Part of me is reluctant to post this because I fear/hate being yelled and screamed at. But more of me wants to write it down out loud.

During the recent brouhaha about Fox News, I couldn't help being puzzled since to me Fox seems mostly a bit disorganized and casual. Well, except for the screaming financial experts on Saturday morning, of course. And most of the women wear way too much eyeshadow and hairspray and although they have impressive educations and vocabularies, and sound bright and aware, they look too porcelain-doll for my taste. But a viewer with a remote can always watch something else, right? And it is part of the whole free speech thing that there be different points of view out there on the airwaves. But then I realized I was thinking about the station as a whole with some Barbie doll women and some loud annoying men. And then I thought about Glenn Beck.

A few weeks ago I mentioned to some friends that I think Glenn Beck may be the most dangerous and evil man in America. That might be an overstatement but I'm not sure who else would even vie for the distinction. Mere days after I made my pronouncement, Time magazine did a cover story on him. Happy though I am to know I was ahead of my time (get it?!), I'm sorry they and I are giving him so much ink (as we say in the biz). On the other hand, he needs to be identified as what he is, not simply left to wreak havoc and damage unchecked or unremarked upon.

Beck seems to look all angelic. He has a fairly pleasant, round, slightly pasty and bland face. But behind that mild exterior swirl eddys and earthquakes of fury. He loves to declaim and proclaim and cause as much trouble as he can. Basically, he's a terrorist. He'd like to grab hold of us all and infect us with his cynical, hateful, angry ideas. In the sweetest possible way, of course. And if some decent people with genuinely-held beliefs that seem similar to his happen to have rabble-roused heart attacks or turn on their country in the process, well, life's a you-know-what.

While he sneers about the mean president who's trying to take your money away from you, and while he stirs up various kinds of panic, it turns out that Beck himself is - quelle surprise - very different from what he espouses. He's a divorced and remarried father of four (two children in each marriage) and a "recovering" alcoholic, neither of which are wrong at all but they would not be on his own lists of how one ought to be. I feel bad and sad for him that both his mother and a sibling committed suicide, and another brother died of a heart attack, and one of his four children is physically disabled (cerebral palsy), and having turned to alcohol and then to fanatical passion about ideas seems downright reasonable under the circumstances - I'm guessing politics has replaced scotch in his addicted emotional life - but one or two visits to his program and you see that he is devious and calculating on a phenomenal level and he snags too many otherwise intelligent and thoughtful people in his net. Furthermore, in the hypocritical tradition of many demagogues and unlike the so-called normal Americans to whom he appeals and on whose heartstrings he yanks so hard, he himself lives quite differently than they do, no doubt a pillar of the unsuspecting community in an ultra-upper-class southern New England town with the highest median income of any town in the country ($178,651) and where it would be hard to find even a few people of color.

It's not entirely evident that Beck actually believes what he says. He clearly loves the sound of his voice - a voice that alternates from softly sarcastic to screaming. His rants are over-dramatized and I have to believe they are a calculated performance. His tirades are almost paced to a metronome like old-fashioned hellfire and brimstone preachers intending to rouse listeners into a frenzy.

Beck's immediate appeal is simple. He speaks directly to the fact that many of us feel scared and frustrated by the strange world of the moment. He's playing on our sense that American fundamental principles like be-all-you-can-be and buy-what-you-want are in jeopardy. And he wraps it all up in a package that seems, at first, kind of amusing and maybe really simple and straightforward. But as you listen longer, you realize he's fondling the strings of a put-upon violin and singing variations on a "socialism is coming" song every time he opens his mouth. He uses the race card in particularly under-the-surface and demonic ways, labeling black people including the new president as "white racists" and then smiling his round doughy innocent smile and saying gee he didn't said anything bad, gee, what could you possibly mean.

Bottom line, Beck's public persona is evil, deceptive, nasty, hateful and hating - a hypocritical lynch-mob rabble-rouser. I would suggest that one should beware of him, certainly, and also of anyone who think he speaks anything even approximating truth.

In these difficult times, too many people have legitimate problems, questions and issues. It is unfortunate that some will look for answers from this man and thereby risk falling into his cauldron of hatred and hysteria.

By which I mean to say that pretty much no one stays calm and rational when a policeman talks to them. I doubt if it matters who has the greater claim to logic because both people think it's theirs. I doubt if it matters that/if the police are "just doing their job" or asking innocuous questions. I doubt if it matters if one side or the other is white or black although assumptions certainly are made on both sides when race is involved. In such situations, hotness will infuse all heads no matter what, almost inevitably.

In the Gates incident, the policeman could have left as soon as he realized that Gates lived in the house, even if hundreds of thousands of people had gathered, and could have said, gee, sorry, no problem, have a good night. And Gates could have said, through clenched teeth if he had to, here's my driver's license and I live here and sorry for your trouble.

But people can be - and often are - sarcastic, angry and rude when challenged, surprised and/or scared. Power in a uniform with a gun confronting someone without either will always be unpleasant and scary, and no one reacts well when feeling surprised and scared. And a person holding a power position will always feel challenged and threatened when spoken to loudly and angrily. It doesn't have to be because they're black or white or even polka-dotted (as Steve Martin used to say), it's just human nature. The trick is knowing how to cool off in two seconds. We all need to know how. And to do it at those times. And to have a calm and reasonable conversation if we can. What we do not need to do is make it into a great big conceptual hullabaloo and blame it on a big impersonal -ism that allows us to disavow responsibility for our own behavior, no matter how understandable and instinctive, and no matter how sarcastic, angry and/or rude. Sometimes a cigar is really truly nothing more or less than dried leaves crushed into a long cylindrical shape that will get lit with a match and smoked.