//= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == '|') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i]));} //]]> (310) 367-6109
Editorial & Production Offices:3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd. Suite 400 Los Angeles, CA 90034 (310) 391-2245
advertisements GA_googleFillSlot("left1"); GA_googleFillSlot("left2"); GA_googleFillSlot("left3"); GA_googleFillSlot("left4"); GA_googleFillSlot("left5"); Print|Email Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" Rally, a Week LaterLast Saturday, Glenn Beck held his "Restoring Honor" rally inWashington, DC. Reason.tv's segment on the event, which went up afew hours after its conclusion, is above. (Shot by Jim Epstein withhelp from Josh Swain; edited by Meredith Bragg and Epstein; hostedby me; approximately 6.30 minutes).
Gohere for the writeup we gave the rally and to get downloadableversions of the video.
Reflecting on the event after a week has passed, some thingsstick with me, including the following:
1. While I think Beck is often massively confused in terms of basicfacts, he is channeling a very strong tradition in Americanwith regards to religion and the public square. One of the mainthemes of the rally is that is was our "turning away" from God thatled to our present problems (which are never fully articulated butare palpable due to recession). The solution, offered by Beck andother speakers and certainly most of the people we talked with inthe crowd, was "embracing" God and putting him back in the centerof our lives, both private and public. Regardless of whether theFounders were Christian in the way that many contemporaryChristians would recognize (they weren't), the notion of the U.S.as a god-fearing country that publicly demonstrated its religiosityis an old and powerful one. What is particularly odd about theanxiety that we've turned God (vaguely Christian in invocation, butreally a non-denominational higher power) out of the public squareis the not-small fact that we haven't: In a way they certainlydidn't in the '60s and '70s, for instance, politicians are far morepublicly pious than they used to be. But that may be less importantthan the feeling.
2. The recession is undergirding a huge amount of free-floatinganxiety about everything. This is obvious but rarely goes baldlystated. For much of the new century, and certainly for all of thepast three years, there has been nothing but uncertainty in theeconomy and a good degree of uncertainty in the political arena.The people we talked to felt something like cogs in a machine whoseshape and size they didn't even understand. They were not rabidxenophobes or racists or even haters in general, but they werepissed off that their individual actions did not seem to mean much.They were not conspiracists (few if any brought up Obama as aMuslim or a foreign national, for instance), but they felt cheatedand frustrated that their individual lives seemed to be controlledby larger forces and institutions over which they had little or nocontrol. And to the extent that they talked about government, thefocus was generally upon government spending that they assumedthreatened to destroy the future, for them and their kids orgrandkids.
3. That sort of mind-set has a history of giving rise to twosorts of broader movements. It can create a populist movement,which seeks to tame power elites, demonize foreigners, turngovernment over to a new crew, etc. Or it inspires self-improvementmodes that have political import but are not fundamentallypolitical (the various Great Awakenings in America, or theself-help gospels of Norman Vincent Peale). The rally was aninteresting mix of both strands. In his day job, Beck rarely missesan opportunity to rail against politicians, especially thosehe deems socialistic or progressive, and there's no mistaking SarahPalin on any podium as a politician. Yet more strong at this eventwas the self-help dimension, the idea that self-transformation wasthe key to a larger group transformation. A lot of that seems tostem almost directly from Beck's facility with and embrace of 12Step rhetoric. In some sense, the rally was a giant AA meeting (Idon't mean this snarkily), flush with the notion that whatever elseis going on in the world, you can control some portion of your ownlife.
4. The attendees saw a continuity between George Bush and BarackObama, spendthrift and ineffectual Republicans and Democrats. Tome, this was the most interesting aspect of the crowd. There weredefinitely more Republicans than Democrats (who may have beenmissing almost totally), but virtually everyone we talked withidentified as an independent. Who was fed up with the past decade,really, not just the past 18 or so months of Obama.
5. The crowd reminded me of Wal-Mart (not being snarky!). I livepart-time in small-town Ohio where the local Wal-Mart Super Centeris a major third space. Over the past few years and contrary to itsimage as wholesome, the chain has gone serously goth. Check out theT-shirts you can buy there and virtually every other one has skullsand crosses on it. And if something doesn't have stylized chainsand blood on it, then it's in Day-Glo colors. The crowd reflectedthat, with more piercings than I've seen at some rock shows, ZZ Topbeards galore, a biker look on many men and women. A noticeablenumber of the crowd were even wearing inexpensive Faded Glory(Wal-Mart's housebrand) American flag T-shirts. Any number ofcommentators may have been appalled by the crowd, but check it andsee: This is America.
