Size does matter: When bathed in his own afterglow, Glenn Beck becomes as soft and gentle as Mister Rogers.
In cadence and content, his Washington rally debriefing Monday on Fox News's "The Glenn Beck Program" was soothing television, with a slideshow that proved theirs was not a choo-choo train trip to the land of make-believe, but a real phenomenon. He called it a miracle.
Here's a picture Beck has of Sarah Palin praying for fully 10 minutes, Beck said, "the most beautiful picture of Sarah Palin ever taken," just look at it. Here's one of a man and his young son in a moment of patriotic bliss-out under blue skies. Here are the geese that flew in perfect formation over the crowd just as the rally began on Saturday in front of the Lincoln Memorial. As he stood in his bulletproof vest and prepared to restore America, those geese, Beck said, were a way of knowing that God had noticed.
And on closure: Closure is both a concept and an emotion and something we talk about so much in life that the word became its own cliche. And closure, it seems, is an unspoken reason why we channel-surf so much in the first place -- TV is the place where things work out, where crimes are easily solved, where weight comes off and where roses are bestowed in quasi-real stagings of love.
In his live televised Oval Office address Tuesday night, President Obama dealt out a therapeutic, paternal sense of closure: The war in Iraq is over, in the sense that America is no longer officially fighting it. Our sacrifices have been made and honored.
A trillion-dollar investment, on which we are now closing the books. Which is not the same as closure, so much as transferring the balance.
Leave a comment