New Hal Crowther Column

Here's a link to the latest column from Hal Crowther, one of the sharpest cultural critics around today. About twenty years ago I remember he wrote about Limbaugh with similar insight (and that does not mean he just disagreed with Limbaugh's politics, but rather saw through his act), and here he addresses the more recent Glenn Beck phenomenon. Of course you can go back much further than that to find evidence of the kind of anti-intellectualism such figures represent. Richard Hofstadter documented the length of that tradition in The Paranoid Style in American Politics way back in the early sixties; Susan Jacoby's The Age of American Unreason was something of a sequel from just a couple years ago. Let's face it, there's something inherent in democracy that creates a place for the likes of Beck in public debate (not in itself a bad thing), but once that debate is joined, it's essential that he be called on his nonsense (like anyone else), and you'd like to think that would ultimately have some impact on his credibility. Crowther seems pessimistic about whether or not that is happening, but I hold out hope that most people can still tell the difference between the proverbial spit and shinola.