6. The organizers and the attendees are not part ofthe Leave Us Alone coalition. In some ways, they areproto-libertarian: they want the government to spend less money andthey seemed wary of interventions into basic economic exchange(nobody seemed to dig ObamaCare or the auto bailouts or the bankbailouts). But they also want the government to be super-effectivein securing the borders, they worry about an undocumented fall inmorals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be afeature of the public square. Which is to say, like most Americanvoters, they may well want from government precisely the thingsthat it really can't deliver.
Where does this crowd and its energy and mentality go from here?We'll find out over the next few months.
Help Reason celebrate its next 40 years. Donate Now!
StumbleUpon| Digg| Reddit| Twitter| FacebookTry Reason's award-winning print edition today! Your first issue is FREE if you are not completely satisfied.
← Hugh Hefner, Rep. Loretta Sanchez, the… | Main See all 357 comments | Leave a comment Irrational Hater|9.4.10 @ 9:37AM|#Theytirrrkkerrrrjerrrbbssgod!
reply to this //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == '|') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i]));} //]]> |9.4.10 @ 9:38AM|#The comments re Wal Mart reminded me of something I noticed lastyear when we happened to pass through Sturgis, ND (unintentionally)the very weekend of the Sturgis road rally. Nearly everybody on ahog was grandparent age, and it made me realize that a significantgrandparent style these days is Grandpa with shaved head andgoatee, Grandma with long white hair, both done up in their Harleychaps.
If Easy Rider was made today, it would involve old folks seeingAmerica, and being shotgunned at the end by angry, SarahPalin-hating hipsters in a Scion xB.
reply to this Jeffersonian|9.4.10 @ 10:30AM|#Sturgis is in SD.
reply to this Kolohe|9.4.10 @ 12:02PM|#That's how unintentional it was! :)
reply to this Jeffersonian|9.4.10 @ 1:50PM|#Missed his left turn at Albuquerque?
reply to this //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == '|') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i]));} //]]> |9.4.10 @ 6:03PM|#Whoops. We were headed to Wyoming, so, North Dakota, EastDakota, whatevah!
reply to this //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == '|') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i]));} //]]> |9.4.10 @ 4:49PM|#Same here! I was at Mt. Rushmore, talking to other Sturgis-boundtourists, and they all seemed to have that free-floating sense ofthings are wrong and have been for a long time.
reply to this Amakudari|9.4.10 @ 9:51AM|#1. A "non-demonitional" god? I'm not a gra
(310) 367-6109
Editorial & Production Offices:3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd. Suite 400 Los Angeles, CA 90034 (310) 391-2245
advertisements GA_googleFillSlot("left1"); GA_googleFillSlot("left2"); GA_googleFillSlot("left3"); GA_googleFillSlot("left4"); GA_googleFillSlot("left5"); Print|Email Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" Rally, a Week LaterLast Saturday, Glenn Beck held his "Restoring Honor" rally inWashington, DC. Reason.tv's segment on the event, which went up afew hours after its conclusion, is above. (Shot by Jim Epstein withhelp from Josh Swain; edited by Meredith Bragg and Epstein; hostedby me; approximately 6.30 minutes).
Gohere for the writeup we gave the rally and to get downloadableversions of the video.
Reflecting on the event after a week has passed, some thingsstick with me, including the following:
1. While I think Beck is often massively confused in terms of basicfacts, he is channeling a very strong tradition in Americanwith regards to religion and the public square. One of the mainthemes of the rally is that is was our "turning away" from God thatled to our present problems (which are never fully articulated butare palpable due to recession). The solution, offered by Beck andother speakers and certainly most of the people we talked with inthe crowd, was "embracing" God and putting him back in the centerof our lives, both private and public. Regardless of whether theFounders were Christian in the way that many contemporaryChristians would recognize (they weren't), the notion of the U.S.as a god-fearing country that publicly demonstrated its religiosityis an old and powerful one. What is particularly odd about theanxiety that we've turned God (vaguely Christian in invocation, butreally a non-denominational higher power) out of the public squareis the not-small fact that we haven't: In a way they certainlydidn't in the '60s and '70s, for instance, politicians are far morepublicly pious than they used to be. But that may be less importantthan the feeling.
