Sitting in his Mercury Radio Arts office three days later, Beck told me that he, too, noticed the silence and was astounded. “If someone had told me, ‘Hey, why don’t you tell some history stories at the end, and there will be dead silence,’ I’d have said, ‘No way.’ ” Beck has great distrust of success, especially his own. Friends say he is terrified of something going wrong, someone in his audience “doing something stupid” (presumably code for violence). There is a certain boyish disbelief in Beck as he engages in his real-time assessment, often on the air. “I told my wife, ‘I can’t believe I actually have reporters following me to Alaska,’ ” he said. (Note: reporter’s wife said the same thing.)
Beck told me that he recently threw away all of his old tapes from his Morning Zoo years, so his kids could not hear them. He has no idea what his role is in the political firmament. The notion seems to bore him. His most animated attacks on Obama in the days after the “Restoring Honor” rally were over his take on the president’s religious convictions, which Beck called “a perversion of the Gospel of Jesus Christ as most Christians know it.”
He is fragile, on the edge. There is no template for him or for where he is headed. “I have not prepared my whole life to be here,” Beck told me from his plush couch, his face turning bright pink. “I prepared my whole life to be in a back alley.” I expected him to cry, but he did not.
You've got to read this profile on Beck; it's hilarious.
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