My job interview with Glenn Beck

"Be not afraid of greatness," spoke Malvalio in Twelfth Night. "Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon 'em."

Yes, and some of us can't recognize greatness when it's stretched out right before our eyes.

All I was looking for back in the spring of 2006 was a job that would take me away from the drudgery of working for a Philadelphia law firm. Then opportunity knocked.

A crew of writers was needed to help a local radio talk-show personality kick off his new magazine. Someone had given this man my name. One morning his assistant left a message on my phone, asking me if I were interested in joining an "exciting experiment."

I answered the call, and within two days I was sitting in front of Glenn Beck in his cluttered office on City Line Avenue.

Eyes averted

Since I never listened to talking heads on the radio, I had no idea who this man in a crewcut was. I did notice (it was hard to forget) that he never smiled, was prone to look down on his desk pad and appeared to be about to burst into a blinding rage at any time. I was not impressed. Hell, I was downright scared of him.

I had thought I was interviewing for a magazine geared for entertainment— to present zany insights into current events. But Beck described himself as "a fist in a punch and Judy show." If he hired me, I was to provide the bat he needed to do his slugging.

Beck did his best to reassure me I was in the right place and with a person who, as he described himself, "recognized the craziness of the human condition." But I couldn't wait to get out of there.

Not once during the interview did Beck look me in the eye. Later I learned that averting one's eyes is a common practice among Mormon men (Beck had converted from Catholicism) when talking to a woman other than one's wife or relative.

Whether it's also common Mormon practice to engage total strangers in conversation about one's private battle with the devil (Beck had drinking problems), I don't know. Maybe Beck was probing to learn whether I too had an undisclosed struggle with Mr. Barleycorn. (Since my life is an open book, he could have found out for himself.)

No, I think Beck was on a mission to play personal savior to anyone who talked to him. Unfortunately for him, I had already found one.

After 60 minutes with this man, suddenly citation-checking and subpoena writing wasn't looking all that bad. I left the interview and went back to my windowless law firm office with a renewed faith in the merits of paper-pushing.

One key question

Fast-forward now to today. Glenn Beck has morphed from zany entertainer into a prophet of America's emerging angry right wing. While I remained behind my desk, he has come out from behind his to save America, if (as he says) it's not too late.

A pivotal moment in American history (I quote from his website) came on the day of Beck's "miracle at the mall" this past summer. Lesser historians and media pundits remember this as the day Glenn Beck managed to hoodwink more than 400,000 people to come to Washington, D.C. and listen to his story about resurrecting America back to the land of milk and honey it once was and up from the progressive graveyard it has languished in since the likes of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt buried the dream by introducing unemployment insurance and Social Security.

"What has happened to this country?" laments Glenn Beck to his mesmerized website visitors. Funny, I've been asking myself the same question. Specifically, how does a manic-depressive frenetic personality capture the hearts and minds of millions of Americans?