I recently picked up a copy of Glenn Beck’s Common Sense. Why, I don’t know. It just jumped out at me in the bookstore, and it was 30% off anyway. So I decided that, since just burning it would be silly, I’m going to read through it and post my response to each chapter, with counterarguments and citations and such. There are eight chapters (if you include the introduction and the chapter on the 9/12 project), and I’ll probably do a chapter every few days (except for chapter 5, which I’ll have to split into two posts due to its sheer size), so this should take about a month as long as college life doesn’t interfere too badly.

First, a bit of information about the book itself: it goes for incredibly cheap on Amazon (about $7 or so), it’s 111 pages long (174 with the copy of Thomas Paine’s Common Sense he included as well as sources), and oddly enough for a political book, I can’t find a single positive review printed on it. Now, onto the introduction.

The very first sentence of the introduction is “I think I know who you are.” Beck then proceeds to list the qualities he believes the audience for the book has. Several of them, such as “you try to do the right thing every day,” or “You sometimes argue with friends about politics, not because you are a political activist, but because you think the issues are actually important” are so trite as to be essentially meaningless. Others, such as “… you stopped expressing opinions on sensitive issues a long time ago because you don’t want to be called a racist, bigot, or homophobe if you stand by your values and principles” or “Now our government, the instigator of our problems, is telling everybody that they have to start sacrificing” are thinly-veiled attacks on progressives. We’re only in the introduction and, without explicitly mentioning it, Beck has started his assault on what be perceives to be the cause of all of modern America’s ills: the government. He briefly seems to realize that there might be other problems when he remarks

… you wonder why it makes you feel like a bad parent if your kids don’t have certain shoes, the newest video games, or aren’t signed up for five different sports teams

Sadly, it’s unlikely that Glenn Beck will attack corporate advertising for turning wants into perceived needs. There’s also a bit of unintentional comedy in

You’re not a prude, but you happen to think that a three-year-old shouldn’t be watching shows that treat sex lightly and mock mothers and fathers. But what can you do? The other shows are worse.

If Beck is using this introduction as a method of venting his own complaints about parenting, then clearly he needs to either subscribe to Nickelodeon or Noggin, or possibly even… turn off the TV or not let his kids watch it! Shocking, I know. Aren’t Republicans supposed to be all about personal responsibility? So why is Beck complaining about how the TV is doing a poor job of raising children?

Anyway, once we’re done with the list of grievances Beck has nailed to the metaphorical door, he states that “The fastest way to be branded a danger, a militia member, or just plain crazy is to quite the words of our Founding Fathers.” What the hell? I don’t think that quoting the founding fathers (I absolutely refuse to deify them with a proper noun) makes you crazy at all. But what I do think is that crazy people tend to quote them in their political arguments, as if they were absolutely perfect and had no moral flaws in and of themselves. Do I need to remind them that the three-fifths compromise, which literally stated that slaves were not a whole person, was put in the Constitution by the founding fathers, or that the famous phrase “all men are created equal” didn’t include people with an excess of melanin? Do you have any doubt that, were they to be transported to today, they would nearly have a heart attack at the fact that we elected a… a NEGRO to the office of President? But I don’t want to go on a tangent here about how stupid founding father worship is; this is about Glenn Beck’s book.

He wants us to realize how America changed from how it used to be; notice the subtle implication that change is always bad. If the typical Beck reader is about 40 or so, then in their childhoods rights for non-whites was a new concept, gay rights were practically non-existent. Lawrence v. Texas, which ruled sodomy laws as unconstitutional, wasn’t even until 2003! I know he didn’t mean it that way, but it’s still rather amusing. The introduction ends with Beck imploring us to ‘declare the causes that unite us’, advice which the modern Republican party does sorely need. We’ll see what those causes are over the next nine chapters (hint: veiled racism/classism/bigotry!)