A semi-regular e-mail correspondent -- an articulate heckler, really -- sent me something about the Beckstock festival in Washington. The gist of it was that he fully expected the likes of Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews to mock the spectacle of thousands of people in prayer.
I didn’t respond. I seldom do. He’s a Last Word obsessive, so it’s easier just to let his first word and his last be the same. Life is just too damn short for some forms of aggravation.
But the idea of Glenn Beck (speaking of hecklers) leading a spiritual renewal of America is like a sick joke that’s perversely funny and mostly just disgusting. If that weren’t greeted by hoots of derision, and not just by the likes of Olbermann and Matthews, I’d be greatly disappointed.
Mocking prayer per se would indeed be immoral. Mocking a made-for-TV prayer choreographed for a bomb-lobbing commentator’s political propaganda and profit is a moral imperative.
A critic – I think Oscar Wilde, but might be wrong – supposedly said of Dickens’ tearjerker The Old Curiosity Shop that “anybody who didn’t laugh when Little Nell died has a heart of stone.” The principle seems relevant and applicable here.
So does Barry Goldwater’s famous comment on the so-called Moral Majority, when he declared that good Christians should “line up and kick Jerry Falwell’s ass.”
Point being: Mocking God and mocking charlatans who claim to speak for Him aren’t, never have been, and never wi
ll be the same thing.
And speaking of charlatans…
While Beck and his flock were gathered on the mall once filled for Martin Luther King Jr.’s most famous speech, the Right Reverend Al Sharpton was in another part of town holding a counter … whatever.
Sharpton, as he no doubt would like everybody to forget, rose to national prominence in 1987 as enabler-in-chief of the Tawana Brawley hoax. That breathtakingly reckless episode brought New York to the brink of racial meltdown over the alleged gang rape of a 15-year-old black girl by white men -- including, supposedly, a New York police officer. The whole thing was later exposed as a hoax, for which Sharpton and others were ordered to pay defamation damages, but for which he has refused for more than two decades to apologize.
Maybe in Al’s world, being a venerable civil rights leader means never having to say you’re sorry. In my world, he’s hardly any less absurd an heir to the MLK legacy than Glenn Beck.
It occurs to me that maybe that’s the real message of these dueling gasbags: Do they really represent what America has to choose between? If so, then we really do have reason to pray.