2. The recession is undergirding a huge amount of free-floatinganxiety about everything. This is obvious but rarely goes baldlystated. For much of the new century, and certainly for all of thepast three years, there has been nothing but uncertainty in theeconomy and a good degree of uncertainty in the political arena.The people we talked to felt something like cogs in a machine whoseshape and size they didn't even understand. They were not rabidxenophobes or racists or even haters in general, but they werepissed off that their individual actions did not seem to mean much.They were not conspiracists (few if any brought up Obama as aMuslim or a foreign national, for instance), but they felt cheatedand frustrated that their individual lives seemed to be controlledby larger forces and institutions over which they had little or nocontrol. And to the extent that they talked about government, thefocus was generally upon government spending that they assumedthreatened to destroy the future, for them and their kids orgrandkids.
3. That sort of mind-set has a history of giving rise to twosorts of broader movements. It can create a populist movement,which seeks to tame power elites, demonize foreigners, turngovernment over to a new crew, etc. Or it inspires self-improvementmodes that have political import but are not fundamentallypolitical (the various Great Awakenings in America, or theself-help gospels of Norman Vincent Peale). The rally was aninteresting mix of both strands. In his day job, Beck rarely missesan opportunity to rail against politicians, especially thosehe deems socialistic or progressive, and there's no mistaking SarahPalin on any podium as a politician. Yet more strong at this eventwas the self-help dimension, the idea that self-transformation wasthe key to a larger group transformation. A lot of that seems tostem almost directly from Beck's facility with and embrace of 12Step rhetoric. In some sense, the rally was a giant AA meeting (Idon't mean this snarkily), flush with the notion that whatever elseis going on in the world, you can control some portion of your ownlife.
4. The attendees saw a continuity between George Bush and BarackObama, spendthrift and ineffectual Republicans and Democrats. Tome, this was the most interesting aspect of the crowd. There weredefinitely more Republicans than Democrats (who may have beenmissing almost totally), but virtually everyone we talked withidentified as an independent. Who was fed up with the past decade,really, not just the past 18 or so months of Obama.
5. The crowd reminded me of Wal-Mart (not being snarky!). I livepart-time in small-town Ohio where the local Wal-Mart Super Centeris a major third space. Over the past few years and contrary to itsimage as wholesome, the chain has gone serously goth. Check out theT-shirts you can buy there and virtually every other one has skullsand crosses on it. And if something doesn't have stylized chainsand blood on it, then it's in Day-Glo colors. The crowd reflectedthat, with more piercings than I've seen at some rock shows, ZZ Topbeards galore, a biker look on many men and women. A noticeablenumber of the crowd were even wearing inexpensive Faded Glory(Wal-Mart's housebrand) American flag T-shirts. Any number ofcommentators may have been appalled by the crowd, but check it andsee: This is America.
6. The organizers and the attendees are not part ofthe Leave Us Alone coalition. In some ways, they areproto-libertarian: they want the government to spend less money andthey seemed wary of interventions into basic economic exchange(nobody seemed to dig ObamaCare or the auto bailouts or the bankbailouts). But they also want the government to be super-effectivein securing the borders, they worry about an undocumented fall inmorals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be afeature of the public square. Which is to say, like most Americanvoters, they may well want from government precisely the thingsthat it really can't deliver.
Where does this crowd and its energy and mentality go from here?We'll find out over the next few months.
Help Reason celebrate its next 40 years. Donate Now!
StumbleUpon| Digg| Reddit| Twitter| FacebookTry Reason's award-winning print edition today! Your first issue is FREE if you are not completely satisfied.
← Hugh Hefner, Rep. Loretta Sanchez, the… | Main See all 357 comments | Leave a comment Irrational Hater|9.4.10 @ 9:37AM|#Theytirrrkkerrrrjerrrbbssgod!
reply to this //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == '|') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i]));} //]]> |9.4.10 @ 9:38AM|#The comments re Wal Mart reminded me of something I noticed lastyear when we happened to pass through Sturgis, ND (unintentionally)the very weekend of the Sturgis road rally. Nearly everybody on ahog was grandparent age, and it made me realize that a significantgrandparent style these days is Grandpa with shaved head andgoatee, Grandma with long white hair, both done up in their Harleychaps.
