NEWS JUNKIE POST
Feb 5, 2010 at 10:40 amAn American Name
Glenn Beck is infamous for putting his ignorance, his intolerance, bigotry and general cluelessness on display for the world to see. But some things that come out of his mouth are less…shall we say…well thought out than others?
On February 4, on his radio talk show, this came out of his mouth:
He chose to use his name, Barack, for a reason. To identify, not with America — you don’t take the name Barack to identify with America. You take the name Barack to identify with what? Your heritage? The heritage, maybe, of your father in Kenya, who is a radical? Is — really? Searching for something to give him any kind of meaning, just as he was searching later in life for religion.
It seems to escape Glenn Beck’s notice that every name is an ethnic name. Including “Glenn.” Yes, his own name is Irish, Gaelic (a variant of Glen). It is difficult to see how an ethnic name from Africa is less American than an ethnic name from Ireland – or anywhere else.
And what is an “American” name, Gaelic Glenn? America is a melting pot, inhabited by people from every corner of the earth. How can one name possibly be more “American” than another?
Oh, that’s right…this is all part of the old “constructed other” routine, sowing fear: He is not one of us. He is one of them. We are back to Sarah Palin’s “real Americans” and as we all know, “real” Americans don’t come from Africa, right Glenn?
I mean, America is for the old Anglo-Saxon Protestant white person, right?
So if your name isn’t Tom, Dick, or Harry, you’re apparently one of “them” out to destroy American values and America itself. Can’t trust anyone named Barack and Mustafa is right out!
It’s really difficult at times to grasp that Glenn Beck says some of the things he says (to say nothing of Hannity, Coulter, and Limbaugh) but he does say them and we cannot pretend he does not, however simpler (and pleasanter) it would make the world.
While this sort of unreasoning hate is out there, being spouted, being aired, and listened to by an audience that does not even blink at the absurdity of it, let alone show outrage, we have to note it and speak out against it.
The only thing un-American about this whole thing is Beck himself. He has no respect for the cultural diversity that made this nation great. By his own logic, his ancestors should have stayed put; they didn’t belong here.
But it is precisely those people who chose to make America their home who have made it great. The Revolutionary War was not fought by Americans; even the “native” colonists (I use that term advisedly) did not share an equal burden in the struggle, which was born more by the Irish than any other ethnic group. Without the Irish immigrants, who would have made up the rank and file of the Continental army and the militias? Not those Anglo-Saxon Protestants.
The lesson of the Civil War is the same: again, immigrants made up much of the Union army. Germans, Norwegians and Swedes (like my own ancestors), and again, Irishmen and Scots and others. The same goes for the frontier army of the 19th century.
So when Glenn sticks his foot in his mouth like this, and manages to look even more grotesquely ignorant and intolerant than is his wont, we should take advantage of the opportunity to educate those people out there who might believe such nonsense.
It’s not true.
So much for the lesson of history. The lesson of today is that if there is one group of people in the world you do not want to trust to tell you the sky is blue, it is Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, and all the others on the far right-wing who have manufactured a mythical America to turn to. They don’t like how things turned out, so they’re just going to pretend like none of it ever happened. The past isn’t what it should be, so they’ll write a new one and mold our nation’s future to match it.
We can’t let that happen. Not on our watch.
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The people who make up Beck’s audience don’t care whether his rantings make sense or not. What they’re looking for is someone who’ll feed back and amplify their own prejudices and hatreds–and he does a helluva good job at that. If Obama were to bring about world peace tomorrow, they’d rag on him for destroying the defence industry and putting people out of work. If he walked on water, they’d say that he can’t swim.
You cannot reason with people like that. They live in Bizarro World. The best that we can hope to do is to neutralize them.
Not only that, but the Irish (and the Italians) were essentially treated as non-White when they first started immigrating. Essentially the same rhetoric – they’re taking our jobs, they don’t belong here, they should go home.
You guys make me laugh. Why does Beck, Limbaugh, Hannity and others scare you so much? I mean, the most hateful, racist people in this country are left wing propagandists. The ratings of these shows are so far above the rest for one reason. Truth. Not because they speak it, but because Conservatives do their own research as suggested by those you say, people don’t care whether it makes sense or not. That’s BS and you know it. The reason I fell onto this propaganda site was in the process of doing my own research, and low and behold, I come across a site who seems to subscribe to the same ridiculous ideology as the likes of Olbermann, Madow or Mathews. Now those are great roll models. How’s that tingle up your leg doing? I guess Mathews isn’t racist since he forgot the President was black for an hour. Good luck with this, your going to need it. The majority does not follow your ideology. Thank God for that.