Amity Shlaes claims that Glenn Beck’s reading list constitutes a serious threat to traditional university curricula:
For unlike other hosts, who tend to pick up and drop topics, Mr. Beck has begun to develop a new canon for adults. And unlike other hosts, but indeed like a professor, Mr. Beck tends to demand a lot of his viewers. For example, he recently devoted the better part of an hour to a biography of Samuel Adams by a historian without a Ph.D., Ira Stoll, whose book highlights the revolutionary firebrand’s piety. Mr. Beck breaks other tv rules. He insists viewers read books by dead men – W. Cleon Skousen’s work on the Constitution, the “5000 Year Leap.” It is all a long way from “Oprah,” “The Newshour” or even much of public television.
[…..]His genius has been in his recognition that viewers do not want merely the odd, one-off book, duly pegged to news. They want a coherent vision, a competing canon that the regulated airwaves and academy have denied them. So he, Glenn Beck, is building that canon, book by book from the forgotten shelf. Since the man is a riveting entertainer, the professors are correct to be concerned. He’s not just reacting or shaping individual thoughts. He is bringing competition into the Ed Biz.
What to do? The Glenn Beck reading list may not satisfy everyone. Some of his views are indeed worth questioning. Some of us don’t agree with important components of his politics. Beck’s personal attacks put a lot of us off. Maybe there should be yet a third new reading list. As for the guild, a better response than its own ad hominem smearing is to widen their own reading lists and lectures. Professors can blame only themselves if Mr. Beck has taken an opportunity to teach. It is they who gave it to him.
This is complete bullshit: Beck’s target audience is aging white trash, not college students. The people who are reading Glenn Beck’s books now used to read Hannity and Dow 35000, not Joyce and Civilization and Its Discontents.
I doubt many people at universities ever think about Glenn Beck this way at all. What is galling, though, at least to me, is the faux intellectualism of the Council on Foreign Relations, which employs Amity Shlaes.
Joel
I believe these are already required reading at Regent.
Cat Lady
Those books may be on the reading list if the course is “Epistemic Closure 101”.
Otherwise, Amity Shlaes is full of shit. It must be great to be a wingnut. No shame required, no intellectual rigor demanded, and 24/7 poo flinging. Also.
dhd
I don’t think I understood quite how stupid and/or crazy Amity Shlaes was until this…
El Cid
I read the 5,000 year leap and it had a lot more sense in it than anything pseudo-scholar Schlaes has done.
Most of the lunatic Skousen’s most popular book, for example, is just recounting various historical acts and words and views of the founding fathers. There are some really off things about religion, and other questionable conservative interpretations, but it’s not directly fodder for the Beckite nuts except as they tell you to interpret it, unless you happened to know the other Birchite crap that Skousen pushed. It isn’t even directly saying much that many founding fathers didn’t write. When I read it, I just didn’t get how the Beck loonies thought it said what they say it says. It’s pretty much the 1950s grade school version of U.S. history and manifest destiny-ism. It’s in The Naked Communist that you find the Birchite batshit.
Schlaes is just a silly liar.
Kryptik
And this is why I call bullshit whenever someone tries to excuse Beck with the ‘entertainer’ angle. Whether he believes his shit or not, it’s obvious he is trying to yank the discourse hard right, whether or ideology and personal profit. And there are just way too many assholes who fawn over him to ignore, at the risk of letting his hands get into the jar.
Allison W.
This is silly. Glenn is popular and has a loyal following but I am certainly not concerned that his reading list is going to go mainstream and infiltrate our schools or something.
mistermix
Glenn has an audience of 2 million. There are 13 million students in college right now.
I’m guessing that college has a bit more influence, even if we assume that some percentage of the shitheads who watch GB are actually following his idiotic curriculum.
Also, too: Shales would never consider that Beck is just using those books as a rather unsophisticated form of appeal to authority — “Jeez, he’s read all those books, he must know what he’s talking about.”
http://tvbythenumbers.com/2010/06/04/cable-news-ratings-for-thursday-june-3-2010/53245
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/school/cps2008.html
Mike G
I’ll present a golden unicorn if you can find any of Glenn Beck’s viewers who have actually read a majority of the books he “quotes” (including Beck himself), any more than Dennis Miller’s right-wing audience actually understand or even want to understand more than 10% of the obscure references in his ‘jokes’. I doubt most of the Beck-ites have even read Beck-authored books all the way through, they just buy and display it at home as evidence of their ‘faith’.
