Truth and Illusion, George, You Don't Know the Difference.

The title of this blog is a quote from Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and applies to too many people these days. Some mix up the two--truth and illusion--in search of fame. The father of the balloon boy perpetrated a hoax in order to gain publicity and has probably damaged his son's perception of reality in order to get on reality TV.

Another example is Fox News' resident whacko Glenn Beck who can't tell TV images from real life. Or at least his television persona can't--I don't think he believes half of what he says. In a recent segment of his show, he called on America to harken back to the days when we all got along and believed in the same basic principals. To illustrate his point, he showed two TV commercials from the late 60s-early 70s when he was a boy: the Coke ad with Mean Joe Green taking the beverage from a young fan and then rewarding the kid with his sweaty, stinky jersey; then the Kodak commercial with Paul Anka singing "Good morning, yesterday/You wake up and time has slipped away..." while home movies of Christmas and other holidays unspool.

There is something basically screwy about using TV commercials to illustrate an ideal past. They're advertisements used to sell a product. They create an idealized, unreal image in order to get you to associate that warm fuzzy feeling with the product so you're plunk down your two dollars and get the soda or the film (now obsolete) or whatever. Plus, it wasn't that ideal a time anyway.

Beck is about my age, maybe a little younger. I can remember that era and America was torn apart by Vietnam and Watergate. We weren't all holding hands and singing "Kumbaya" (except for my younger brother who liked to croon that tune because he knew it annoyed the hell out of me). Also, blacks, Hispanics, women, gays and other minorities groups weren't exactly dancing a jig over how wonderfully and equally they were treated.

Beck then proceeded to tell a long convoluted metaphor about America being like a teenager who disobeys his parents' curfew and is now at a party where everyone is drunk and he knows he's going to be punished. He'll have to spend the next Saturday night grounded (read be more fiscally responsible). Okay, I'll concede it's a legitimate point, but it's corporate America that's been overspending, not the average citizen whom Beck was addressing. Then he actually began to cry (again!) I can tell he's acting when he tears up like that. He's almost as bad an actor as Spencer on The Hills.

This goon has also compared the Obama administration to Mao's China for advocating volunteerism with the cooperation of Hollywood. So volunteerism is evil all of a sudden? That's a bit of a leap. And here's another one--Obama is giving too much power to these psychos by launching this "war" against Fox. He should just ignore them. By targetting them and freezing them out of certain stories he's driving up their ratings and giving Murdoch and Ailes a legitimate beef.