Forget for a moment that Glenn Beck is Glenn Beck.
There is no multi-million dollar radio and television empire, there are no creepy 9-12 revival meetings, and Americans slog through the holiday season without The Christmas Sweater.
Just imagine that some random guy, who perhaps might have been a rodeo clown at one point, wrote this thriller novel called The Overton Window, and you're an editor taking a look at the manuscript. You're reading the prologue, which concerns a man named Eli Churchill, the far-reaching conspiracy he's uncovered, and the dangerous men he knows are hunting him down to keep it quiet, and you see this passage:
When he put the phone back to his ear, an automated message was playing. The phone company wanted another payment to allow the call to continue. He worked his last six quarters from their torn paper roll and dropped them one by one into the coin slot. He had just three minutes left.
In a way it was ironic. After years of planning he'd brought all the evidence he needed to back up his story, but not nearly enough change to buy the time to tell it.
“Are you still there, Beverly?”
“Yes.” The signal on the phone was weak, and the woman on the other end sounded tired and impatient. “With all due respect, Mr. Churchill, I need for you to get to the point.”
“I will, I will. Now where was I?” As he riffled through his pile photocopies a couple of the loose pages got caught up in a gust and went floating off into the night.
“You were talking about the money.”
“Yes! Good, OK. $2.3 trillion is what we're talking about. Do you know how much that is? From sea level, that's a stack of thousand-dollar bills that would reach to outer space and back with 30 miles to spare!”
I look at this passage and wonder why it is, exactly, that a man who knows both that his life is in imminent danger and that he has only 180 seconds to explain the entirety of this grand criminal plot would waste several of those precious seconds describing in utterly irrelevant terms how vastly huge a sum of money $2.3 trillion is.
It makes no sense, and if I were that editor I'd mark it for deletion and take it as a very bad sign that the author doesn't really understand character motivation. But I'm not that editor and Glenn Beck is, in fact, Glenn Beck, so he likely got a little more leeway than an average, competent author would when laying out the fictionalized versions of his many conspiracy theories (which, not surprisingly, don't really require a whole lot of fictionalizing).
And as it turns out, those wasted seconds could have been better utilized, as poor Mr. Churchill ends up being shot by a mysterious assassin before he's able to tell “Beverly” about the nuclear weapons he's seen that will no doubt be put to nefarious use. So it looks like we can add one more item to the list of The Overton Window's many clichés -- the informant getting killed just before he's able to reveal the evil plot.