He conjures up fact-bites that sound credible enough to his rubes, knowing they’re never going to fact-check him. The gullible and stupid make an ideal target market.
nitpicker
She leaves out the fact that Beck puts blinders on about things that interrupt his “coherent vision.” For example, he uses Paine’s Common Sense to convince readers of the wisdom of the founders, but leaves out Paine’s Agrarian Justice in which he argues our nation should…
He also studiously ignores Paine’s Age of Reason in which he writes:
Kryptik
A lot of you guys are making a mistake as far as where this is going.
Beck’s ‘curriculum’ isn’t aimed at REALLY trying to change Academic orthodoxy. The aim is the same aim as always: inundate the political mainstream with bullshit upon bullshit, and rely on the ever reflexive attempt at ‘balance’ to gleefully move the goalposts so ideas that were once batshit are now just ‘one side of the story’. And those university students who do get caught up in this, the Liberty folks and such? Guess where they usually end up going into? Yep, shooting straight up the ranks of the GOP.
Mr Furious
What mistermix and Mike G said…
Beck’s “curriculum” is a all about presenting himself as a counter-intellectual. He reads the books the elites don’t want you to know about, and he’s here to share the secret list with you. It’s all show.
It allows him to source his bullshit for an audience that that will never verify, only trust. And the chance any of these teabaggers will actually find, purchase, read and actually comprehend and be impacted by any of this material is minuscule.
Most Beckheads who actually follow through and buys this stuff are more likely to do so for one-upping fellow wingers in a display of bookshelf dick-waving.
Harold Turkoman
I just got my master’s in international relations. An overwhelming majority of professors and students in the field see the Council on Foreign Relations as a sanctified institution beyond question. When one asks them how CFR can be taken seriously when it employs, among others, Amity Shlaes and Elliott Abrams (who ranks as a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies despite not speaking any languages of the region), they respond as if they just received a fart to the face.
Davis X. Machina
Almost none of whom study history, at least beyond the one or two distribution-requirement-satisfying cattle calls. The amount of good, or ill, that can be done by professors in the humanities is strictly limited, for better or for worse.
Business, accounting, marketing, finance, soft economics — not courses like this one — that’s where the indoctrination on American campuses happens. In the schools of marketolatry.
How many industrial relations majors are there? Labor studies? A nation where ‘business’ is an academic discipline is in no danger of a revolution.
New Yorker
And this is why I’m confident this country won’t go fascist. There aren’t armies of young men reading Skousen’s fascist crackpottery and then marching through the streets cracking skulls. You need young people to get critical mass in a fascist movement. Mercifully, the Teabaggers don’t have the youth.
The Dangerman
Regulated airwaves? Since fucking when?
And Academy denies this bullshit because … it is bullshit.
HE Pennypacker, Wealthy Industrialist
@Mr Furious: What you said.
Nellcote
@Allison W.:
And then there’s the Texas Schoolbook Massacre.
Bootlegger
@Davis X. Machina:
+1
If we’re indoctrinating college students to marxism we’re doing a damned terrible job.
I love conservative attempts to bend the space-time continuum by insisting that liberal intellectuals are wetting our pants over the latest pap they pass off as deep thought. I don’t know how many times I read about how “scared” we are of Sarah Palin, explaining why we can’t stop trying to destroy her. Or now, how we are wetting our pants about Professor Beck and his incoherent pseudointellectualism. They truly don’t understand how sad and pathetic Beck and Palin are in my eyes. “Fear” them? Maybe only in the sense that they’ll talk some idiots in doing violence that will hurt a lot of people. But I certainly don’t fear their ideas or arguments–both of which they plagiarize like a lazy freshman.
Waldo
Books?!! Seriously? It’s a wonder Beck’s audience can even read the buttons on their remotes, for fuck’s sake.
licensed to kill time
__
That’s basically how I respond to any inadvertent Beck exposure, too.
arguingwithsignposts
Interesting that Ms. Schlaes’ education is listed nowhere on the CFR site. But wikipedia does have this:
Her bio:
At least McMeghan has an MBA. Geez.
ruemara
I have about $800 net worth. If there’s any proof that 50% of Glen Beck’s audience has read all the books he’s promoting, in their entirety, I would give that entire net worth to Focus on the Family.
Somehow, I believe my money is safe.
sukabi
the folks that watch Glen Beck in all likelihood don’t read — anything. And having Glen Beck tell them to pick up a particular book and read it is laughable… they get all they need from the books he pushes from his hour long ragefest on the subject.
