The genius of Beck’s chalkboards is that first of all they give the impression of good old fashioned education. None of this modern audio-visual, multimedia trickery but solid, direct, words on a  board in black and white, like teaching was in the good old days before They spoiled it and brought in all their “viewpoints” and “interpretations” and other foreign, multicultural muck. Proper tools, proper teaching, proper facts and spanking all round if you spoke out of turn. Secondly it enables Beck to be his usual slippery self, particularly with his arrows. Link two entities in the modern world and you’re defining a relationship, something fixed with parameters, attributes and labels. Draw an arrow on a board and it can mean anything. Right now it might show the supposed flow of money but it looks just like the one next to it, and what does that show? Political influence? Family connections? Geographical proximity? Some vague concept or defunct ideology?. And if they all get confused and make a perfect loop or deranged tangle, so much the better, so many more links and connections and implied hierarchies of stuff that would the Founding Fathers rolling in their graves…. ACORN, Van Jones, Darwin, Harry Potter, Kermit the Frog, Social Justice, Satan, the Left…. See the pattern? See how it all fits? I suspect that if E. M. Forster had seen The Glenn Beck Show he would have come up with a better catchphrase.

The section I caught was about the Civil Rights Act and how it was Eisenhower who set things in motion and LBJ who took the credit despite trying to scupper the whole thing back in 1957. The show transcript isn’t up at Fox yet so I could be a little off, but it seemed to me that  if Beck was saying there was only one civil rights act, it  took seven years to get passed because of LBJ, and it was entirely down to the Republicans led by good old Eisenhower. And of course  all this was being kept secret from you, America, because They don’t want you to know the truth, the truth that will set you… well, you know how it goes. The point of this segment was that LBJ was the bad guy for stalling civil rights until he could claim the credit, but they had kept all this from you, America. (Pause, stare into space, no… I promised I wouldn’t… wouldn’t cry.)

This doesn’t take much effort to check, should you be an English guy who still gets the year of American independence wrong, and it’s bunkum, of course, at every level. There was no single, definitive Civil Rights Act. There were three, those of 1957, 60 and 63, plus the Voting Act of ’64, which was possibly the most important of all. I assume you all knew that, probably learned it in Elementary School.

So why don’t Beck’s fans? Were they all getting wedgies that day? And if it does all seem to be new and secret information to them, why don’t they look it up?  Beck always tells them to always check his facts, “question with boldness,” because he knows they won’t, or else they’ll go straight to the rabid rightwing blogs and get sidetracks into saying how ugly Nancy Pelosi is. By supposedly having teams out researching his material(or rather  cribbing from the usual revisionist books), and showing those clever arrows pointing at a picture of Johnson looking blotchy and evil, Beck knows he has the true believers in the bag. Checking would be, at this point, well, rude.

This, I have now decided, will not do. So today I shall begin again,return to blogging basics – albeit without the return to handcoding, which would be downright silly (although I reserve the right to do it tomorrow). Unlike my original online diary back in the long lost days of the 20th century, however, this is not going to be anonymous.  It was too easy to be a meanspirited ass back then when I was hiding behind a pseudonym, too tempting to descend into cartoonish bravado and swagger when I believed I would never be called on to justify what you”d just churned out. I don’t feel the need to rant and rage, slobber and whine this time around. I’ve changed. I’m a married man with two kids and I can’t even pretend I’m living a life of decadent misadventures in need of cryptic concealment. Not that I ever was, but I liked to give the impression that it might go that way. Why, I intend this to be so evenhanded and congenial even people I work alongside should be able to read it without wishing me ill.

The lost years (aka today and yesterday)

So, imaginary reader, how is life treating you? (Pause. Tumbleweed, Crickets.) Okay, then. Me, oh let’s see. Just returned from my youngest son’s second birthday party at Pease Park, where the kids larked on the splashpad and we wilted in the unnatural heat of an Austin summer  morning. (As I write this it’s 101F, so it was probably merely in the mid 90s.)

The cake was impressive, as you can see and entirely edible except for the tray. We may be eating it and its sugary adornments for weeks to come. My wife won the services of a web designer who does this sort of thing as a sideline in a silent auction at her school last year and she did us proud.

Yesterday I went to the doctor for a follow up appointment and yet more X-rays to see what was going on in my right lung. Apparently it is now free of whatever was gumming it up over the last few months but the recurring cough and fever symptoms keep coming back – mild enough to be beaten into submission by a couple of ibuprofen, but annoyingly persistent. I’d been diagnosed with pneumonia a couple of months ago and the symptoms kept returning, despite increasingly powerful antibiotics and the occasional nap. A possible cause, I was told yesterday, was food particles going down the wrong way, into my lung rather than stomach. Apparently it’s straight route down into your right lung if you gulp your food and things can fester and accumulate with unpleasant results, boys and girls, so beware. Had I noticed the pneumonia symptoms coming on after any particular food? Heartburn? Reflux? Took me a while to come up with a possible culprit: Central Market’s Hatch Pepper Tortillas. Could it really be that my favorite snack was to blame? It seemed such an unlikely and pissy cause that it would have made for an episode of House. Not a very exciting one, mind you, as no one shouted at anyone, stole painkillers or showed any cleavage. The doctor gave me the pneumonia vaccine, which is normally only given to the over 65s, which was a bit dispiriting. I half expected it to come witha craing with Wether’s,  a half-off coupon for the early bird special at Luby’s and a leaflet in 72pt Comic Sans saying WRAP UP WARM WHEN IT GETS A BIT CHILLY, DEAR….

Meanwhile

Meanwhile, of course, other things have happened in the decade or so since I wound down whatever it was I called Countdown to the Big Four Zero after I ‘d reached that incredible age, but I’ll save all that for future entries when I run out of daily nuggets of real life and kneejerk thoughts about the state of the world. I’ll just point out that I stopped prior to 9/11 and didn’t didn’t write about that day or its aftermath. I found myself unable to start again as the months and years went by and the “blogosphere” became swamped with rightwing blowhards demanding Total War on anyone and anything to the left of Donald Rumsfeld, and it struck me as a time when self-involved personal blogging about missed trains, bad food and work-related hangovers was somehow insufficient and weedy. It’s taken me a long time to get back in the right frame of mind. But I’m there now. and I’m here now. So let’s go….