I fear...he's from Mount Vernon

Every time we travel up to our vacation property in the San Juan Islands, our path takes us through the town of Mount Vernon, Washington. It's an agricultural community of about 31,000 people 60 miles north of Seattle. When we pull off I-5 to pass through town, heading west to Anacortes, we know we're about a half hour away from the ferry landing .

We've often stopped for lunch, and have become quite familiar with the retro downtown, which gives off a vague '70s vibe. So I was mildly surprised when I caught a news item the other day saying that Mount Vernon's mayor had proclaimed Sept. 26 (that's tomorrow) as "Glenn Beck Day" to honor the conservative commentator who's rocketed to fame on CNN as a wild-eyed, flame-throwing critic of President Obama.

Turns out Beck grew up in Mount Vernon, although he moved to Bellingham, just south of the Canadian border, and graduated from high school there. He is probably best known as the guy who recently declared that Obama has "a deep-seated hatred for white people." And he seems to everywhere you turn -- TV, radio, books, magazine covers, the Web. I'm more familiar with Rush Limbaugh, the mouthpiece of the rabid right, so I suppose it was morbid curiosity that drew me to a recent TIME magazine cover story, "The Agitator," to see what I might learn about Beck.

Sure, I already knew he was "the hottest thing in the political-rant racket, left or right," and "a gifted entrepreneur of angst," as the TIME article noted. But reporter David Von Drehle provided more:

Beck is 45, tireless, funny, self-deprecating, a recovering alcoholic, a convert to Mormonism, a libertarian and living with ADHD. He is a gifted storyteller with a knack for stitching seemingly unrelated data points into possible conspiracies — if he believed in conspiracies, which he doesn't, necessarily; he's just asking questions. He's just sayin'. In cheerful days of yore, he was a terrific host of a morning-zoo show on an FM Top 40 station. But these aren't cheerful times. For conservatives, these are times of economic uncertainty and political weakness, and Beck has emerged as a virtuoso on the strings of their discontent.

He's developed a signature catch phrase "I fear..." or "I'm afraid..." with which to stoke distrust, mistrust and outright hatred amongst his followers. And Von Drehle does a masterful job of revealing Beck's schtick.

What's this rich and talented man afraid of? He is afraid of one-world government, which will turn once proud America into another France. He is afraid that Obama "has a deep-seated hatred for white people" — which doesn't mean, he hastens to add, that he actually thinks "Obama doesn't like white people." He is afraid that both Democrats and Republicans in Washington are deeply corrupt and that their corruption is spreading like a plague. He used to be afraid that hypocritical Republicans in the Bush Administration were killing capitalism and gutting liberty, but now he is afraid that all-too-sincere leftists in the Obama Administration are plotting the same. On a slow news day, Beck fears that the Rockefeller family installed communist and fascist symbols in the public artwork of Rockefeller Center. One of his Fox News Channel colleagues, Shepard Smith, has jokingly called Beck's studio the "fear chamber." Beck countered that he preferred "doom room."

It's mildly amusing to think that Beck has raked in an estimated $23 million in salary and other earnings in the past year, when you know those revenues in all likelihood come from listeners who are the same easily manipulated small-town white folks who made up Sarah Palin's army of true believers. Do they realize they're being played?

In any case, tomorrow is Beck's big day. Check out the story about his controversial homecoming, courtesy of Manuel Valdes, a former summer intern at the Skagit Valley Herald (that's in Mount Vernon) who's now working in the Seattle bureau of The Associated Press.