Tyro
If I took a college history class and the teacher assigned us mass market paperbacks as reading material, I’d ask for a refund. Even Howard Zinn knew that the value of “A People’s History of the United States” laid in its bibliography.
Mothra
Doug, please don’t use the term white trash.
It’s not as offensive as the n word or other racial terms, but it’s a race and class based attack, IMO, and I think there are other ways to criticize than to employ such an attack.
TR
Well, a professor wouldn’t assign a book that was (1) written by a non-accredited author and (2) posited an argument that actual historians would find laughable, like say, that a lax Congregationalist troublemaker who specifically resisted his parents’ wishes to enter the ministry was a pious man.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
Ms. Schlaes is conflating intellectual thought with paranoid pendatry – of which coherence is a distinguishing trait. To quote from Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics:
plus ça change
TR
@dhd:
You should read what Eric Rauchway — a professor at UC-Davis and the author of the Oxford University Press volume on the New Deal — has to say about her shoddy methods and tendentious argument.
Check out this and this and, if you want to see him get into the weeds for a worthwhile smackdown, this.
licensed to kill time
__
When’s the test? I demand to see the test scores! No Child of Beck Left Behind! Is his children learning?
Svensker
@Davis X. Machina:
Don’t forget “journalism”.
ed
Quoting the insightful Ms. Shlaes:
Any questions?
TR
Alright, I just read Shlaes’ piece. I love how she sneers at professors as a “guild” as if they’re the Teamsters, upset that Beck is going to rob them of their cushy benefits package.
The reason they don’t like Beck and Shlaes and other know-nothings like them is that they make up facts, distort the clear record, and generally just spin bullshit about the past to justify their own contemporary politics.
I posted a link that got caught in moderation, but the real reason actual, trained, accredited historians don’t like know-nothings like Shlaes is that their methods are laughably sloppy. See Eric Rauchway’s takedown of Shlaes here.
There’s a reason she was one of the first people in seventy years to “discover” her miraculous findings about how the New Deal actually made things worse in the 1930s. It’s that she’s an utter fucking moron.
Kyle
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Reminds me of one of the rare occasions where Ann Coulter was called on the cornucopia of mendacious bullshit that was one of his/her books. Her defense was “But..but..I have [x-hundred] footnotes!” — pretty much all of which were garbage.
Rightards love to appropriate the trappings of academic work as a talisman against criticism, knowing their audience is too bedazzled by tribal faith and ignorant to see through their bullshit. Some goober in a trailer in Alabama isn’t going to fact-check Coulter’s footnotes, he’s going to be impressed with himself for reading something that has notations jus’ like them fancy college-boy books, and claim their mere presence ‘proves’ what she says is ‘true’.
StopBeck
Exactly! I thought the same thing when I saw Amity’s post over at Real Conservative Politics.
jake the snake
What has happened to the CFA over the years. It was always anti-communist, but I don’t think it was always a wingnut welfare institution. Paul M. A. Linebarger was a fellow there in the sixties, and he was pretty much a centrist classic liberal.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
I seriously doubt that he gives a damn whether anybody reads these books or not. Given his propensity for showmanship it’s more likely that he simply is projecting the image of someone who reads books.
TR
@Kyle:
Well said.
And this, really, is what Shlaes hates about the “guild” of academia. It’s a world of peer-reviewed journal articles and anonymous readers’ reports on books, of open Q&A sessions at public talks. There is rigorous criticism from all sides, a demand that opposing arguments be considered and weighed and, if need be, countered, but countered with actual hard evidence.
Her world, meanwhile, is nothing but preaching to the choir. She and Beck tell their conservative listeners just what they want to hear. They don’t interact with the mainstream scholarship on their issues, they sneer at it and try to discredit it.
The universities aren’t afraid of Shlaes and Beck. Shlaes and Beck are afraid of the universities.
ceece
My inlaws send me these books. They personally don’t read anything more than the church pro-life monthly, but they know that *I* read, and so they think I need to know all about Benjamin Franklin’s pious nature (!!) and Thomas Jefferson’s writings on Jesus, all falsified or taken massively out of context.
Maybe they hope my head will explode or something. It could be worse, they send my spouse articles about ‘coming home to Jesus’ complete with tearful personal commentary.
wilfred
Helen’s just sick of it all. She’s been one voice against a multitude for too long.
