Glenn Beck

No Thomas Paine and No Common Sense.

A short review of:
GLENN BECK’S COMMON SENSE
Publisher: Threshold Editions
ISBN13: 9781439168578

Glenn Beck's book is an unhistorical, incoherent and shallow rip-off of Thomas Paine and the high name-recognition of Paine and his Common Sense (1776). Readers looking for either history or Thomas Paine will be badly disappointed. Beck appears to have never read Paine or, if he has, never thought about him. He also claims that he was channeling Paine in some way. Well, there is a difference between channeling and parasitism. In the former, the subject’s ideas, thoughts, or speech are manifested; this didn’t happen. In the latter case, an exorcism is called for. Someone ring up the Vatican.

A few observations from the historian's viewpoint:

The brilliant center point of Beck's project is to encourage people to return to the atmosphere of fear, panic and rage of 9/11 when, he claims, we were all united. JUST what we need; more “unhinged.”

Paine was a revolutionary reformer and progressive. Beck aspires to being a reactionary populist. There's a difference, Glenn.

Most of Beck's text is a repititioun of his hackneyed and inaccurate appeal to the halcyon days of yore — which precise period he does not name — and a prototypical diatribe against government intrusion without specifics or — perish the thought — specific solutions:

Glenn Beck, libertarian conservative, believes we need to get government "off our backs" and out of EVERYTHING, especially business. Let's see ... well then we must suppose that he's good with the industrial solvent melamine in baby's food. Your kid lost their kidneys as a result? Pay for it yourself ! And evidently Beck wants to return to the "good old days" of child labor. Ok. And yeah, less regulation would been the solution to the infamous 2008 financial crash. Hell yes, more derivatives and less regulation !! That's the solution !

This books is a historical dead-zone. For Beck, the Mexican American War of 1848 never happened; neither apparently did Jim Crow, the Spanish-American War, the extermination of Native American peoples, slavery, the Red Scare or the McCarthy hearings. Does he not know that at the time of the founding of the U.S., something less than 18% of white males could vote? We didn't even get universal white male suffrage until after 1842. Women struggled for almost another 100 years before finally getting the vote in 1922. Blacks were brutalized and effectively disenfranchised until 1965. The good old days of when exactly?

Inspired by Thomas Paine? It's a good thing that Paine's remains were long ago stolen from their grave … from which they would otherwise erupt and rotate. Glenn Beck is no Thomas Paine and he seems bereft of common sense. Don't purchase this book. Out of a sense of duty to Paine’s historical memory, mine was purchased “used” for a fraction of it's cover price; and it was STILL a waste of money.

[The above is a re-edited version of a piece originally published at my now defunct blog, the Thomas Paine Review.]