It's a surprisingly cynical comment in what's supposed to be a storybook fairy tale: "Life is pain, Highness," the mysterious man in black (Cary Elwes) tells Princess Buttercup (Robin Wright) in "The Princess Bride." "Anyone who says different is selling something."

Sometimes it's clear what's being sold. Sometimes it's not.

It was easy to see what was being sold last week in EnergySolutions Arena and the Salt Palace: The gospel of multivitamins.

Sales associates for Utah-based Usana Health Sciences gathered for their international convention, and every presentation was designed to rev up the crowds to sell Usana's nutritional supplements and related products.

At one session I attended, I heard the sales associates cheer for practicallly anything that was said from the stage. Improvements in the company's website? Cheers. A game-show-style segment in which a woman uses a vacuum cleaner to suck dollar bills from a plastic booth? More cheers. A video touting the success of the U.S. speedskating team (which Usana sponsors) at the Winter Olympics in Vancouver? Major cheers.

It's all a grand effort to energize the sales associates, to whip up excitement to get the associates eager to sell more product when they get home.

There also was one of the sure-fire tools of salesmanship: The flash of celebrity.

The celebrity that hit the stage at EnergySolutions Arena on Friday was the actor Jason Priestley, along with his wife Naomi, a Hollywood makeup artist.

The Priestleys come by their Usana loyalty honestly, having tried the company's nutritional supplements five years ago. Not even the company's execs knew that a TV star was among its customers, said Dan Macuga, Usana's v.p. for marketing.

Now "we're part of the Usana family," Naomi Priestley declared to the associates, who cheered wildly.

The Priestleys' sales pitch represented a curious phenomenon: The idea that a message carries more weight when it's uttered by somebody famous.

Even Jason Priestley acknowledges the phenomenon. "Celebrity is a form of currency," he told me after speaking to the Usana sales associates, "and you have to be careful how you spend it."

In Washington, D.C., this weekend, the nation witnessed another celebrity-driven sales pitch — though it wasn't clear exactly what was being sold.

The celebrity was Glenn Beck, who regularly uses his talk-radio and Fox News megaphones to sell gold coins (he shills for Goldline International, which is now under investigation for fraud) and blackboards full of right-wing conspiracy theories.

Beck staged his much-hyped rally near the Lincoln Memorial on Saturday, which also happened to be — and Beck continues to swear up and down that this was a coincidence — the 47th anniversary of Martin Luther King's famous "I Have a Dream" speech.

The rally was officially nonpolitical (because it was a fundraiser for a nonprofit veterans' support organization), though giving podium time to former Alaska half-term governor Sarah Palin makes that claim difficult to swallow. The event drew thousands of people involved in the Tea Party movement, though they were urged to keep their usual anti-Obama signs at home.

Beck labeled the rally "Restoring Honor," a bumper-sticker sentiment vague enough to be catchy — Whose honor? Where did it go? And how would it be restored? — without demanding any actual action from the assembled audience.

What the crowd (estimated at 87,000 by a CBS News report, short of the 300,000 Beck's organizers were planning for) got, to their surprise, was Beck (a Mormon) taking on the appearance of a televangelist.

"America today begins to turn back to God," Beck told the crowd, urging them to "recognize your place to the Creator. Realize that He is our king. He is the one who guides and directs our life and protects us."

Apparently Beck's D.C. visit didn't include a trip to the Jefferson Memorial, where he might have gotten a lesson in the separation of church and state. And Beck conveniently ignored the fact that Dr. King's 1963 event, The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, championed an agenda of economic equality that would repel the Tea Party's big-money backers (like the oil-baron Koch brothers, whose bankrolling of fake grassroots groups was exposed last week in a profile by The New Yorker's Jane Mayer).

So what, ultimately, was the "Restoring Honor" rally? A political event? A fundraiser for veterans? A revival meeting? Or a massive ego-stroking for Glenn Beck?

At least the folks pushing vitamins are clear about what they're selling.

Sean P. Means writes the Culture Vulture in daily blog form, at blogs.sltrib.com/vulture