Glenn Beck: Theater, Madness, McCain and Clydie Clyde

Katie Couric is turning Barbara Walters with her new web show. In her first webisode below, Katie's first guest Glenn Beck is theater and madness. Salon's Alexander Zaitchik, who's working on a book about Beck, has been writing about how Beck came to be a spewer of hate.

It's about time that someone shone a light on this guy. Beck's mother drowned when he was 15. Beck called it a suicide and he has struggled with the same things his mother battled--drug addiction, manic fits of depression and thoughts of suicide. What's interesting to me is people take him seriously and they can't see they he's one foot inside of a mental breakdown.

Read part one here and part three is here.
Here's some interesting excerpts from part 2 of 3-- Beck's imaginary friend:

Like dozens of stations launching generic zoos around the country, Beck's first morning show was titled simply "The Morning Zoo." It wasn't a playbook zoo, as it lacked an ensemble, but it had a zoo spirit. It was fast-paced and featured skits and fake characters voiced by Beck. Beck's main cartoon character was named Clydie Clyde, a Muppet-voiced alter ego who sounds like the love child of Yoda and Kermit the Frog. Today the descendants of Clyde live on without names. Beck lapses into voices to imitate anyone he doesn't like, while going boggly-eyed and waving his hands around like he's slipping on a banana peel. (Clyde was based on the most widely imitated such character at the time, "Mr. Leonard" from Shannon's New York Zoo team.)

"Beck's Corpus show was just him, Clydie Clyde and the news reader," says Tod Tucker, who hosted the slot following Beck's at KZFM. "He was extremely talented and he knew it. At first we didn't get along because he was so arrogant, but we became friends. He always talked about going to New York City and making it big. That was his dream."

Beck hated black people long before Obama:

With Dries across the console, Beck directed a rotating ensemble cast and wrote or co-wrote daily gags and skits. Among the show's regular characters was Beck's zoo alter ego, Clydie Clyde. But Clyde was just one of Beck's unseen radio ventriloquist dolls. "He was amazing to watch when he was doing his cast of voices," remembers Kathi Lincoln, Beck's former newsreader. "Sometimes he'd prerecord different voices and talk back to the tape, or turn his head side to side while speaking them live on the air. He used to do a funny 'black guy' character, really over-the-top."

"Black guy" impersonations were just one sign of the young Beck's racial hang-ups. Among the few recordings of "Captain Beck and the A-Team" archived online is a show from February 1986 in which Beck discusses that night's prime-time television schedule. When the subject turns to Peter Strauss, an actor known for starring in television's first miniseries, Beck wryly observes, "They say without [Strauss' early work] the miniseries 'Roots' would never have happened." Clydie Clyde then chimes in with an exaggerated and ironic, "Oh, darn." The throwaway dig at "Roots," which chronicled the life of a slave family, wins knowing chuckles from Beck's co-hosts.

He has always been childish:

It was no secret in Louisville that Curtis, whom Beck had never met and with whom he did not compete for ratings, was overweight. And Beck never let anyone forget it. For two years, he used "the big blonde" as fodder for drive-time fat jokes, often employing Godzilla sound effects to simulate Curtis walking across the city or crushing a rocking chair. Days before Curtis' marriage, Beck penned a skit featuring a stolen menu card for the wedding reception. "The caterer says that instead of throwing rice after the ceremony, they are going to throw hot, buttered popcorn," explains Beck's fictional spy.

Beck turns Super Patriot:

The birth of Glenn Beck as Radio Super Patriot can be traced to the morning of April 15, 1986. This was the morning after Ronald Reagan ordered U.S. warplanes to bomb Moammar Gadhafi's Tripoli palace in response to the bombing of a Berlin nightclub frequented by U.S. servicemen. Beck sounded stoned during the show -- and given his later claim to have smoked pot every day for 15 years, might have been -- but even then his politics were anything but tie-dyed. After opening the show with a prayer and Lee Greenwood's "God Bless the USA," Beck played patriotic music through the morning. The only track receiving multiple plays was a New Wave-ish spoof titled "Qaddafi Sucks." The song was a huge hit with listeners, dozens of whom called Beck to tell him how inspired they were by his patriotism. Caller after caller applauded him for "standing up for America." When someone argued that Reagan should have dropped more bombs, Beck agreed. "I personally don't think we did enough," he says. "We should've went over there [sic] and bombed the hell out of 'em."