If Easy Rider was made today, it would involve old folks seeingAmerica, and being shotgunned at the end by angry, SarahPalin-hating hipsters in a Scion xB.
reply to this Jeffersonian|9.4.10 @ 10:30AM|#Sturgis is in SD.
reply to this Kolohe|9.4.10 @ 12:02PM|#That's how unintentional it was! :)
reply to this Jeffersonian|9.4.10 @ 1:50PM|#Missed his left turn at Albuquerque?
reply to this //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == '|') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i]));} //]]> |9.4.10 @ 6:03PM|#Whoops. We were headed to Wyoming, so, North Dakota, EastDakota, whatevah!
reply to this //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == '|') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i]));} //]]> |9.4.10 @ 4:49PM|#Same here! I was at Mt. Rushmore, talking to other Sturgis-boundtourists, and they all seemed to have that free-floating sense ofthings are wrong and have been for a long time.
reply to this Amakudari|9.4.10 @ 9:51AM|#1. A "non-demonitional" god? I'm not a grammar Nazi or anythingand will probably get schooled by Joez Law, but still, that's apretty amusing typo.
2. In the same way that the anxiety is unstated, so are thesolutions, and I think in both cases it's because we don't want toaddress the problems and just hope they'll go away. You'll get muchdifferent answers if you ask people whether they think thegovernment is spending too much money vs. whether the governmentshould cut Social Security, Medicare and defense.
4. I think a lot of people say they're fed up with the lastdecade when that's just a mental trick to give form to theirarguments against Obama. There are a lot of people protesting nowwho would not be seen protesting a Prez McCain, whose policiesregarding entitlements or war would likely be similar toObama's.
My best guess of where it goes from here is that it helps somemodest Republican victories in November and fizzles. Think anti-warmovement post-2006/2008.
reply to this //= 0; i=i-1){ if (l[i].substring(0, 1) == '|') document.write("&#"+unescape(l[i].substring(1))+";"); else document.write(unescape(l[i]));} //]]> |9.4.10 @ 10:10AM|#I would agree with you except the antiwar movement was alwaysbuilt on a temporary condition-the Iraq War and the BushPresidency.
The broad middle class gets that their government is goingbankrupt and their currency worth less every day than it wasbefore, and that this problem is not going away.
reply to this Amakudari|9.4.10 @ 10:41AM|#Disagree. I think people worry that our government's policiesare leading us in a bad direction, but they don't have convictions.I was at a house party yesterday and
3415 S. Sepulveda Blvd. Suite 400 Los Angeles, CA 90034 (310) 391-2245
Last Saturday, Glenn Beck held his "Restoring Honor" rally inWashington, DC. Reason.tv's segment on the event, which went up afew hours after its conclusion, is above. (Shot by Jim Epstein withhelp from Josh Swain; edited by Meredith Bragg and Epstein; hostedby me; approximately 6.30 minutes).
Gohere for the writeup we gave the rally and to get downloadableversions of the video.
Reflecting on the event after a week has passed, some thingsstick with me, including the following:
1. While I think Beck is often massively confused in terms of basicfacts, he is channeling a very strong tradition in Americanwith regards to religion and the public square. One of the mainthemes of the rally is that is was our "turning away" from God thatled to our present problems (which are never fully articulated butare palpable due to recession). The solution, offered by Beck andother speakers and certainly most of the people we talked with inthe crowd, was "embracing" God and putting him back in the centerof our lives, both private and public. Regardless of whether theFounders were Christian in the way that many contemporaryChristians would recognize (they weren't), the notion of the U.S.as a god-fearing country that publicly demonstrated its religiosityis an old and powerful one. What is particularly odd about theanxiety that we've turned God (vaguely Christian in invocation, butreally a non-denominational higher power) out of the public squareis the not-small fact that we haven't: In a way they certainlydidn't in the '60s and '70s, for instance, politicians are far morepublicly pious than they used to be. But that may be less importantthan the feeling.
2. The recession is undergirding a huge amount of free-floatinganxiety about everything. This is obvious but rarely goes baldlystated. For much of the new century, and certainly for all of thepast three years, there has been nothing but uncertainty in theeconomy and a good degree of uncertainty in the political arena.The people we talked to felt something like cogs in a machine whoseshape and size they didn't even understand. They were not rabidxenophobes or racists or even haters in general, but they werepissed off that their individual actions did not seem to mean much.They were not conspiracists (few if any brought up Obama as aMuslim or a foreign national, for instance), but they felt cheatedand frustrated that their individual lives seemed to be controlledby larger forces and institutions over which they had little or nocontrol. And to the extent that they talked about government, thefocus was generally upon government spending that they assumedthreatened to destroy the future, for them and their kids orgrandkids.
