28 January // Joseph McCarthy + Glenn Beck

Reading Arthur Miller's "Are You Now Or Were You Ever?" reminded me a lot of the weird parallel between Glenn Beck and Joseph McCarthy. It's almost like they're fulfilling the same roles in our society, just 50 years apart. Check out this video from the Glenn Beck Show that, unbelievably, portrays McCarthy in a supportive and positive light while calling for another modern-day witch hunt.



The Beck/McCarthy love connection is terrifying, isn't it?

My question is -- is this kind of thing cyclical? Are we destined to have sporadic outbreaks of intolerance and radical conservatism throughout our entire national history? Will there always be scapegoating and xenophobia, or can we ever develop a cohesive society that cherishes differences? Why is there such a push for conformity in America? For a society based on the melting pot ideal (which the title of Miller's play itself hearkens back to), why do we always seem to push for conformity in every expression of personal ideology? Why do we, as a nation, have such difficulty with variances in politics, religion, ethnicity, gender and orientation?

When I was doing an online search for McCarthy + TV (based on a half-remembered political science article linking the fall of McCarthyism with his televised demeanor), I ended up running across this. Reporter Edward Murrow ran a special program on McCarthy as part of the TV show "See It Now" -- it is widely held that the visual representation of McCarthy's incoherency and nonsensical rambling turned popular opinion against him. It turns out that CBS News has actually posted that broadcast on their online archive. It's strange because McCarthy doesn't seem that different from Beck to me, yet a medium that spelled the doom for one man is the broadcast "commentator" empire of another.


(Click the photo above or go to http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=1065699n)