The Glenn Beck Report

OnStarGate 7

Paranoid schizophrenics have a special knack for detecting conspiracies that normal people like you and me would never see. I have known two of them up close and personal. One was a brilliant gent who had been at the top of his class at the US Coast Guard Academy and had a nervous breakdown from the pressure. He was OK if he stayed on his meds, which he didn’t like to do because they “made his brain feel like it was frozen”. He worked on and off, and he was convinced that while he was out “they” were coming into his apartment and “doing things”. I tried to pin John down as to exactly what “they” were doing during a desperate phone conversation we had one night; he called because he feared he was going to get violent. Two of the things he mentioned were that “they” had gone into his closet and removed a button from one of his shirts, and “they” also had moved or somehow screwed up his ship-in-a-bottle project. “They” had also rigged his TV, radio, and phone so that “they” could secretly watch him and listen to him. These nights ended badly for John, usually with 5 cops on top of him trying to get him into handcuffs. By the time he called me it was always too late. He had stopped taking his meds, hadn’t slept for 3 or 4 days, and the only thing I could do was call his sister, who lived 300 miles away, so she could come and mop up the mess. Sad.

The other person was a guy named Don who was in his mid-20s. Don was a typical central Wisconsin teenage kid who liked to drink and drive every weekend with a car full of friends. Don woke up early one December morning in the middle of a snow-covered field next to Wisconsin Highway 29. In the field with Don were two wrecked cars, including the one he was DWI, and eight bodies. Three of them were passengers in his car, five had been passengers in the car Don hit when he ran the stop sign and drove onto 29 from the dirt drinkin’ road. Nobody showed up on the scene for quite a while so Don had plenty of time to be alone with the dead.

When I met him several years after the crash, Don was hearing voices that told him what to draw on his apartment wall. The drawing was bizarre, with lots of vines and insects. The voices spoke to him while I was visiting once, and he told me what they were saying. It was incomprehensible, but he was threatened by “them” and felt compelled to comply or something terrible would happen. The last time I saw Don, I drove him to the hospital and helped him check himself into the Psych Ward for another 30 day evaluation.

I forced myself to listen to the Glenn Beck radio program segment about OnStar and Obama because I wanted to see if I could find any connection between Glenn, John, and Don.

Yes, I did. The language and dialect of paranoia sounds the same when coming from a schizophrenic or coming from someone who is trying to stoke the boiler sitting under a giant stewpot of fear. Glenn uses the same phraseology of my friends John and Don. “How can you trust the government? The government is listening to my conversations. The government is tracking me. The government has ruined our future and they plan to make it worse. The government can stop your car and let the air out of your tires!”

It’s not as if Glenn Beck woke up on Thursday and discovered that OnStar exists. It’s not even that Glenn woke up to the fact that the government has been illegally spying on telephone conversations, email, and other communications of Americans (he says he’s OK with that). But letting the air out of your tires… that’s the last straw for Glenn. The government can let the air out of my tires. Whoa.

Glenn’s sudden, irrational fear of the US Government taking control of his car is based on the false premise that the bailout of GM was a government takeover of GM. I am going to assume that anyone who reads this will know on some level that the government does not control GM’s business activities, its management, its workers, its purchasing, or any part of GM that still survives. GM faced a situation where they would have failed and hundreds of thousands of people would have lost their jobs, creating a shock wave through the entire economy. So they took government assistance to avoid an outright failure. Does Glenn Beck really believe that GM is now acting as a spy agency for the Obama Administration?

To back this claim up, Glenn told us that he had visited the OnStar central office and seen all the operators and the maps, looking like a hi-tech war room. The person who was touring Glenn told him that OnStar has the capability of turning off a car remotely, which they didn’t do at the time but are now advertising on TV as an anti-theft measure.

And all of this would have been OK if only the Maoists hadn’t taken control of the government. Glenn does something dishonest, again, by taking a quote out of context. This time his misquoted person is Ron Bloom, the Administration’s Senior Counselor for Manufacturing Policy (or as Glenn would say, the Manufacturing Czar, ooooh, scary!) Bloom’s actual words follow, I have highlighted the excerpt that Glenn Beck used on his show:

BLOOM: The second thing about us is we’ve decided to get on the field. Some unions and our union, in fact, some years ago, largely played defense in these situations. We had what we had and we tried to protect it. What we realized through long and often painful experience is that management matters, business strategy matters, capital structure matters, ownership matters. We spent a long time trying to clean up the messes that others had left us. And so now we try to create our own messes. This is more dangerous politically, it’s more difficult. It has higher risk. We think it has higher reward. But in any event, in these cases where we can be on the field, you should expect to find us on the field.

Generally speaking, we get the joke. We know that the free market is nonsense. We know that the whole point is to game the system, to beat the market, or at least find someone who will pay you a lot of money because they’re convinced that there is a free lunch. We know this is largely about power, that it’s an adults-only, no-limit game. We kind of agree with Mao that political power comes largely from the barrel of a gun. And we get it that if you want a friend you should get a dog.

What Bloom is talking about is how labor has realized that the “free market system” is rigged against labor, and the statistics bear this out. Since Reagan began his union-busting with the air traffic controllers strike in the early 80s, the percentage of union jobs in America has decreased from about 55% to about 7%. The system is rigged, it is anti-labor, and it is about raw political power. He doesn’t state that he wants to murder 10s of millions of people, he simply states the political truth. If you want the political truth, about the last place you ought to be checking for it is Glenn Beck’s shows.

So, Glenn, you little paranoid weasel, here’s the scoop. OnStar isn’t listening to your conversations any more than I am. They are not tracking you, they are a private business that operates a service which people pay for. Most people think it’s a good idea to have OnStar anti-theft protection. The US Government doesn’t care where you go and if they did they could just look at your cell phone information. Ron Bloom is not a Maoist any more than you are. In fact, he may be less of a Maoist than you are because he cares about what happens to people in the workforce and you don’t, you care about the people in the ivory towers.

One last thing. I hate to be the one to let the air out of your gasbag paranoid frenzy, but if the government wants to let the air out of your tires they will probably use spike strips.

Pfffffffffffffft. Glenn Beck the punching clown deflates again.