(no subject)

[fpb]

If the Glenn Beck rally has been the success it is claimed, that is the worst news, for the American right, for America, and for the world, that anyone could conceive. Beck is a creature of Rupert Murdoch, and anyone who looks at Murdoch knows that he is corruption incarnate and personified. A thrice-married libertine who managed somehow to worm his way into a Papal knighthood while his newspapers persecuted the Church, a tax fraud who manages to pay less than one per cent of his British income in tax thanks to a monumental structure of tax-haven corporations, an enemy of competition and free trade whose purpose in every industry he enters is monopoly, a brute who sells his newspapers on nothing but sex and thuggery, this man was born to poison everything he touched.

To deal with him is to be compromised. Ask Brent Bozell III (who however has been growing depressingly silent on the monster of late) which of the four TV networks is most outrageously committed to obscenity, moral looseness in every area, exaggerated violence and showy, narcissistic sex; and then ask all the conservative pundits and personalities, beginning with Sarah Palin herself, how they can keep a straight face preaching the benefits of Judeo-Christian culture and family values knowing that an hour or two later the same network would be broadcasting "Family guy" or some obscene "reality" show. Debbie Schlussel may be a self-righteous harpy notable mostly for her failures, but in opposing him, everyone who works for him, and everything he stands for, she is doing righteous work; and someone has to.

When Dr.Martin Luther King called together the famous rally which Beck imitated, he had spent more than a decade building up the civil rights movement and his own position in it; he had risked his life (which he was one day soon to lose) in its service, and had acquired such stature that almost every notable black personality in America, beginning with Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson, was willing and glad to stand by his side. Who is Glenn Beck? What has he done to give him the moral authority to imitate Dr.King, to call out a political movement in the nation's capital, to claim to speak in the name of God and the constitution? Nothing. He is there because he has been promoted by Murdoch's bloodsucking, liberticidal organization; and the hand that moves him is the hand of the international crook from down under. This is the take-over of the conservative movement by the media colossus that pays no taxes, that teaches (and pratices) sexual looseness and mental brutality, that has nothing but a negative, acidic, destructive impact on society. God help us.

Comments

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

Thank you for saying so. May I link to this?

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Please.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Glenn Back isn't the entire rally - he was hitching his wagon to the Tea Party wave much more than the reverse. And the rally itself was notable for being non-agressive.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

My point is that this is Robber Murder buying a stake in the Tea Party. And Robber Murder is corruption. The whole FoxTV operation has been in part an attempt to both raise and control a new American "conservative" movement for Murder's, sorry, Murdoch's own benefit, and unfortunately it looks like he is succeeding.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Does it matter so much when such reports come from the rally? This kindness, incidentally, is what I've experienced time and again travelling through America, and hasn't been much reported since Tocqueville. And one of its major components is Christianity. You should look at the good side.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Look at what Robber Murder and his damned tabloids have done to the United Kingdom, then you tell me. I came to Britain one year after Murdoch; I have seen the effect of his journalism on popular culture all my adult life, and despaired as I watched. Can you seriously tell me that the whole lad/ladette culture, with all that it involves, would have happened had not the best-selling newspaper in the country been The Sun? And as for this being the readers' choice, I answered that here: http://fpb.livejournal.com/402681.html . As a journalist, you will know that I am right, and that Murdoch's commercial success has nothing to do with reader choice.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

I was working for the Sunday Times when Murdoch bought it, and by and large he improved it. It was smug and complacent, with islands of brilliant reporting.

He also killed the printers' union, which was a massive favour he did to all British publishers. I would welcome him in a jiffy to shake up the pathetic French press.

