Glenn Beck: The Overton Window

Near the beginning of the walk were the relatively small potatoes: crazy Pet Rock-style fads that had inexplicably swept the country, the yearly conjuring of must-have Christmas toys (murders had been committed for a spot in line to buy some of these), a series of manufactured boy bands and teen pop music stars, most of whom could neither carry a tune nor play an instrument. On a dare, Noah’s father had once boasted that he could transform some of the century’s most brutal killers into fashion statements among the peace-loving American counterculture. And he’d done it; here were pictures of clueless college students, rock stars, and Hollywood icons proudly wearing T-shirts featuring the romanticized images of Chairman Mao and Che Guevara.

Last in this section were a few recently developed pharmaceuticals that had required some imaginative new diseases to match them. Drugs weren’t so very different from other products; it was all just a matter of creating the need. If you hear about restless-leg syndrome often enough, one day soon you might start to believe that you’ve got it. Cha-ching; another job well done.

Farther along, just past Big Tobacco, was a small exhibit devoted to the poster-child client in the world of public relations: the lottery. Fun fact: as a naïve youngster during a rare family chat at the Gardner dinner table, Noah had come up with the tagline displayed in this frame. It had been the first time he’d ever earned a pat on the head from the old man: You can’t win if you don’t play. Sure, kid. And you can’t fly if you don’t flap your arms.

No other product could demonstrate the essence of their work as perfectly as the lottery. The ads and jingles might remind all the suckers to play, but it was the PR hocus-pocus that kept them believing in the impossible, year after year. A fifth-grade math student could seemingly blow the lid off the whole scam: to reach even a fifty-fifty chance of winning you’d have to buy a hundred million Powerball tickets. Everybody knows that, but still they dream on. Take their money and give them nothing but a scrap of paper and disappointment in return, and then- and this is the key-make them line up every week to do it again. If you can pull that much wool over the eyes of the public and still sleep at night, you’ve got a long and rewarding career ahead of you.

Each of these PR triumphs represented a defeat for someone else, of course. That was simply the nature of the business, of all business really. The whole concept of winning requires that others lose, and sometimes they lose everything. That’s just the way it had to be. A person could waste his whole life trying to work out the right and wrong of it all.

Case in point: Noah had a friend in college, not a close friend, but a self-described bleeding-heart lefty tree-hugging do-gooder friend who’d gone to work for an African aid organization after graduation. She’d kept in touch only casually, but her last sad letter had been one for the scrapbook. It turned out that after all the fund-raising and banquets and concerts and phone banks, all the food and clothing and medical supplies they’d shipped over had been instantly hijacked and sold on the black market, either by the corrupt provisional government, the corrupt rebel militias, or both. Most of the proceeds bought a Viking V58 cruiser for the yacht-deprived son of a parliament member. The rest of the money went for weapons and ammunition. That arsenal, in turn, fueled a series of sectarian genocidal massacres targeting the very starving men, women, and children whom the aid was meant for.

Back in his younger days, Noah had been quick to snatch a moral from this story: You can’t fix everything, and maybe you can’t fix anything at all. It’s all too big, and too broken. So don’t rock the boat, kid. Just count your blessings, keep your head down, and play the lucky hand that’s been dealt to you. This had come as a welcome vindication for a young man who’d given up early on his own high ideals and drifted into the safe though stormy harbor of his father’s business. It was a comforting answer, so long as you didn’t think too hard about the questions.

And what had that woman said today? All you PR people do is lie for a living.

That’s right, sweetheart. Well, Miss Holier-than-thou, to paraphrase the artful response of a prominent client of the firm, I guess that all depends on what the definition of lie is, now doesn’t it? And while you’re looking that up in the dictionary under L, run your uppity little finger down the column to the last word of your indictment: living. We all have to make one, and unless I’m mistaken, you and I both get paid with the same dirty money. The difference is, one of us isn’t kidding himself.

By now he’d arrived at an alcove that showcased the truly world-class events and power players, political and otherwise, that the company had helped to invent.

A number of U.S. presidents were on display here, a nearly unbroken succession from the present and upcoming administrations all the way back to JFK. To hear the old man tell of the only two holdouts, Jimmy Carter had been too high-and-mighty to accept this sort of assistance, and Nixon had been too cheap. Republican or Democrat, it didn’t matter; to the realists of modern politics, ideology was just another interchangeable means to an end.

Noah was nearly to the end of the hall when a small, unassuming case study caught his attention. There was no title or description on this one, just a silent running video, the testimony before Congress of a volunteer nurse named Nayirah al-Sabah. She was the fifteen-year-old Kuwaiti girl whose tearful story of infants being thrown from their incubators by Iraqi soldiers became a podium-pounding rallying cry in the final run-up to the 1991 Gulf War.

Undeniably moving, highly effective, and entirely fictional.

The client for this one had been a thinly veiled pro-invasion front group called Citizens for a Free Kuwait. The girl wasn’t a nurse at all; she was the photogenic daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The testimony had been written, produced, and directed by Arthur Isaiah Gardner, the distinguished gentleman sitting just behind her in the video.

A dull headache had begun to pound at his temple, and Noah abruptly remembered where he’d been meaning to go: the bulletin board in the break room. He had to grab the address of that meeting of flag-waving wackos, and then finish his conversation with an attractive but naïve young woman who might need to be straightened out on a thing or two.

“Aw, come on, man, what are we doing on Park Avenue?”

Over the years Noah had confirmed many times that there truly is such a thing as a bad night. When these doomed evenings arrive you can’t avoid them. The jinx comes at you like a freight train, and by the time you’re caught in the glare of those oncoming lights it’s far too late to avoid the disaster. The best you can do is make your peace with doom and ride out the curse until sunrise.

If there’s a bright side to all this, it’s that bad nights that don’t kill you can sometimes make you a little bit smarter. For instance, he’d learned that when the situation starts to go downhill it’s often due to avoidable errors in judgment, always involving things you should have foreseen but didn’t, and that those errors usually come in threes. A pilot will tell you the same thing; a plane crash is rarely the result of a single failure. It starts small, an innocent mistake or a bad decision that leads to another one, and then another, and before you know it you’re at the bottom of a smoking hole wondering what in the hell just happened.

Take this night, for example: Noah’s first mistake had been opting to hail a cab instead of waiting a few minutes for a limo from the company motor pool. Then he’d become immersed in his BlackBerry just after the ride got under way. Minutes later when he looked up, the road ahead was a sea of twinkling red brake lights. The pre-weekend traffic was stacked bumper to bumper as far as the eye could see. That was his second mistake.