Books - The Overton Window "by" Glenn Beck

The Overton Window - Glenn Beck  I had seen this at the library a few weeks ago and had been thinking of it ever since.  Kook novels are a field of special interest for me because they contain ideas which I am unlikely to encounter anywhere else, usually packed in an especially mediocre form of utopian/dystopian fantasy.  I was in the mood for something easy to digest and I knew this couldn't have been written by Beck himself (if it had, it probably would have been 600 pages), so it would be a standard ghost-written page-turner which hit all the notes at the right time.  When a kook novel is written by the kook him/herself it can be challenging, if not impossible, to read and I regret that among the many on the shelves here at the Kooks Museum I have only read most of them.  Any book I can rip through in four hours is a well-crafted piece of formula fiction, and that's what this is.  Steeped in kook lore as I am, I got all the Global Political Conspiracy references and was pleased to be introduced to some pretty interesting social engineering concepts, including the eponymous Window - ideas acceptable to the public are within this so-called window, and to change what is accepted one introduces extreme and unacceptable ideas, which automatically widens the window making less extreme ideas palatable.  This is similar to less well-defined ideas of my own, that the existence of an obviously insane extremism makes it easier to introduce unusual or uncommon ideas which seem more reasonable by comparison.  This is a classic and very useful fallacy of argument which actually operates subliminally to alter people's ideas without their knowing it. The irony of Beck's use of the Overton Widow concept, to me, is that he doesn't appear to realize that he has been used for exactly that purpose - as a public loony introducing crank extremist theories in order to make a less radical deliberate thought control agenda more palatable.  After finishing The Overton Window I opened another book I got at the same time, the first volume of  Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities.  I knew by the time I got to the second paragraph that I held in my hands a work of genius.  The sad thing is, I am not sure I will be able to read it.