And the equivalent of the lad/ette culture, alas, exists in countries with no Murdoch press.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

That is like saying that Mussolini made the trains run on time. Nobody denies that Murdoch, like Attila, has a limited cleverness at what he does, or else he would not have succeeded in three or four countries. (Notice however that when he tries to break out of the English-speaking world, he has trouble.) And the fact that the evil social developments in Britain have some equivalents elsewhere is neither surprising (given Britain's cultural importance) nor denies that the development of this horrible culture in Britain is intimately linked with the Murdoch press. The lad/ette culture is worse in Britain than anywhere else in Europe: look at the figures in terms of STDs, unmarried and underage pregnancies, drunkenness and so on. This is the generation that read The Sun as children, when their parents left it lying around the home. I watched it happen. The Sun came first; it was only much later that the BBC and other newspapers (except for the Mirror, of course) degenerated. And the reason could be read in a poll I remember from the early nineties, when the lad/ette culture had not yet triumphed, which showed that Samantha Fox was the favoured role model for a majority of interviewed eleven-year-old girls. Where do you think they had found out who she was - or learned to admire her? Murdoch pushed the tabloid press to a wholly new level of vulgarity and graphic aggression, and showed there was money in that; and at the same time, won elections for the destructive pseudo-conservative Margaret Thatcher. His influence on British society is immeasurable, and all bad.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Samantha Fox was all over television and the likes of OK magazine after she broke through in the Sun. She even sang for a bit. I mean, we got to see her in France, for cripes' sakes. And she wasn't such a bad girl; she had a kind of rough-at-the-edges genuineness and sweetness.

As for Thatcher, she was FANTASTIC. Steadfast, principled, far-thinking, brave. I was bowled over by her from the start.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

AFTER she broke through in the Sun. And BECAUSE she had broken through in the Sun. And her stardom and the reason why all those eleven-year-olds admired her was all to do with her tits. The same poll, as I recall, placed "page three girl" among the top three career ambitions for pre-pubertal girls. As for Thatcher, I, like the majority of people in Britain, hated her from the word go. Principled? Only if destruction and immorality are a principle. She never saw an abortion she did not like. She abolished the London County Council because she did not like its politics, exposing the capital of the country to the nonsense of being administerd by 33 squabbling councils. She deindustrialized the country and did so quite deliberately. (Compare and contrast Germany.) She began the infernal cycle of fake consumption-led growth financed by house price inflation, for which we are only now beginning to pay. (Compare and contrast Italy, where not a single bank has gone bust, because Italians still rent their houses instead of buying them at inflated prices that they will never in their lives be able to repay.) She let loose the unproductive speculators of the City, removing every serious control over them; and the result could be seen even in her own government. I remember going through a few years' worth of back issues of Private Eye, and finding that the period had seen an average of one major bankruptcy with criminal features every four months. We are not talking peanuts here, we are talking about the likes of BCCI, Robert Maxwell, Polly Peck International, Blue Arrow, etc etc etc. The Thatcher government was a disaster, and the bill will be paid for generations.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

http://fpb.livejournal.com/450158.html
http://fpb.livejournal.com/355190.html
and on a more general level:
http://fpb.livejournal.com/321448.html

[shezan.livejournal.com]

We are SO going to disagree on that.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

On what? That she deindustrialized the country? That she was a consistent supporter of abortion? That she had a strategic alliance with Murdoch and his press? That the infernal cycle of house price inflation and pseudo-prosperity began in her time? All these are facts.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

P.S.: neither the murder of the printers union, nor any supposed editorial improvement to the Sunday Times, do anything to prove that Murdoch's success has anything to do with a free market. My argument is that it does not, and that he has exploited to the maximum the distortions of a market that does not cater to the reader but to the advertiser. I am also no admirer of macho management, whatever its short-term benefits; the degradation of employees is ultimately always a bad thing.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

I am absolutely no admirer of macho management, and most times I believe in unions, but SOGAT and the NGA were regularly holding the whole print run hostage, like Mafia racketeers and with the same techniques. I still remember being stuck in the evenings until you could get out in a convoy, the only way not to be stoned and beaten by the picketers, and the vile anti-Semitic insults they used to shout at Bernard Levin when he crossed the line to get to his desk at the Times in Wapping. Murdoch did everyone a MASSIVE favour by ending this. The French press lords never had the guts to take on the Syndicat du Livre, and the result can be seen every day in our thin, craven papers, kept barely alive with a trickle of government subsidies.

And actually, the Sun makes more money from its sales than from ads. Most tabloids are market driven, because advertisers prefer an upscale redership.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

But the whole market structure is determined not by demand, but by distribution and advertisement. Murdoch made smart use of an unnatural market - like Al Capone. (Incidentally, it is because the market is restricted and unnatural that the unions had so much power. In a free market with a natural variety of titles, they could not stop the presses without endangering their own livelihoods as well as the paper's. What happened with SOGAT was akin to one stronger gangster knifing a weaker.)

At any rate, this is secondary. I don't deny that Murdoch, like Al Capone, is clever in his own area (except I am rather fonder of Capone). In fact, if he were not such an accomplished invader, occupier and destroyer, I would not be so alarmed at the role he is building up for Glenn Beck and for his own whole USA operation. It is because I spent the last 30 years watching his press poison what was once a civilized country - who could, today, believe that within living memory the English had a reputation for manners? - that I look at his growing and already central role in American conservatism with absolute horror; tempered only by the consideration that the man, now, is old, and that at some point he must die.

[mentalguy.livejournal.com]

Beck organized it, advertised it on his show, and led it, however.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

And everywhere I saw it mentioned it was described as Glenn Beck's rally.

[super-pan.livejournal.com]

I am also very afraid. American politics and culture right now scares me, and Glenn Beck in particular.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

You, of course, have no stake in this, whereas I am looking at the perversion of a movement in which I hoped, especially to break the evil of abortion. But the polluting power of demagoguery embodied in Beck and manipulated by Robber Murder is something we both have good reason to dread and to hate. If someone like Murdoch had been alive a century and a half ago, slavery would never have been broken, but freedom might have.

[affablestranger.livejournal.com]

As always, sir...

Very well put.

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

Things are upside-down. Citizens of a country founded on religious freedom declare there is no place for a religious group in Lower Manhattan. I'd buy the arguement if they said it is too close to Wall Street to be called holy, or even that the surrounding businesses are too profane for anything called sacred in the vicinity. NYC needs all the prayers it can get.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I cannot agree with this. I don't know when I will have the time, but I intend to write another essay on American religious history dealing with the American delusion that all religions are equally good.

[rfachir.livejournal.com]

We don't have that delusion - just the rule not to discuss politics or religion at dinner.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

There is plenty of place for religious groups in Lower Manhattan, and in fact there already are two mosques there, one four blocks from Ground Zero, and another twelve blocks away. Nobody says the Islamic center in discussion cannot be built, only that its present location is hugely insensitive.

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

That Burlington Coat Factory is sacred ground indeed.

Seriously, anyone who has a problem with the whole thing needs to sit down, take a deep breath, and watch Bob Ross on PBS for awhile until their knickers untwist. The only thing this flailing about does is expose the insensitivity, bigotry, and racism of an unconscionably large part of the US population.

I could get pretty het up about the Mormon temple which absolutely dominates the view as one drives north of Washington DC--but I don't.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

I don't have a dog in this fight, but smug, supercilious, self-enamoured statements like that are one reason why liberals in the US are losing. Learn some manners. I spent much of last evening attacking shezan's most cherished political beliefs, without, I think, once using stupidly insulting language such as "untying your knickers" and so on. Learn to engage your opponent's views instead of insulting them, because insulting them means you are not bothering to understand them, and that makes you stupid with respect to them.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

What's striking here is how the self-regard is inversely proportional to the consideration accorded to the American people.

...and thank you for borrowing at least a springer spaniel for me here! I'm sure we can enjoyably disagree politically for many more exchanges, a pleasure obviously self-denied by the above poster.

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

Fair enough. I'll attempt engagement.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

That building was actually damaged by the attacks. So, not exactly neutral.

And really, what strikes me is how NON racist America is. 70% of the people polled opine that it would be anti-constitutional to forbid the building of the mosque. 70% also feel it's the wrong place to build it. Where's the bigotry?

