Feeling small, feeling infinite

I've always marveled at the end of the 1957 Sci-Fi classic "The Incredible Shrinking Man."

Cheesy, yet inspiring.

Really.

Tourette's Demagogue

This morning, a little story caught my eye: Fox's Glenn Beck Announces Comedy Tour.

It explains that Fox News’ latest sensation, Glenn Beck, is taking to the road with a comedy show in early June.

Have you seen this eccentric fellow? Unintentional(?) idiocies routinely spurt from his lips. Much of the time, it seems to me, Beck is a deer in the headlights of the car that he steers but that he simply cannot control.

He’s the Tourette's* Demagogue. You've gotta like so poignant a schnook, what with his uncontrollable blurtations, his manifest emotional instability, and his "recovering alcoholic"/"the Lord saved me" underdoggereletry.

According to this A.P. story,

Beck calls his act a ''poor man's Seinfeld'' and intends to mix topical humor with his modern-day reimagining of Thomas Paine's 1776 pamphlet ''Common Sense.''

Now wait a minute. Englishman Tom Paine’s pamphlet did have a certain importance among "the vulgar" during the American Revolution, though it was largely ignored or despised by many revolutionary leaders. For instance, John Adams—a conservative favorite—called it a "crapulous mass."

As you know, Paine was a troubled soul, and, after his American adventure, he returned to England, whereupon his radical nature emerged yet again, yielding the publication of “Rights of Man,” a kind of defense of the French Revolution and attack on organized religion, especially that silly and corrupt ol' Christianity.

More specifically, “Rights of Man” was a response to Edmund Burke’s famous “Reflections on the Revolution in France,” which was highly critical of that French project and its idealistic/rationalistic philosophy.

Now wait a minute. Edmund Burke is widely regarded as the founder of modern conservatism, whose classic conservative ideas are expressed throughout “Reflections.” Paine was combating that?

Yup.

The Painester, before he was forced to flee back to America, later published a “Rights of Man,” Part Deux, in which he advocated government social programs (to address poverty), using progressive taxes.

Gosh, he wasn’t much of a conservative, was he?

This Glenn Beck fella may be likeable, but he sure is a dope.

*I do not mean to suggest, of course, that Tourette Syndrome is a form of schnookery--only that, like those with TS, Beck tends to blurt things out sans control. Many a great and good person has had TS, and some, of course, have flourished with it.