There is Something to be Said for That

I don't get out very much.  It was only last night, while nibbling a hamburger at our neighborhood picnic, that I learned about Glen Beck's planned rally tomorrow at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. -- mimicking Martin Luther King's famous moment almost 50 years ago.  Beck claims he wants to "restore honor to Washington," and if he can accomplish that with a few speeches and a weekend God bless him.  In fact, if he succeeds in Washington we might want to take him on tour, honor being an asset in short supply in any number of places around the country -- indeed, around the world. 

Based on what I read of him, however, my expectations aren't very high -- and "what I read" is all I have to go on.  I've never listened to more than a minute or so of him on the radio, and in that case he was holding himself out as a biblical scholar unencumbered with any apparent reading of it.  So I'm not sure how much he ultimately knows about honor.  He is pretty good at derision, put downs, condemnation, and insult; he seems to have a good and healthy pair of lungs, with a knack for hyperbole, half-truth, and specious generalization; and he definitely can draw an audience.  But then anger, froth and excess volume always can. 

But wisdom?  Experience?  Insight?  And, of course, honor?  Well, I can't say that I know too much about his credentials there.  I do, however, know some things about the wisdom, experience, insight, education, imagination, and, yes, honor of Martin Luther King, and his dream about American life that still sounds and feels expansive and enlarging and ennobling, and by comparison Mr. Beck's "dream" seems a little picayune.

My neighbor beside me at the picnic table was voicing little use for this hypertensive radio personality, but I find one redeeming quality in Glenn Beck.  With him making so much news in recent months, I hardly hear anything about Rush Limbaugh.  And there is something to be said for that.