Bye-Bye Limbaugh and Beck?

Forty years ago, a line of actors and actresses came out on a Manhattan stage and dropped their robes to face the audience naked. My reaction then was "That's interesting, now what else have you got?"

As it turned out, very little. Despite sketches by Samuel Beckett, John Lennon and other literati, "Oh Calcutta" was deemed "sophomoric and soporific" by a New York Times critic and remains memorable only for crossing a cultural threshold of public nudity.

It comes to mind now as Rush Limbaugh and Glenn Beck, two figures who strip their psyches bare in a new era, seem to be imploding after showing us everything they've got and bumping up against possible boredom with their act.

After a disastrous (in his own word, wasted) hour of bear-baiting Democratic pariah Eric Massa (akin to shooting fish in a barrel and missing), Beck now finds himself under fire from evangelical leaders for equating Christian social justice with Nazism and Communism.

"When Glenn Beck is asking Christians to leave their churches, the Catholic Church, the black churches, Hispanic, evangelical, to leave all our churches," says the head of Sojourners, a Christian networking group, "I'm saying it's time for Christians to leave the Glenn Beck show."

Beck's desperation is echoed in Limbaugh's promise to leave the country if health care reform is passed. With his huge audience and contract, El Rushbo won't be going anywhere soon but his threat is symptomatic of the pressure felt by extreme figures to keep pushing the boundaries of expression.

Their plight brings up another image from the last century. In the early days of TV, a civil-rights leader described a dilemma:

"At dimly-lit open-air rallies each night, the speaker's face lights up in the glare of photofloods during those passages a cameraman thinks most likely to win ten seconds of network time. The lights go off abruptly when the cameraman's interest flags, leaving the speaker blinking in the dark, and fishing for another, even more startling statement to bring the lights back on."

Beck and Limbaugh, like their counterparts on the Left, keep fishing for ever more startling statements to hold our interest, but in a time when politicians say and do the unthinkable daily, it's getting harder to stay in the spotlight.

The only novelty left would be public figures coming on stage fully clothed and speaking with civility, but so far Barack Obama's act is only attracting a bare majority of the audience.

Letterman, Polanski, Palin and Beck

In last night's monologue, David Letterman makes a little joke about avoiding award ceremonies for fear of being nabbed for sexual misconduct (as Roman Polanski was in Switzerland) and then gives his audience a no-laughs account of being blackmailed over having affairs with women who work on his show.

We are deep into media-outdoes-real-life here, in the terrain of the 1976 "Network" movie that posited a TV anchorman who goes raving mad, is exploited for ratings and then killed on-air when they drop.

Letterman will no doubt overcome his extortion embarrassment as easily as he did the flap over a tasteless A-Rod/Sarah Palin daughter joke last summer as he continues on his new $90 million contract, while the ex-Alaska governor matches his income, thanks to Rupert Murdoch's underwriting of her sure-fire best-selling memoir next month and career as a commentator for Fox News and the Wall Street Journal.

Unless Palin's political career miraculously revives, all this might be filed as entertainment news, if it were not for the concurrent rise of Glenn Beck as a rival to Rush Limbaugh for the mad-as-hell-not-going-to-take-it-anymore crowd.

A lifelong radio-TV mouth with a history of alcoholism and drug abuse, Beck now rates a Time cover and a section of his own on the White House blog to correct the lies and distortions he is spewing over Murdoch's media.

In the New York Times, under the heading, "The Wizard of Beck," conservative columnist David Brooks tells "a story of remarkable volume and utter weakness. It is the story of media mavens who claim to represent a hidden majority but who in fact represent a mere niche--even in the Republican Party. It is a story as old as 'The Wizard of Oz,' of grand illusions and small men behind the curtain."

Brooks is right, of course, but the conflation of show biz and real life continues as surely it was starting to do decades ago when I ran into my high-school classmate Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote "Network," in a restaurant on his way to meet William Paley, the founding father of CBS and the archetype of TV executives lampooned in his movie.

"I must admit," Paddy confessed, "I'm a little nervous about meeting him."

After he left, the agent with me said, "He should be. They showed 'Network' on CBS last week, and it got lousy ratings."

Guilty Prosecutors?

This has been a dizzying week for deciding who is above the law or below it, with figures from Ted Stevens and Rod Blagojevich to the AIG bonus recipients parading before the public bench for reappraisal.

*The former Republican senator from Alaska gets a pass from a Democratic Attorney General on the grounds of bad behavior by prosecutors from the Bush Justice Department, which still faces unresolved accusations of firing eight federal prosecutors for not being political enough.

(Sarah Palin wants the Democrat who defeated Stevens to resign, but that idea has as much chance as the moose she shoots from airplanes.)

*The Disney World vacation of the impeached former Illinois governor is interrupted by news he has been charged with numerous counts of fraud and corruption, but only after successfully naming Barack Obama's successor to the US Senate.

His indictment raises again questions about the part played in his case by the universally sainted prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, who went public with an inflammatory attack on Blagojevich in December but failed to charge him then. Was Fitzgerald's move, an obvious attempt to keep the governor from selling the seat, proper behavior for a federal prosecutor? Does it open the door to others hounding elected officials in less cut-and-dried cases?

*From, of all people, Fox News' usually rabidly wrong Glenn Beck comes a scathing interview with Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal pressuring him for legal reasons for his public hounding of AIG bonus recipients, laying bare blatant political grandstanding by Blumenthal and, to a lesser degree, New York's Andrew Cuomo for political gain rather than duties of office. Beck wins that argument handily. Political piling on by officers of the law is an ugly sight, no matter who is at the bottom.

Eric Holder's action in the Stevens case is an encouraging sign that we are moving back to the traditional norms of rule by law but a New York Times editorial suggests more:

"He should not stop with this case. Don Siegelman, the former governor of Alabama, and Paul Minor, a prominent Mississippi trial lawyer, have charged that Justice Department prosecutors engaged in unethical behavior in cases that led to their convictions. Both men claim that they were singled out for prosecution because of their affiliation with the Democratic Party.

"Given the flagrant partisanship of the Bush Justice Department, it is especially reassuring to see Mr. Holder ignore party lines to do the right thing by Mr. Stevens. It has been far too long since the attorney general seemed interested in enforcing ethics and nonpartisanship in a department that has been shockingly lacking in both."

It's time to reaffirm that, while nobody is above the law, neither is anyone below it.

Natural Disasters

Amid the overwhelming sadness of seeing California on fire, there are reminders that all is not lost.

Syndicated radio host Glenn Beck is now famous for pointing out that in Malibu “a handful of people who hate America...are losing their homes in a forest fire today."

After Hurricane Katrina, the President’s mother philosophized about victims in the Houston Astrodome, "Everyone is so overwhelmed by the hospitality. And so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this--this is working very well for them."

Silver linings are everywhere in Bushland, if only we knew where to look. Consider Baghdad last spring, where a Republican Congressman found it "like a normal outdoor market in Indiana in the summer time."

Hope and renewal are everywhere. All it takes is a perfect storm of stupidity to help us see the light.