Glenn Beck: Egotistical or Liberal?

Glenn Beck gets many things right: Teddy Roosevelt was a disaster for America, small government, property rights . . . the founding principles. He gets some things wrong, too: the world might be on the way to destruction but it won’t be in the next five minutes, Bill O’Reilly is not a conservative, and all the random whatnots that he advertizes on his radio program. (Seriously, I could point out specific issues that I think he misses on but that would require more than the ten minutes I intend to invest in this post.)

This latest book of his, though, gets my dander up. Being George Washington is a history, a historical fiction. I haven’t read it and I don’t intend to. The idea isn’t new, after all, and other writers have already beaten him to the punch on this book. Jeff Shaara’s Rise to Rebellion and The Glorious Cause are two such books that tell the story of General Washington and the American Revolution in the manner of a novel rather than a dry history book. Shaara has nine New York Times Best Sellers and, what is sure to be his tenth, will be released in May of next year. David McCullough’s 1776 is a Pulitzer Prize winner that is written in the same style. The American Revolution is a widely written subject and these are just two of the heavyweights on the topic.

The fact that he has added to the body of work covering Washington doesn’t bother me a bit. What does bother is the way he promotes his book. He does so by denigrating histories that have come before the historical fiction style was first used. One of his co-hosts will read, in an over-done, obnoxious English accent to fife and drum background music, a passage from a non-fiction history, usually written by a historian of some note. Then, to dramatic background music akin to that from a pivotal scene in an action movie, Beck reads a passage from his own book covering the same event as the previous passage from the non-fiction history. Once his reading is finished, he and his buddies proceed with their typical sarcasm as to how the non-fiction version, clearly, is outdated and only Beck’s version will stand the test of time.

I wonder where Glenn Beck got all the facts of history that made his own book possible.

The final cut is that Beck, the conservative radio personality and internet show host, is anything but conservative in promoting his book. It is the liberal who tears down others in order to make himself taller, not the conservative. The conservative creates and lets the quality of his work stand or fall on its merits; he welcomes the competition.

Perhaps ego is a fault of Beck’s. He did, after all, give a previous book of his the same title as one of the most influential writings in all of history: Common Sense. Further evidence of a gigantic ego is the cover art on the jacket of a book about George Washington:

Imagine that, Glenn Beck is the cover and ole George is relegated to a bust in the background.

Because I think Beck is a good egg and am hoping that the subject of this post is just a fluke as to his character, I hope he reads this and, at least, addresses the jacket design for the second edition of the book.