Media Matters' Jeremy Holden ably tore apart Glenn Beck's latest mash-up of pop culture and paranoid conspiracism, wherein the Fox News host bemoaned the evolution of the bumbling sitcom father and linked Homer Simpson to the Weather Underground and President Obama's secret plans for communist world domination. Before I continue, reread that sentence and appreciate the fact that I didn't have to embellish at all for comic or dramatic effect.
Anyway, Beck's complaints about the buffoonization of television dads aren't particularly groundbreaking. Conservatives have been whining for years that Hollywood is trying to undermine the 1950s family ideal of Ward Cleaver presiding lord-like over his 2.5 kids and permanently aproned wife. John Tierney devoted an entire New York Times column to “The Doofus Dad” in 2005, lamenting, exactly as Beck did, that the father characters from The Simpsons and Everybody Loves Raymond are generally well-meaning but also “forever making messes that must be straightened out by Mom.”
Of course, Beck adds the thoroughly insane twist that the dumbing down of TV dads was intentionally engineered in accordance with an obscure manifesto from a 1960s domestic terrorist group. And that actually gets to the irony of the situation -- much of Beck's shtick is wrapped in his role as a father (“I'm not a journalist. I'm not. ... I am a dad, and quite frankly, I'm a little pissed off right now”) and he all too frequently demonstrates the sort of hilarious ineptitude that has come to define the modern sitcom father. So one could argue that Beck, like Homer Simpson and any other blundering idiot father on TV, is doing his share to downgrade America's view of fathers.
The evidence speaks for itself, and the similarities are too eerie to ignore.
HOMER: Look kids! I just got my party invitations back from the printers.
LISA: “Come to Homer's BBBQ. The extra B is for BYOBB.”
BART: What's that extra B for?
HOMER: It's a typo.
BECK: Yesterday, when I walked out of the studio, I looked at Pat and I almost said to Pat -- I said, “I can feel it coming.” He said, “I know.” He said, “They are just strong in power and focus.” And I said, “It's just -- it's darkness, and I can just feel it coming.” And I started to say, “The problem is, is that -- ” and I stopped, because I don't want to utter something like this without really thinking it through, but what I was about to say is, “the problem is that God is giving a plan, I think, to me that is not really a plan.”
HOMER: I've always wondered if there was a god. And now I know there is -- and it's me.
BECK: You want a sport? You know what soccer is? It's worse than curling. At least curling you are like, yes I can I probably do that, pick up a broom. We beat Canada every time we would try to curl. You can have girls come out and curl against the pros in Canada.
HOMER: Lisa, if the Bible has taught us nothing else, and it hasn't, it's that girls should stick to girls' sports, such as hot-oil wrestling, foxy boxing, and such-and-such.