Overton Window: Chapter 14-15

Chapter 14

The problem with right-wing anti-state paranoia is that, while winguts pay a great deal of lip service to shrinking the government, they also fetishize authority. Like in that scene we just saw, where the supposed bad guys break in and start beating the shit out of people? The greater portion of Beck’s audience popped wood while reading it.

On the one hand, the government is out to get us. On the other hand, cops and soldiers (and, let’s face it, private military contractors) are heroes and if you say anything bad about either profession, you hate America. So who is the state going to send to quell dissent and stifle the truth?

Accordingly, off-camera, the cops decide that they want nothing to do with this, tattle on their superiors, and to avoid a scandal, the teabaggers all go free.

Suddenly, Noah is a teabagger hero. Hollis (the fat friend) thanks him, and then Barbara Emerson, Molly’s mom-but-not-really-her-mom, thanks him, and determines that it should be he who claims the prize of her daughter’s maidenhood. Someone sends a snazzy car for him, so he agrees to drive Molly and Barbara home. We’re treated to some description of the car that suggests that Beck and the car ought to maybe get a room.

If you think I’m kidding:

“You’ll like this,” Noah said, as he opened a center compartment by his side. Behind the sliding door was a neat pyramid of Turkish hand towels, kept constantly warm and moist like fresh dinner rolls. With a set of tongs he passed one to each of them, and then unrolled his own and pressed the steaming cloth to his face, rubbed in the heat, leaned back, and breathed in the faint scents of citrus and therapeutic herbs. His riding companions did the same, and soon there were long sighs from across the compartment, the sounds of unrepentant indulgence, comfort, and relief.

They drop Barbara off, and then Molly, like the spunky but ultimately subservient model of conservative womanhood that she is, apologizes for misjudging Noah. They agree to get food. Pretty inoffensive, right? You’d think.

“Tell Robert we need some orange juice and two Al Sharptons at the curb.” Through the glass divider, he saw the driver nod his head and engage the Bluetooth phone system.

“What’s an Al Sharpton?” Molly asked.

“Fried chicken and waffles…”

It’s okay, you guys. Some of Beck’s best friends nameless extras in the crowd scenes are black!


And these guys.

We get a boring infodump about Molly’s background. I don’t know if this is in any way relevant, but apparently Barbara is her real mother, and she reverted to her maiden name after her husband died. Not sure why she’d do that, or why the coy “it’s complicated” thing happened earlier. Noah says some things about Bill Clinton that make me think that he and Bill Clinton should get a room. Molly gets him to talk about his father and all the evil things he’s done. Despite the fact that she’s supposed to be more politically savvy than he is, she encourages him to mansplain how coups and wars are won through propaganda and PR rather than bullets. There’s a Godwin violation on page 78—honestly, I would have expected it sooner.

They talk about their parents some more and eat racist food, and then cuddle. She asks him to take her home with him—nothing sexual, just a sleepover. Because she doesn’t feel safe. I told you, these wingnuts are kinky.

Chapter 15

Apparently Molly doesn’t live in New York City, despite the fact that she seems to know a lot of people there, works there, and has a place in the East Village. That’s the only explanation for why she acts gobsmacked at the sight of the Upper East Side and, when Noah shows her two of the places that every visitor to New York City has seen—Central Park and the Met—she continues to gape like a dying fish. Then they go into Noah’s building and she gets ogled by Eliot Spitzer.



I’m not kidding—he’s namedropped. For some reason, it’s totally nasty when Spitzer does it, but fine for Noah to view her as a piece of meat.

Molly runs around his $5 million apartment “like a toy-starved moppet cut loose in FAO Schwarz,” then pops back into his room as he’s reading in bed. Danny cannot be located. This is sheer pretense. She gets in bed with him, but not to do anything sexual, and I’m just going to let Beck speak for himself here:

“Suit yourself, lady. I’m telling you right now, you made the rules, but you’re playing with fire here. I’ve got some rules, too, and rule number one is, don’t tease the panther.”

OH GLENN BECK NO. How is it that he makes cuddling more squicksome and unappealing than that Hagrid/Giant Squid Harry Potter fic?


The panther is his penis.

And we’re done Part 1. Time to break out the champagne, because I have a feeling I am not going to get through Part 2 sober.

Overton Window: Chapter 16-18

Chapter 16

Beck keeps quoting a guy named Carroll Quigley, so out of sheer perverse curiosity, I looked him up. Historian, wrote about secret societies, apparently was a huge influence on the John Birch Society. Apparently, Quigley was less than thrilled about this, but conspiracy nuts are not to be dissuaded even when an author they like tells them that they’re full of shit. That just means that the author is in on it too.

