Glenn Beck on the edge

One year ago, he was balking at the idea of doing a TV show on CNN -- so much so that he went kicking and screaming into the initial sit-down with the cable news channel's executives.

"Just so you know," he told a roomful of CNN power brokers, "this is going to be the shortest meeting you guys have ever had. ... Not interested."

Today, he is the namesake of the fastest-growing talk show in cable news, and he's just signed to do color commentary on current events for ABC's "Good Morning America."

So much for "Not interested" in television as a medium for Glenn Beck .

In addition to his 7 p.m. daily talk show on CNN's Headline News, Beck also has his name on and hosts the No. 3 radio show in America. It can be heard locally at 10 a.m. on 104.7 FM.

So, what is his appeal?

Probably that he says out loud what most of his listeners think. He is the fast-moving train his audience knows flirts daily with a wreck.

While his show is chock-full of politics, it is not political. Riddled with attention deficit disorder, he can begin one sentence with his struggles with alcoholism, parenthood and marriage, and end with how that parallels the sectarian violence in Iraq.

Beck might be a conservative, but he is no lockstep, water-carrying Republican. Like most Americans, he is center-right. And, like most Americans, he too was fed up this past November with the vacuum of ideas coming out of Washington.

"I think the Republicans and the Democrats are both taking us to the same destination -- hell in a handbasket," Beck explained. "One of them is flying on the Concorde, and the other one's taking a very slow steam train, but the destination is the same place."

To Beck, that trip to hell does not stop with our politicians. It is societal.

"Too many people are concerned about their party, too many people are concerned about their labor union, and too many people are concerned about their own business," he says. "You see it with your own children in school, where you see a child that has been misbehaving and they're called on the carpet, and the parent immediately says, 'Not my child!' It is because it's no longer about the collective; it's about 'me.'

"Look at what's happening in the news -- imagine that each story is just one domino," he continues. "What we're doing as a society is, we're looking at the one domino and going, 'Yeah, look at the spots on that domino.' What we don't realize is, that domino is sitting on the floor next to a hundred other dominos. While they're not connected, they are once one falls ."

Beck believes all those dominos are going to fall right next to each other -- and that that could bring the end of Western civilization.

"Europe is practically one match away from being on fire," he says. "They've been asleep too long."

That is his serious side, a side that caused such liberal luminaries as the bloggers at Daily Kos to encourage their legion of believers to write or call CNN, demanding Beck's removal.

"My show can go anywhere from political nonsense all the way to relationships," he says. Perhaps that is why he gets people from 17 to 70 watching it.

"If there is a secret to the success of my shows, it is this: First, I'm riddled with ADD, and that has a certain entertaining appeal to it, because you never really know where I am going because I never really know where I am going," he explains.

"Top that off with my Mary Poppins approach -- you know, a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down -- and, somehow, it works out."