Glenn Beck's Convenient Letter

     I never liked people like Glenn Beck, you know the type, the smartass kid in the school yard who insists on possessing knowledge no one else has, even if it is not true, just so he can assert the subterfuge of his superiority. Or the disgruntled teenager who thinks his parents are purposely plotting against his happiness. And as adults we have all worked with folks, who like Mr. Beck, are always spreading rumors about the company's impending demise. No one knows for sure why persons suffering such affliction behave in such a manner, but they have kept research psychologists flush with material for at least a century.
     I am not saying I necessarily disagree with Glenn Beck's assertions about how President Obama and other Progressives have slowly eroded the soil from around the edifice of freedom. But where others take a reasoned approached to this encroachment, Mr. Beck works hard to lead his legions of lemmings to leap off the cliffs of common sense into the chasm of irrationality. The mechanisms he uses are his radio show and books, all aimed to give substance and authority to his delusional theories in order to increase his audience for the former and unit sales for the latter.
     The latest drivel I heard rolling off the tongue of this modern day P.T. Barnum is that all of history as we previously knew it is a lie created by the Progressives for the last hundred years. His "evidence" for such a claim is a letter found in a box belonging to Upton Sinclair which was purchased at auction by one of Mr. Beck's votarients. This one letter, which Glenn Beck never even questioned the authenticity of because it supported his agenda to serve up more conspiracy slop to his masses, proves that Progressives have engineered the manufacturing of history with the willing participation of the press (which is what the media was called in the days when there was only the print medium).
     The Progressive movement was not that formulated back in the early 1900s to engage in such an elaborate scheme as Mr. Beck and his "letter" suggest." The movement began in the Republican Party with Theodore Roosevelt, and Calvin Coolidge even considered himself a devotee of the ideology for a time. The movement flowed between parties and ideologies, sometimes firmly planted in the garden of the Right, and sometimes drifting into the garden of Leftism. It was not really until the Franklin Roosevelt administration that the Progressive movement became the Leftist ideology we know today.
     Of course the real trajectory of history does not suit the purposes of Glenn Beck, it is much to gray to fit into his black and white world. So he must twist and mangle the limbs of history to fit into his conspiratorial casket. The reason is simple; he wants to sell more books, increase his radio and cable audience, and keep his empire based on doom and gloom propped up with the stilts of deception. The persons who buy into Mr. Beck's special brand of self-aggrandizing delusion will find themselves poorer for the experience, both financially, as those who bought gold on Mr. Beck's recommendation and have lost up to a third of their investment, and in piece of mind that never comes as a result of believing conspiracies.