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Conservative Joe Scarborough, one of the few conservatives who is an adult, says Beck is bad for conservatism.

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The Source of Glenn Beck's Woes May Be Mother's Suicide

I never knew this about Glenn Beck. It's almost certain that the apparent suicide of Beck's mother (Beck claims his mother's drowning was a suicide) and her battle with depression, plays a big role in his instability. Salon doesn't draw any conclusions, but you can draw your own.

Early one morning in May 1979, a 41-year-old divorcee named Mary Beck went boating in Washington's Puget Sound. Her companions on the expedition were a retired papermaker named Orean Carrol, whose boat she helped launch near the Tacoma suburb of Puyallup, and Carrol's pet dog. Exactly what happened next remains shrouded in morning mist, but among the crew, only the dog would survive the day. The boat was recovered late that afternoon adrift near Vashon Island, just north of Tacoma. It was empty but for two wallets and the frightened animal. Mary Beck's body was discovered floating fully clothed nearby. Carrol's corpse washed ashore at the Vashon ferry terminal the following morning.
The county coroner found no evidence of violence on either body. Police investigators told Tacoma's News Tribune that the double drowning appeared to be a classic man-overboard mishap -- a failed rescue attempt in which both parties perished.

At the time of Beck's death, she held custody of her 15-year-old son, Glenn, with whom she had moved to Puyallup. She had left her estranged husband William behind in Mt. Vernon, Wash., another small city 100 miles due north. After producing two daughters and a son, the Becks' marriage had collapsed in 1977 under the weight of Mary's chemical addictions and manic fits of depression. It was in the two years bridging this divorce and his mother's drowning that a teenage Glenn Beck launched one of the most bizarre and unlikely careers in the history of American broadcasting.

His sheltered upbringing:

The Becks were also active in the Immaculate Conception Catholic Church, whose day school Beck and his sisters attended. To this day, the face-to-face community of Mount Vernon and the watercolor backdrop of Skagit Valley remains the soft-focus template for Beck's evocations of idealized small-town "real" America. He has also pointed to the area's white demographic -- made up of descendants of Swedish, German and Dutch settlers -- as the source of his lingering discomfort around Jews and other ethnic minorities. "I'm the whitest guy you will ever meet," Beck never tires of saying. "The first time I saw an African-American, my dad had to tell me to stop staring."

Science of Mind? I find it hard to believe that Beck has anything to do with Science of Mind, which is more about spirituality (think A Course in Miracles) than religion. I know a bit about Science of Mind and it certainly doesn't profess hate, which proves a twisted mind can distort anything. But we already know that because we've seen what people do in the name of religion:

Religion is central to Beck's current identity, but he didn't grow up that way. Anticipating his own shotgun conversion to Mormonism, his father adopted Catholicism only because it was the precondition to sex and marriage with Mary. Before meeting his future wife, William Beck preferred a more modern form of spiritualism known as Religious Science. Developed by Ernest Shurtleff Holmes, the "science of mind" philosophy combined a Unitarian belief in god with a humanistic belief that man ultimately determines his own destiny through his thoughts and actions. Holmes is considered a proto-theorist of what would become the modern self-help movement, and his ideas early trickled down to the young Beck. Holmes has graced Beck's recommended reading lists, and Holmesian ideas appear just two pages into Beck's 2003 memoir cum manifesto, "The Real America," which begins with dime store science-of-mind. "I have found there are four steps to change," writes Beck. "1. You must want it. 2. You must believe it. 3. You must live it. 4. You will become it."

His mother's gift prompted him to go into radio:

But it wasn't a love of music that originally drew Beck to radio. Years before he got his first headphones and rocked out to Cheap Trick, Beck caught the radio bug from his mother's gift. Specifically, it was Orson Welles' infamous news-report rendering of H.G. Wells' "War of the Worlds," which he'd first heard on Mary's "Golden Years of Radio" albums, that launched Beck's imagination in the direction of radio.

Beck's radio beginnings:

Beck rolled into Texas in 1983 driving a blue two-seater Datsun 280Z sports coupe. On the bumper, a Reagan-Bush '84 reelection sticker. At his side, his wife, Claire. And taking form in Beck's mind, an invisible character named Clydie Clyde who would define the next 10 years of his career as a Top 40 morning DJ. Read it all.

Beck tries to sum up Obama. Perhaps Clydie Clyde is whispering in his ear: