Tilting at windbags
Ideologues take full advantage of America’s amnesia about Thomas Paine
By Kevin Uhrich 11/12/2009
Jon Stewart recently did a good job on “The Daily Show” of skewering FOX’s over-the-top right-wing nut job Glenn Beck, using Beck’s blackboard full of Rube Goldbergesque diagrams, lots of phony knuckle biting and sudden dramatic hand gestures to depict this paragon of supposedly conservative virtues as the loon that he really is.
But was this extreme but still “fair and accurate” depiction of the unbalanced Beck in action really enough to undo the damage that this wackadoo’s already done — not just to the American public, but to the reputation of a man whom Beck and his tea-bagging minions have been shamelessly mischaracterizing in all their patriotic goose-stepping; the very man credited with inventing our democracy, Thomas Paine?
“The idea that Glenn Beck and others whose ideas are opposite to Paine’s have adopted him to distort his ideas is extremely disturbing, but not surprising,” writes Alaine Lowell, executive director of the Thomas Paine Society, which is based right here in Pasadena. “It is almost humorous to observe the Christian Right quoting and fawning over the man who blasted Christianity in ‘The Age of Reason.’ Clearly Beck’s disciples haven’t read any of Paine’s works and are merely parroting the few quotes from Paine that fit their agenda.”
These “assaults on the truth,” as Lowell called them, “have made our mission more difficult and have robbed Americans of learning about a true hero of the American Revolution.”
But therein lies part of the problem: Who was Thomas Paine? Yes, it was Paine who wrote in December 1776, “These are the times that try men’s souls,” to inspire weary troops a few days before George Washington led them across the Delaware River to defeat mercenary Hessian troops in the new American army’s first real win of the war. But it was also Paine who nearly 20 years later ticked off so many folks with his critiques of organized religion in “The Age of Reason” that only six people attended his funeral in 1809.
Let’s also remember that the man who penned “Common Sense,” the bristling 46-page pamphlet calling for separation from England five months prior to the signing of the Declaration of Independence, was also a staunch supporter of abolition, justice for the poor and women’s rights — causes that didn’t make him very popular in the eyes of his white male peers.
For whatever reason, there is still no statue erected in honor of the man in his adopted hometown of Philadelphia, although the place is loaded with monuments to his fellow Founding Father Benjamin Franklin. Maybe that explains why Beck and his ilk feel so free to trample Paine’s ideas and mangle his words.
Truth be told, Paine was the very antithesis of people like Beck, an ideologue who will stop at nothing — including distorting the truth about a Founding Father — in order to deceive, which, as Paine also wrote in “The Age of Reason,” isn’t all that difficult to do, because “The sublime and the ridiculous are often so nearly related that it is difficult to class them separately.”
For more on Paine and the Thomas Paine Society, visit thomaspainesociety.org. For a great story about Paine’s life, read philadelphiaweekly.com/.../bring_the_paine-38411579.html.
If you want to know more about what Ben Franklin, George Washington and other revolutionary leaders might have said when they were teenagers, read C.L. Fagan’s historical fantasy novel, “Lightning Strikes the Colonies.” Franklin is expected to make a special appearance at a reception for Fagan between 7 and 9 p.m. tonight at the Cravens Estate, now the San Gabriel Pomona Valley Chapter of the American Red Cross, 430 Madeline Drive, Pasadena.
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