Beck Rally the 'Waterworld of White Self-Pity'

What was it like to be at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally? Like visiting a political event in the not-so-distant future when white people are a minority in America, writes Christopher Hitchens for Slate. The prescriptions offered by speakers and attendees for restoring "honor"—and exactly what honor means in this context—were fragmented, but some themes remained constant: the sense of a white Christianity under siege in schools, at Ground Zero, and in the White House.

"In a rather curious and confused way, some white people are starting almost to think like a minority, even like a persecuted one," Hitchens writes of the rally, yet that idea is still nascent enough that "the overall effect of the rally was large, vague, moist, and undirected: the Waterworld of white self-pity." (More Glenn Beck stories.)