December 4, 2009

Glenn Beck, Thespian

Photo used under a Creatives Commons license by Flickr user Max Wolfe

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If you skipped last night’s Glenn Beck holiday special, The Christmas Sweater: A Return to Redemption, you had company. The live event, beamed into 475 movie theaters nationwide, sold 17 tickets apiece in Boston and New York, and 30 in Washington, DC. At the downtown cineplex in San Francisco, a brisk walk from Mother Jones headquarters and the only theater in the city to air the program, the crowd could be counted on just two fingers—three, if you include this reporter.

The program revolves around a pre-taped, one-man stage production of Beck’s semi-autographical novel, The Christmas Sweater (now available in children’s book form), in which a young boy, Eddie (played by Beck), rejects his mom’s knitted gift, only to watch in horror as she dies in a horrific accident that evening. Eddie runs away from home and hits rock bottom—which a teary-eyed Beck illustrates by collapsing to the floor into a fetal postion—before finding finding salvation and discovering the true meaning of Christmas. It’s a real heartwarmer.

Following Eddie’s redemption, the event switched to a live forum profiling figures with stories a lot like Beck’s. As the sympathetic testimonials pour in—from a cancer survivor, a recovering drug addict, and a young man who says Beck’s novel brought him back from suicide’s edge—the lone constant, (other than Beck choking back tears, of course), is a barn-sized book jacket for The Christmas Sweater. For all the emotional rhetoric, A Return to Redemption is really just a big-budget infomercial.

 

Beck laments at one point that 2009 has been a year to forget, which is partially true, but not for him. Between the 9/12 project, his forthcoming plan to overhaul American democracy, and his movie, he’s become conservatives’ most versatile pitchman, a one-man WalMart for political outrage, literary grace, and, should you need it, a shoulder to cry on.

 

Sad you missed out on A Return to Redemption? Fear not. Beck will be back for an encore on December 10. Good seats are still available.

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WE CAME UP SHORT.

We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

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