Being Glenn Beck - NYTimes.com Glenn Beck was sprawled out on his office couch a couple of weeks ago, taking - as self-helpers like to say ­ - an inventory. "I think what the country is going through right now is, in a way, what I went through with my alcoholism," he told me. You can either live or die. You have a choice. Beck, who is 46, was in the Midtown Manhattan offices of his production company, Mercury Radio Arts, which is named for Mercury Theater, the company created by Orson Welles. He had just finished his three-hour syndicated radio show and was a few hours away from his television show. It was a Wednesday afternoon in the middle of September, and Beck had just returned from a week's vacation in the Grand Tetons followed by a quick hop to Anchorage, where he and Sarah Palin appeared at an event on Sept. Beck has a square, boyish face, an alternately plagued and twinkle-eyed demeanor that conjures (when Beck is wearing glasses) the comedian Drew Carey. He is 6-foot-2, which is slightly jarring when you first meet him, because he is all head and doughiness on television; I never thought of Beck as big or small, just as someone who was suddenly ubiquitous and who talked a lot and said some really astonishing things, to a point where it made you wonder - constantly - whether he was being serious. At some point in the past few months, Beck ceased being just the guy who cries a lot on Fox News or a "rodeo clown" (as he has described himself) or simply a voice of the ultraconservative opposition to President Obama. In record time, Beck has traveled the loop of curiosity to ratings bonanza to self-parody to sage. It is remarkable to think he has been on Fox News only since January 2009. In person, Beck is sheepish and approachable, betraying none of the grandiosity or bluster you might expect from a man who predicted "the next Great Awakening" to a few hundred thousand people in late August at the Lincoln Memorial or who declared last year that the president has a "deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." He wore a blue dress shirt tucked into jeans and brown loafers, which he kicked off as soon as he sat down. He showed little interest in the results from primary elections held the day before - upsets in Delaware and New York for Tea Party candidates whose followers often invoke Beck and Palin as spiritual leaders and even promote them as a prospective presidential ticket in 2012. "Not involved with the Tea Party," Beck told me, shrugging. While many identify Beck with a political insurgency - as Rush Limbaugh was identified with the Republican sweep of 1994 - to believe that the nation suffers from "a political problem" comically understates things, in his view. "I stand with the Tea Party as long as they stand for certain principles and values," Beck told me. He is a principles-and-values guy. Beck talks like someone who is accustomed to thinking out loud and inflicting his revelations in real time. He speaks in the language of therapy, in which he has been steeped through years of 12-step programs and the Mormon-affiliated addiction-treatment center he and his wife run in the New York, New Jersey and Connecticut region. As he lay on his office couch, he recalled a very low moment. It was back in the mid-1990s. He was newly divorced, lying on the olive green shag carpet of a two-bedroom apartment in Hamden, Conn., that smelled like soup. It had a tiny kitchen, and his young children slept in a bed together when they visited on weekends. "It was the kind of place where loser guys who just got divorced wind up," Beck said. "You'd see a new guy come in, you'd say hello and he'd walk in alone, and you'd be like, "Yeah, I understand, brother." " Beck understands, brother. Communists in the White House are bent on "fundamentally transforming" the country; progressives speak of putting "the common good" before the individual, which "is exactly the kind of talk that led to the death camps in Germany," as he said on his show in May. Or, as he said in July of last year, "Everything that is getting pushed through Congress, including this health care bill," is "driven by President Obama's thinking on . . . reparations" and his desire to "settle old racial scores." It sounds harsh, maybe, but this is the rhetoric of crisis and desperation, and so much of the population is too blind drunk to recognize the reality - which is that the country is lying on an olive green shag carpet on the brink of ending it all. "Some have to destroy their family and their job and their house and their income," Beck told me. Some don't get it, and they die. Some do get it, and they revere Glenn Beck. WHILE THE RIGHT has traditionally responded to its aggrieved sense of alienation with anger, Beck is not particularly angry. He seems sorrowful; his prevailing message is umbrage born of self-taught wisdom. He is more agonized than mad. He is post-angry. Beck rarely speaks with the squinty-eyed certainty or smugness of Rush Limbaugh or his fellow Fox News hosts Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity. He often changes his mind or nakedly contradicts himself. "When you listen and watch me, it's where I am in my thinking in the moment," Beck told me. I'm trying to figure it out as I go. He will sometimes stop midsentence and recognize that something he is about to say could be misunderstood and could cause him trouble. Then, more often than not, he will say it anyway. In the middle of his analogy to me about his own personal crash and the country's need to heal itself, Beck looked at his publicist with a flash of alarm about how I might construe what he was saying. "He is going to write a story that I believe the whole country is alcoholics," he said. And then he went on to essentially compare his "Restoring Honor" pageant at the Lincoln Memorial to a large-scale A.A. meeting. "When I bottomed out, I couldn't put it back together myself," Beck told me. I could do all the hard work. I could do the 12 steps. But I needed like-minded people around me. Mark Leibovich is a reporter in the Washington bureau of The Times. He last wrote for the magazine about Mike Allen of Politico.