Glenn Beck is very much in the role of modern conservative American commentators and contributes to the partisanship that is growing in the U.S. He is funny, intolerant of stupidity and loves to challenge peoples’ uninformed opinions with facts. He also has strong Libertarian instincts so his book shouldn’t be burned immediately.
One shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but Arguing with Idiots (Simon and Schuster, New York, 2009) does feature a photograph of Beck looking awfully comfortable in a Stasi uniform (the rear of the dust jacket shows him crying some very unconvincing crocodile tears. The contents are unprepossessing at first sight, being a series of short essays studded with inset ‘factoids’, cartoons, and other such web-like offerings.
And yet he has produced a lovely manifesto, a guide book to dealing with “small minds and big government”. This is the book of sanity and activism that we all need. We need to rise against idiocy and mercilessly savage it. Okay, so he is short of active prescriptions for action, but he offers a big box full of ammunition that we can all use.
