Glenn Beck: Better Than Marina Abramovic

by Will Wilkinson

I won’t say that this is the greatest thing that I have ever seen, but neither will I say that it is not glorious to behold. Glenn Beck, American, offers a voice of warning … from the future:

Kyle Mantyla of Right Wing Watch (I’d rather watch grass grow) writes:

The best thing about Glenn Beck owning his own network is that he answers to nobody and so there is nothing to stop him from indulging every insane idea that he has, resulting in hour-long programs like last night’s end-of-the-year recap in which a 90-year-old Glenn Beck recorded a dire message from the future about how 2014 was the year in which the whole world fell apart.

Living alone in an abandoned building with only a few tiny candles and a small fire for light and heat, future Beck somehow managed to scrounge up some batteries and video cameras with which to record his message. And even though the world in 2054 is apparently short on food and fuel and energy and everything else, future Beck still somehow managed to obtain stockpiles of footage from news programs that aired forty years earlier and even had the capacity to edit those clips into his dire message about how everything from Ebola, to ISIS, to the Federal Reserve all brought about the complete collapse of capitalism and society starting in 2014.

Glenn Beck, in my opinion the world’s greatest performance artist, has built a fortune on the crackpot credulity of extreme conservative. This video is just delightfully bats. Will Menaker tweets:

It’s like he wants us to know he’s pulling our leg. But then he’s totally not! Glenn Beck is a living magic eye poster. You squint and you see the winking irony, but you try to pull it into focus and it vanishes! All you see is the authentic wild-eyed paranoid ideologue. But then you catch the wink! Agh! The mercury-blooded cipher! I love him so much I wrote down what he said:

Forty years ago, 2014, your history books claim, that was the year of the dawn of progressivism! The dawn of a new beginning! The end of capitalism! I’ll tell you know that it was that. That this new era of equality, and diversity and tolerance … I beg to differ with your history book! Forget your books! I was there! I saw it! I remember 2014, I remember four words that came to me… There was a clash of the “evil” tea partiers. There was a clash on a ranch in the middle of the country. A man said he had a right to his own land. It was at that time that I heard, and I’ll never forget it in my prayers, four words: “And. So. It. Begins.” Over and over again I saw it, over and over again I heard it. I was like Nebuchadnezzar without Daniel… Sorry. You probably don’t even know what that means. Right. I’m not crazy. I was naive, but I was not crazy.

Not crazy … like a fox! So the turning point in American history is the standoff at Cliven Bundy’s ranch? Of course. And the bewhiskered ghost of Glenn Beck future apologizes for his biblical reference because … why? Because the Bureau of Land Management was not brutally overthrown, and so the Bible has become illegal? Who knows! Who cares! This is art, people. Beck’s historical-reenactor-from-the-dystopian-future scenery-chewing raises the bar for avant garde thespians everywhere. In twenty years, when Beck steps out for his bow, I’ll be first in line for the MoMa retrospective celebrating this luminous American original and his mind-bending decades-long post-modern meta-satire of unhinged populist demagoguery. Who needs spineless Hollywood? The bleeding edge of culture is happening at The Blaze.