The tea party: more for them, less for the rest of us (Hal Crowther)

[struggle4progress]

Tears of rage
by Hal Crowther

... My memory doesn't extend back to anything quite like this, nothing so animated by rage yet devoid of content. As a friend of mine wrote several years ago, everything's like pro wrestling now: taunts and scowls, fantastic narratives and pantomimes of violence, empty conflict aimed at inflaming an audience of oafs. And of course we're aware that the wife of the founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, herself a participant in some of those preposterous ringside narratives, is spending a fortune to win a U.S. Senate seat in Connecticut. One key difference is that most tea party combatants come armed with deadly weapons, engineered to shed real blood. Dialogue, as I learned dramatically, is not their style. But what sort of dialogue can we imagine with a fierce minority virtually lobotomized by its gullibility, a minority of bubble-dwelling reactionaries whose every "fact" has been distorted or manufactured? ...

f there's one firm truth, one persuasive image that might change the lives of hypnotized tea-baggers—I know, I'm dreaming—it would be this one, to wit: The relationship between corporate, special-interest America and our government is exactly the same as the relationship between a rider and a well-broken saddle horse; the horse is only cursed and kicked on the rare occasions when it bucks or bridles. Barack Obama saw health care reform and emergency regulation of the financial industry as self-evident necessities, but to the big riders who hold the reins in this country they registered as the kind of high-spirited fractiousness that's punished with whips and spurs. We never hear the words "socialist" and "communist" unless someone tries to dilute the absolute economic power of white men ...

...Their blindness is a greater shame, as I see it, because the tea party gets one very important thing right: The system is broken. Awash in money and mendacity, America's democracy is like a big animal that can't swim, floundering and drowning in 2 feet of water. Cash and slander rule—huge wallets, huge lies. If you won't lie and can't pay, you have no future in American politics. If you aspire to public service, try to find a country with a Supreme Court majority that doesn't spell "free $peech" with a dollar sign ...

Throw the bums out, by all means. How many bums would we miss? But beware of what might come after. The right is not monolithic. All its serious money comes from the same sources, but the reactionary bestiary houses a variety of strange creatures with strange dreams. Tea party grandfathers dream of a 50-foot fence around Mexico, penal colonies for gays and abortionists, a warm gun in every holster and Fox News in every nursing-home dayroom. Rank-and-file Republicans dream only of regaining power, of Dick Cheney's Halliburton foreign policy once more set loose in the world. The Koches dream of a tiny, toothless government about the size of a cherry pit. As for Glenn Beck, don't let those bursts of tears and piety fool you. He's a refugee from a nightmare, he's fresh blood on the staircase. On a recent radio show, Beck recommended a book (The Red Network: A "Who's Who" and Handbook of Radicalism for Patriots) written in 1934 by Elizabeth Dilling (1894–1966), the notorious anti-Semite, racist and Nazi sympathizer who called President Eisenhower "Ike the Kike" and JFK's New Frontier "the Jew Frontier" ...

http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-tea-party-more-for-them-less-for-the-rest-of-us/Content?oid=1667544

[mwb970]

1. Best Tea Party article I've read yet. /nt