We‘re not sure if this will cause the earth’s axis to shift, but Glenn Beck is on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. In it, we learn who Glenn’s demeanor “conjures”:
Beck has a square, boyish face, an alternately plagued and twinkle-eyed demeanor that conjures (when Beck is wearing glasses) the comedian Drew Carey. He is 6-foot-2, which is slightly jarring when you first meet him, because he is all head and doughiness on television; I never thought of Beck as big or small, just as someone who was suddenly ubiquitous and who talked a lot and said some really astonishing things, to a point where it made you wonder — constantly — whether he was being serious.
Drew Carey? Maybe it’s the libertarian thing. The article is long and informative. You can read the ‘complete story’ here. Below is the last page of the the article…
Beck’s Anchorage show started late — around 9 p.m. — and Beck was still speaking as 11 o’clock approached. He kept going, and going, and delivered a stem-winding ending about how George Washington became terrified at the end of his life about doing something that would dishonor himself and his country. I looked around the crowd of about 4,000, and it seemed no one had left. The room was perfectly silent after two hours plus — late on a Saturday night — to hear a self-described “recovering dirtbag” with not a single college credit to his name teach them history.
Sitting in his Mercury Radio Arts office three days later, Beck told me that he, too, noticed the silence and was astounded. “If someone had told me, ‘Hey, why don’t you tell some history stories at the end, and there will be dead silence,’ I’d have said, ‘No way.’ ” Beck has great distrust of success, especially his own. Friends say he is terrified of something going wrong, someone in his audience “doing something stupid” (presumably code for violence). There is a certain boyish disbelief in Beck as he engages in his real-time assessment, often on the air. “I told my wife, ‘I can’t believe I actually have reporters following me to Alaska,’ ” he said. (Note: reporter’s wife said the same thing.)
Beck told me that he recently threw away all of his old tapes from his Morning Zoo years, so his kids could not hear them. He has no idea what his role is in the political firmament. The notion seems to bore him. His most animated attacks on Obama in the days after the “Restoring Honor” rally were over his take on the president’s religious convictions, which Beck called “a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.”
He is fragile, on the edge. There is no template for him or for where he is headed. “I have not prepared my whole life to be here,” Beck told me from his plush couch, his face turning bright pink. “I prepared my whole life to be in a back alley.” I expected him to cry, but he did not.
Mark Leibovich is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times. He last wrote for the magazine about Mike Allen of Politico.
When Glenn talked about it on the radio this morning, he had not yet had time to read the entire report. Here’s his early take:
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