Tears of a Clown: Glenn Beck and the Tea Bagging of America Read Online Free PDF Page A

contradiction. His personal narrative—overcoming his mother’s suicide and years of drug and alcohol addiction to find God and love—is compelling and uplifting. Yet the message he broadcasts to millions is angry and apocalyptic.
    Beck, born in 1964, had the makings of a happy childhood in Mount Vernon. His parents ran the bakery in town, which operated under the names Sweet Tooth Pastry and City Bakery. Of his early childhood, he told the Deseret News of Salt Lake City: “I’m a schmo. My family never made more than $25,000 a year. We’re all bakers for generations.” His parents sometimes dressed him and his sister up in Colonial garb to give the town a patriotic feel that might appeal to tourists. Young Beck, who attended a Catholic primary school, would also dress up in a tux and perform magic tricks.
    “When I was eight years old my mom gave me an album called ‘The Golden Years of Radio,’ ” he wrote. “I became mesmerized.” He wanted to be a broadcaster, and got his first gig at the tender age of thirteen after winning a local station’s contest to host an hour on air. While in high school, he was working as a professional DJ at Mount Vernon’s KBRC, drinking Coca-Cola on the set. By eighteen, he had a highly successful morning show in the area.
    But Beck’s childhood was also full of pain and tragedy. His parents gave up on the bakery when downtown was decimated by the malls. His mother was an alcoholic and a drug addict, by Beck’s account, and he lived with her after his parents divorced in 1977.
    “My mother committed suicide when I was thirteen years old,” Beck frequently says. He describes this as the source of both his pain and his strength: “My mom was a drug addict who committed suicide when I was thirteen. While that was a horrible and tragic event in my life, one that took me years to get beyond, in many ways it has ended up helping me become the person I am today. I am stronger because of it. I am wiser because of it.”
    This isn’t exactly true. He was fifteen years old when Mary Beck drowned in 1979. And the authorities at the time were not convinced it was a suicide rather than a mere accident. After the online publication Salon recently raised questions about the incident, the News Tribune of Tacoma, Washington, looked into it further.
    Forty-one-year-old Mary Beck’s body was found in Puget Sound, as well as that of a man who had taken her fishing on his small boat. An empty pint of Gordon’s vodka was found on the abandoned boat. The Tacoma police report said Mary Beck “appeared to be a classic drowning victim,” although the Coast Guard speculated that she could have jumped overboard, which would mean the other victim drowned trying to save her. In 2000, when he was working in Tampa, the St. Petersburg Times published a profile of Beck that reported that he “never told his first wife that his mother killed herself when he was a teenager. She found out when Beck told his radio listeners.” In any event, fifteen-year-old Beck was brought to the Pierce County morgue, where a family friend identified his mother’s body. Beck and an older sister then went to live with his father.
    In truth, the details don’t really matter. It’s not a whole lot better to lose your mother to an accident when you are fifteen than to suicide when you are thirteen. In a novel loosely based on his childhood, The Christmas Sweater , Beck has the protagonist’s mother die in a car accident when she falls asleep at the wheel. In a note accompanying that 2008 novel, Beck wrote that his mother “died when I was thirteen.”
    Still, the suicide became a key part of Beck’s narrative. He told the Deseret News that a brother—a stepbrother by most accounts—later committed suicide, too, and another died young from a heart attack. Beck wrote in 2003 that he had contemplated taking his own life when he was working in Kentucky in his twenties. “There was a bridge abutment in Louisville,