After the quotes, the tone takes a turn for the hard-boiled as we meet FBI agent Stuart Kearns, one of those hard-living tough guys with a string of ex-wives.



I am increasingly convinced that multiple authors were responsible for this abortion of a novel. He’s waiting to see a prisoner (any guesses as to whom?) and reading over the guy’s file in the meantime. Despite having only done minor things like hate speech, tax evasion, running a grow-op, and so on, he’s a big enough deal that the Joint Terrorism Task Force, the Domestic Terrorism Working Group, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction Working Group are interested in him. Yeah, okay.

I am shocked, shocked I tell you, to discover that Danny Bailey’s middle name is Carroll. There is even a quote from Carroll Quigley at the beginning of the chapter in case you wouldn’t otherwise get the reference.

Nothing at all happens once they meet, except that Kearns endears himself to me a teensy bit with his closing line:

“I’ve got nine words for you that I’ll bet you never thought you’d be so glad to hear,” he said. “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help.”

Heh.


Chapter 17

We really aren’t going to find out what happened with the non-sex for several chapters, are we?

Anyway, now Kearns is smoking on a jet, because we’ve not only had an abrupt genre switch from bad romantic comedy to neo-noir, but we’ve also been transported back to before 1998. He has a Plan for Danny. We’ll see if I can make sense of it, because it’s a bit incoherent. The FBI sets up a fake website, www.stuartkearns.com (by the way, that link redirects to the actual FBI website). Fake!Kearns was fired for whistleblowing on a plot to cause a global financial collapse and usher in a one-world government—amazingly, this fake plot looks a lot like the “real” plot in this book. The villains are the International Jewish Banking Conspiracy, the Masons, the Vatican, and so on. He’s popular with what Beck calls—unironically—the Patriot underground. The website advocates violent revolution.

You’ll like this next bit:

This site and its inflammatory content formed what’s known as a troll in the parlance of the Internet culture. Trolling is a fishing term; you toss your lure over the side and forget about it, letting it drag behind the boat in hopes that something you want to catch will eventually take the bait.

I clearly don’t know as much about this mysterious series of tubes called the internets as Glenn Beck does, but I’m pretty sure that trolls are named for the mythological entity that lives under bridges and gobbles up billygoats. But what do I know? Beck, after all, makes a career out of IRL trolling.



Kearns’ site catches the attention of some other IRL trolls, who want to go all Anonymous on some federal buildings, Tim McVeigh-style. They organize via a “private chat room” on the site.



The internet does not work that way. Terrorism does not work that way. But why let realism get in the way of a good yarn, that’s what I say.

Danny denies that he’s ever encouraged anyone to do violence, despite the fact that less than 30 pages ago, he was calling for armed revolt. But he agrees to stir up the “small-time desperadoes role-playing Red Dawn in their living room” (which sounds like fun, I gotta say), in exchange for his freedom, so that Kearns can arrest them all and be done with it. There’s a complete non sequitur about Kearns dressing up like Colonel Sanders to get a meeting with Nicolae Carpathia Ali Treki, president of the UN General Assembly, which makes less sense in context than it does here. I can only assume that the climax of this story will involve fried chicken somehow, as it seems to be a running theme and is also making me a bit hungry. I couldn’t make this shit up if I tried, people.


Chapter 18

Speaking of which, the first sentence of this chapter is: “Bacon.”

It’s all downhill from there. Molly and Noah do a crossword puzzle like hip twenty-somethings with whom Beck’s audience—composed primarily of non-hip old people—are supposed to identify. Molly says she’s leaving town, Noah still carries around a poem he wrote out in penmanship class. (Seriously.)

Guess which poem it is. No really. Guess.

Then they kiss. It’s the most awesome kiss ever. There is yearning! And hunger! And quickening and urgency! I don’t need to tell them to get a room because some guy does it for me.

But of course Molly is immediately all business, and asks Noah what he’d say if she and the *cough* Patriot Underground *cough* hired his PR firm to help them save the country. He proposes a platform: spending cuts, a flat tax, cutting the tax code down to “four or five bullet points,” and a mealy-mouthed immigration policy. I don’t think I need to tell you what a bad, not to mention unrealistic, plan this is. It’s like reading a paper that a 14-year-old who’s just picked up Ayn Rand for the first time wrote for Civics class.

She proposes that they go to his office and eavesdrop on yet another secret meeting but not so secret that it can’t be eavesdropped upon. He’s unwilling, but she imposes a few austerity measures of her own and tells him that she will forever withhold the golden vagina prize unless he does this for her. He calls her bluff and she walks out.

Conspiracy count: 9.5
Chapters in which nothing happens: Most of them.
Tasty bacon: Is tasty.