play the Pied Piper with impunity.
This does not bode well for the future of America and perhaps the West at large. Too many Americans, and their leaders as well, haven’t got an accurate sense of the real world. In part, that is why the U.S. government regularly formulates domestic and foreign policies that answer the demands of interest groups while harming the rest of us.Such policies fail in the long run. In doing so they open political space for both charlatans and truth-tellers. And here they are in the persons of Glenn Beck and Julian Assange. Now America can choose.
I know who I'm choosing.
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