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

Kentucky, that had my name on it,” he wrote. “Every day I prayed for the strength to be able to drive my car at seventy mph into that bridge abutment … I have those stories to tell my kids and say, ‘Look, insanity runs in the family like a pack of wild elephants. Don’t turn out like Grandma. Don’t turn out like me.’ ”
    Beck talks easily on air about his troubled family—“I have two suicides in my family” and “I come from a dysfunctional family”—but he has relatively little to say about his father, William Beck, who is still living. “My dad and I weren’t very close to each other when I was growing up, because he was working all the time,” Beck writes. “He and I were never close until later in life, when I sobered up,” he writes elsewhere, saying his father has since become “the best friend I’ve ever had.”
    By contrast, his late maternal grandfather, Edward Lee Janssen, is a regular fixture in Beck’s monologues, a symbol of hard work and frugality. He mentions how his grandfather got his family through the Depression, how he’d watch The Lawrence Welk Show with his grandparents on Saturday nights, and how his grandfather used the same handmade tool box for fifty years. “He never wanted a new one,” Beck recalls with approval.
    Railing against some form of government handout, Beck says people like his grandparents “would punch us in the face for needing something like this.” They would have him “in the snow barefoot for a month cutting wood.” He says his late grandparents, though Democrats, would join him in his dislike for modern Democrats. “The Democratic Party … left my grandparents, left my parents,” he reports. “It is anti–everything my grandparents believed, and they were Democrats.”
    Beck also remembers his grandfather, a Boeing machinist and an auctioneer who didn’t go past the fourth grade, as a great storyteller, a trait even Beck’s detractors would say he has inherited. Edward Lee Janssen taught young Beck that there are three types of characters in good stories: “There’s heroes, there’s villains, and then there is the character that is there but for the grace of God go I.” Beck has employed each of these archetypes to great effect. It took him “a long time before I realized my grandfather was just making these stories up.” Beck has apparently acquired this skill, too. He restored the chair his grandfather used when he told the stories and brought it on the Fox set to show his viewers.
    By Beck’s own account, he spent the fourteen-year period between 1980 and 1994 drunk and high. “I was taking drugs every day of my life since I was sixteen years old,” he boasted to the Deseret News . At one point he was drinking a gallon of Jack Daniel’s each week. By the age of twenty-four, he said, “I was making about $300,000 a year”—he had skipped college and gone straight into broadcasting—“and most of it went directly up my nose.”
    “If I hadn’t been such a cheapskate, cocaine would have killed me,” Beck writes. “I remember looking into the mirror one day and seeing crusted blood all over my face, from all the cocaine I had snorted the day before … I found other recreational drugs, like alcohol, to get into that were much more cost-effective and didn’t make my nose bleed.”
    By the time he quit abusing substances in 1994, Beck reports, “The doctor gave me six months to live.”
    The addictions were destroying his career. Now he often mentions the young producer he fired for giving him a ballpoint pen rather than a Sharpie for autograph signing. “I don’t even remember his name,” Beck recalled for one audience, tearfully, his chin quivering.
    The writer Alexander Zaitchik, in Salon , uncovered various similar anecdotes that Beck has been less eager to share in public. There was the time in Phoenix when Beck, on the air, called the wife of a rival a couple of days after she had a miscarriage—and joked