[fellmama.livejournal.com]

If you would be so generous, please explain why you feel building the center at the proposed location would be insensitive? (Or why you think someone would feel that way, if it's not actually your own opinion?)

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Since this was never answered, I will give the answer that should have been given then. Mosques are built on the site of Muslim VICTORIES. Get it?

[eliskimo.livejournal.com]

I suppose the question should be asked if Glenn Beck would *exist* (as a Conservative media personality) without Murdoch. Is it merely 'guilt by association' or do Murdoch's personal beliefs and desires play into Beck's rhetoric?

He was (pardon my language) essentially a 'jackass' radio host before his conversion to Mormonism. How much is his own potentially ingrained confrontational habits peeking through his new worldview?

I'll admit I don't know. Beck wasn't even on my radar until his remarks about "social justice" being code for communism and telling parishioners to "flee" any church that uses that language got repeated everywhere last March. I stopped listening to Rush Limbaugh a decade ago when it became increasing apparent that he was more interested in the self-promotion that name-calling and mud-slinging got him than in really providing a rational alternate voice in American political commentary.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

It might interest you that the term and concept of "social justice" was invented by the Italian Jesuit Luigi d'Azeglio, in opposition to the liberist principles that prevailed in the early nineteenth century. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Taparelli D'Azeglio started writing when Kar Marx was still a child and socialism was only being mooted by a few obscure publicists in Paris, and his doctrines were eventually to become Catholic teaching if not dogma. The D'Azeglios were a talented family; his younger brother Massimo was a novelist, painter, diplomat, politician, Prime Minister of Italy, and one of the leaders of the movement that turned the Kingdom of Sardinia into united Italy. I wonder how they felt about each other, being so far on opposite sides.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Murdoch does not have to invent anything. All the elements that went into the poisonous cocktail of his media empire were there before; he merely refined them, like a crooked chemist refines coca leaf into cocaine and cocaine into crack. So the abuse of the rising conservative movement by hypocritical adventurers and showmen such as Limbaugh or Ann Coulter was on its way before Murdoch ever started working on Fox TV. What Murdoch wants to do is to privatize this movement, corrupt it - hence the ugly mixture of moralist preachers and "reality shows" on his screen - and take control of it. People like Beck are useful to him. From my point of view, the important thing is that Murdoch likes corruption for its own sake, and therefore, whatever incendiary language he may practice on behalf of Judeo-Christian civilization, he, who has the Saudi prince Al-Waleed as junior partner, will never do anything to stop abortion or to shore up social morality.

[shezan.livejournal.com]

Beck was a popular radio host for years before getting his programme on Fox News.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Here I am tempted to do a Lloyd Bentsen. "I knew" (if only) "Martin Luther King, Martin Luther King was a friend of mine." (A hero, at least.) "Mr.Beck, you are no Martin Luther King." Let's keep in mind who exactly is making an implicit self-comparison with whom.

[stahlhelm.livejournal.com]

I know I'm extremely late to this, but I felt a wave of sad relief stumbling upon this. I consider myself a Republican of the Theodore Roosevelt flavor, and seeing what Glenn Beck and the Tea Party are doing to the GOP profoundly unsettles and revolts me.

[fpb.livejournal.com]

Thank you. I am not really a conservative except on the sexual and especially abortion front, and I feel confident that Rupert Murdoch (the world's biggest and most successful pornographer) intends to take what once was the religious right away from its moral grounding and into his corral of vulgarity, anti-state knee-jerk attitudes, and moral anarchy. Notice that all they seem to be talking about these days is taxes (something Murdoch is very expert at dodging); the small matter of abortion, which was rising to the top of the political agenda, seems to have been silenced.

Incidentally I warmly like Theodore Roosevelt. He was the kind of man whose very faults are lovable. And for an extra point, he saw through that tin and brummagem saint Woodrow Wilson when no-one else seemed to - did you know that he invented the stinging expression "weasel words" especially for the way Wilson always seemed to make things mean their own opposite?