Otoh, Ethan Bronner, Jerusalem bureau chief of the New York Times, has a son in the Israeli army. I’m sure everybody knows all about that but this asks some interesting questions:
http://uts.cc.utexas.edu/~rjensen/freelance/ethanbronner.htm
Cacti
Raise your hand if you believe Glenn Beck’s listeners/viewers are plowing through a stack of books in their spare time.
SectarianSofa
@dhd:
Exactly what I was thinking.
SectarianSofa
@Allison W.:
Yeah, judging by the right-wing wackaloon chain mails I am sent from Midwestern relatives, there is no chance in hell that such a ‘bookshelf’ would be anything more than an attempt to accredit batshit crazy. It’s not going anywhere, it’s just a chance to say that big thinkers agree with your batshit crazy, if you already believe the batshit crazy. You might buy the books, but that they exist ‘out there,’ just like the ‘Constitution’ which is misinterpreted to mean whatever you feel like, is the point.
licensed to kill time
@Cacti:
I imagine there might be a few, though I picture them muttering to themselves in the basement while furiously scribbling notes on their very own chalkboard and adjusting their tinfoil hats to ward off the government beams that wreak such havoc with their dental fillings and FILL UP THEIR HEADS WITH NOISE and….
Oops. I think I just described Beck himself.
TR
@Cacti:
Unless you mean “burning” instead of “plowing through,” no.
SectarianSofa
Beck is like The Chronicles of Narnia filmed by the Left Behind People, and instead of child actors, it features Beck, Kirk Cameron, et al., done to look like children using Lord of the Rings hobbit-style forced perspective.
TR
It just gets better and better. From Media Matters:
Everyone knows Jewish people are part of an exclusionary guild, though, so I’m sure Shlaes will praise this suggestion too.
RSA
I like the way Shlaes generalizes from a single example: she reads a Huffpo piece by one professor and immediately thinks it’s characteristic of all of them. She might have learned about this kind of flawed reasoning in college, I guess…
Mike G
@TR:
Perhaps plowing through a stack of library books with their tractor to mulch them because Focus on the Family told him they were “sinful” and “un-Christian”.
Books (well-known and ‘approved’ books like you can buy at Wal-Mart, that is — don’t get creative) are something you display to claim the authority of a knowledgeable person, not something you actually read and mentally digest.
Sometimes I wonder how this country got so far with so many people who take pride in their ignorance and stupidity.
curious
well, this should earn her an invite to plug her next book, even with the empty caveat about beck’s “personal attacks.” he’ll probably share that line with the audience as a show of magnanimity.
here’s one of their previous encounters:
http://www.glennbeck.com/content/articles/article/196/11084/
gnomedad
Glenn Beck is riveting in approximately the sense that a road accident is riveting.
M. Bouffant
More “Amity.”
jayjaybear
Isn’t Amity Schlaes the one who was pushing the “Roosevelt made the Depression worse!” meme a year or so ago?
maus
@The Dangerman:
Since the FCC was introduced? The FCC isn’t very truly free market!
Sly
@jayjaybear:
Yes.
She’s following in a long and glorious tradition of Roosevelt critics on the wingnut welfare circuit, beginning with Jouett Shouse and John Raskob.
mattH
I always figured a big part of Beck’s fascination with Samuel Adams was his stance on both federalism and Shays Rebellion. Couple that with his being the only explicitly religious founder and he seems to fit right in rhetorically with Beck, et al.
Bill Murray
@jayjaybear: yes in her book on the depression. One of her arguments was that people working in government sponsored jobs (like the CCC and those type programs) should nto count as employed, so unemployment was really much higher. That’s almost as dumb as Casey Mulligan
Annamal
I can’t help but feel that Jon Stewart’s audience is far more likely to read the books by the authors interviewed on his show than Beck’s audience…
jayjaybear
@Bill Murray:
That goes quite harmoniously with the assertion that government jobs aren’t “real” jobs that was going around about the time that the stimulus was being voted.
Mr. Wonderful
They want a coherent vision
Yes, that’s it. Beck’s fans watch him sobbing, drawing paranoid conspiracy diagrams, and leering into the camera, and think, “Yes, by Christ, finally: a coherent vision.”
Steaming Pile
@Mike G: I would go so far as to award said golden unicorn to anyone who has read even a quarter of Beck’s pile of dead trees. Ten percent, even.
And I would question the judgment of anyone who would buy one of Glenn Beck’s ghostwritten piles of bullshit to display at home for the benefit of company. Why would anyone want to publicly identify ones self as an idiot?
protected static
Ira Stoll was an uptight, mendacious, sactiminious, bow-tied twat when I knew him in high school… Good to see some things never change.