3. That sort of mind-set has a history of giving rise to twosorts of broader movements. It can create a populist movement,which seeks to tame power elites, demonize foreigners, turngovernment over to a new crew, etc. Or it inspires self-improvementmodes that have political import but are not fundamentallypolitical (the various Great Awakenings in America, or theself-help gospels of Norman Vincent Peale). The rally was aninteresting mix of both strands. In his day job, Beck rarely missesan opportunity to rail against politicians, especially thosehe deems socialistic or progressive, and there's no mistaking SarahPalin on any podium as a politician. Yet more strong at this eventwas the self-help dimension, the idea that self-transformation wasthe key to a larger group transformation. A lot of that seems tostem almost directly from Beck's facility with and embrace of 12Step rhetoric. In some sense, the rally was a giant AA meeting (Idon't mean this snarkily), flush with the notion that whatever elseis going on in the world, you can control some portion of your ownlife.
4. The attendees saw a continuity between George Bush and BarackObama, spendthrift and ineffectual Republicans and Democrats. Tome, this was the most interesting aspect of the crowd. There weredefinitely more Republicans than Democrats (who may have beenmissing almost totally), but virtually everyone we talked withidentified as an independent. Who was fed up with the past decade,really, not just the past 18 or so months of Obama.
5. The crowd reminded me of Wal-Mart (not being snarky!). I livepart-time in small-town Ohio where the local Wal-Mart Super Centeris a major third space. Over the past few years and contrary to itsimage as wholesome, the chain has gone serously goth. Check out theT-shirts you can buy there and virtually every other one has skullsand crosses on it. And if something doesn't have stylized chainsand blood on it, then it's in Day-Glo colors. The crowd reflectedthat, with more piercings than I've seen at some rock shows, ZZ Topbeards galore, a biker look on many men and women. A noticeablenumber of the crowd were even wearing inexpensive Faded Glory(Wal-Mart's housebrand) American flag T-shirts. Any number ofcommentators may have been appalled by the crowd, but check it andsee: This is America.
6. The organizers and the attendees are not part ofthe Leave Us Alone coalition. In some ways, they areproto-libertarian: they want the government to spend less money andthey seemed wary of interventions into basic economic exchange(nobody seemed to dig ObamaCare or the auto bailouts or the bankbailouts). But they also want the government to be super-effectivein securing the borders, they worry about an undocumented fall inmorals, and they are emphatic that genuine religiosity should be afeature of the public square. Which is to say, like most Americanvoters, they may well want from government precisely the thingsthat it really can't deliver.
Where does this crowd and its energy and mentality go from here?We'll find out over the next few months.
Help Reason celebrate its next 40 years. Donate Now!
Try Reason's award-winning print edition today! Your first issue is FREE if you are not completely satisfied.
Theytirrrkkerrrrjerrrbbssgod!
The comments re Wal Mart reminded me of something I noticed lastyear when we happened to pass through Sturgis, ND (unintentionally)the very weekend of the Sturgis road rally. Nearly everybody on ahog was grandparent age, and it made me realize that a significantgrandparent style these days is Grandpa with shaved head andgoatee, Grandma with long white hair, both done up in their Harleychaps.
If Easy Rider was made today, it would involve old folks seeingAmerica, and being shotgunned at the end by angry, SarahPalin-hating hipsters in a Scion xB.
Sturgis is in SD.
That's how unintentional it was! :)
Missed his left turn at Albuquerque?
Whoops. We were headed to Wyoming, so, North Dakota, EastDakota, whatevah!
Same here! I was at Mt. Rushmore, talking to other Sturgis-boundtourists, and they all seemed to have that free-floating sense ofthings are wrong and have been for a long time.
1. A "non-demonitional" god? I'm not a grammar Nazi or anythingand will probably get schooled by Joez Law, but still, that's apretty amusing typo.
2. In the same way that the anxiety is unstated, so are thesolutions, and I think in both cases it's because we don't want toaddress the problems and just hope they'll go away. You'll get muchdifferent answers if you ask people whether they think thegovernment is spending too much money vs. whether the governmentshould cut Social Security, Medicare and defense.
4. I think a lot of people say they're fed up with the lastdecade when that's just a mental trick to give form to theirarguments against Obama. There are a lot of people protesting nowwho would not be seen protesting a Prez McCain, whose policiesregarding entitlements or war would likely be similar toObama's.
My best guess of where it goes from here is that it helps somemodest Republican victories in November and fizzles. Think anti-warmovement post-2006/2008.
I would agree with you except the antiwar movement was alwaysbuilt on a temporary condition-the Iraq War and the BushPresidency.
The broad middle class gets that their government is goingbankrupt and their currency worth less every day than it wasbefore, and that this problem is not going away.
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