The above photo is the "crowd" waiting for the start of Glenn Beck's Unelectable, a Fathom Events production beamed live into movie theaters around the country last night. There were five of us in the theater at Pacific Place; once the show finally started, two more people wandered in late. We were all very quiet, all the way through the show. Here's the idea behind Unelectable: Beck, in a San Antonio theater, was debating a Barack Obama surrogate, who was played by a conservative comedian named Brian Sack. The hosts of the debate were two other conservative comedians playing reporters from the New York Times and CNN. After a rambling preamble (preramble?) about buying a baseball bat for his son, Beck announced the intent behind the debate. It was, he promised, going to be what would happen if the presidential debates were actually honest—"Do we even care about honesty anymore?" Beck asked the audience of gray-haired white people—with Beck in the Mitt Romney role.

This could've been an interesting idea, honestly, if Beck had agreed to a live debate with a Democrat on the issues. But the comedians played it stupid, with the fake New York Times reporter abashedly "admitting" that he's never read a history book, and the Obama stand-in unable to make a single coherent point. (To give you an idea of the level of discourse we're talking about, the Fauxbama opened with a teleprompter joke, and at one point he talked about being at the whim of a higher power by saying "sure, one can beg to the Prophet Mo...Jesus.") Beck delivered all the conservative talking-points. He mocked liberals who worry about protecting caribou rather than drilling for oil. He vowed to personally drill right down into the middle of Teddy Roosevelt's head if a large enough oil reserve was found under Mount Rushmore.

Beck refuted "yes we can" by saying his slogan was "yes I can." He called Obama "a five-year old girl." He fumed when a question about immigration was asked and answered in Spanish. (The fake New York Times reporter sputtered at Beck's protestations against "our co-national language.") In his education platform, Beck whined about there being too many "Harvard-educated lawyers" in the world, when what we needed was more people who follow their passion. (Since he wasn't arguing against anyone real, nobody mentioned that Romney graduated from Harvard, too.) "You don't have to have that gigantic education," Beck said. Thomas Jefferson learned all he knew from an apprenticeship, by gum, and if it's good enough for a Founding Father, it's good enough for everyone. He called Obama a Communist and a devil-worshipper. The foreign policy "debate" consisted of Beck saying, "Arab spring bad. Your policy bad," pointing, then, to the faux-Obama, and concluding, "Israel good." His closing argument was this: "I'm not a Communist. I've never worshipped a monkey god. And I've never eaten my dog."

Then it got worse.

After "winning" the "debate," Beck rambled for what felt like an hour. It was an insane diatribe about George Washington, Thomas Paine, and how God personally intervened to help the colonies defeat the British in the Revolutionary War. He then compared the Tea Party to the American Revolution and Occupy Wall Street to the godless French Revolution, saying that the main difference between the two is that God was on the side of the colonies, and he's on the side of the Teabaggers, too. (Maybe God just really likes tricorn hats?) Beck teared up multiple times. He sounded like a right-wing Mr. Rogers. "You are the greatest people ever," he told everyone in San Antonio and the seven people in the theater in Pacific Place. America is full of "good and virtuous people," and nobody in Europe ever "create[d] anything" before the American Revolution.

The fascinating thing about this two-hour experience was how little Mitt Romney was mentioned. Beck was arguing for the teabagger side of things, and he barely mentioned the Republican presidential candidate. Romney is "boring as snot. He's a geek in a suit," Beck said at the beginning of the night, and that was one of the last times the name came up. The evening was all about hating Obama. Beck touched the Obama surrogate for emphasis a few times during the night, and he made sure to make a huge scene of wiping his hand after touching Obama every single time. If it weren't for Obama, I don't know what all these people would do. Their hate for him burns so brightly, it seems to guide them in the world.

Speaking as a graduate of Beck University, I was surprised by how my former dean behaved. Not by his rhetoric or his praise of ignorance over intelligence. That's par for the course with Beck. But I was surprised how weak he seemed. Where once he roared, now he speaks in a funny little Muppet voice. His tears aren't huge torrents of sadness anymore; they're gasping little chokes. Beck is one of those people whose strength waxes and wanes with the size of his audience. Now that he's a specialty act, and not a mass-market broadcaster on Fox, he's even more ridiculous than ever. He's pathetic, and all his weird frantic charisma is sapped out of him. He used to be fun to watch, and now he's just a novelty performer for a dwindling group of graying true believers. Even though Beck was on the largest screen I'd ever seen him on last night, he was still smaller than he's ever been.

Unelectable is screening an encore performance on Tuesday, September 25th. Please don't bother with it.