Glenn Beck Is Right: Spider-Man Is the Greatest Show (In Hell):
So the other day hillbilly hero Glenn Beck got on his microphone o' doom to announce that he had seen a preview of Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark, a musical on Broadway, don't ya know, and he declared it the most amazingly splendiferous thing since the Resurrection. It just so happens that the Rude Pundit was given a ticket to Spider-Man, and he saw it last night. He can report that, when it comes to theatre (as with most things), Glenn Beck's head is still so fully up his ass that he tickles his lungs when he blinks.

Watching the appalling spectacle unfold in front of him, surrounded by an audience that wasn't sure if it should be entertained but probably thinking, "Fuck me, I spent $150 on this seat; I'm gonna like it whether I like it or not," the Rude Pundit wondered how, other than his incipient madness, could Beck (or anyone) have thought Spider-Man was even remotely good.

And then this morning, in a vodka hangover (for, yes, he had to drink a great deal and alone in order to rid the demons of Cirque du Spidey from his brain), he realized that Spider-Man represented the delusional image that conservatives have about the nation, about humanity. No, it wasn't that Norman Osborne, who becomes the Green Goblin, the main villain, is a global-warming-believing gene-splicing mad scientist, and he gets killed twice. No, it wasn't that almost all the black characters were either hip-hopping ghetto monsters straight out of 1985 or, in one unfortunate case, a dreadlocked subway drummer. No, it wasn't that nearly all the women characters were either secretaries or sluts or slutty secretaries. No, it wasn't that Mary Jane isn't happy until she's subservient to Peter Parker.

It was that Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark is everything that America has become during the reign of conservatives: a bloated, energy-draining spectacle that tells us to be excited and has a simulacrum of a heart, but nothing that approaches actual emotion, where the only thing that matters is shoveling money into a festering, ever-starving corporate gourd in the hopes of turning a profit, even if the only way to do so is to sucker the chumps who want to taste a little of that capitalistic glory. Yes, there may be good people working here, but they are merely tools to some plotless, avaricious, mendacious, unnameable goal that is impossible to achieve because the very act of attempting to reach it was corrupt and foolish and tainted and boring and stupid and the songs just sucked.

(Note: It was preview. Shit's gonna change. So don't see the fucking thing until it opens when they presumably won't stop the show because the pulley strings got tangled or something. Yes, it's true. During the song "Turn Off the Dark," they turned on the lights. That is not a joke.)