The Tea Bagger’s Lament
OK, let’s get something straight here once and for all. When you hear pundits and other people making the claim that the Tea Party members have legitimate complaints that need to be addressed, that is true- but only to such a limited extent that they’re really not worthy of being addressed in the context of a movement separate from the rest of us. Here’s my definition of a tea bagger- and yes, I call them “tea baggers.” As Bill Maher said- and I’m paraphrasing- tea bagging used to be such a nice, wholesome gay sex act until they took on the term by default. I don’t know if you can call what follows a “definition,” because that usually entails only a sentence or two, but you know how I am. If I could get my thoughts into a sentence or two, I’d be on Twitter instead of hanging out here with the likes of you.
The cause and the intent of the Boston Tea Party was so diametrically opposed to what the tea baggers assume that it was all about. The British government (the King) had colluded with the East India Company to force consumers in the colonies to purchase a product from that one particular importer- or corporation. Well, perhaps I don’t have that exactly right, but you can try to put it into one sentence, too, in the comments, and if you get your history right, then I can edit this later to pretend that I knew what I was talking about all along. Anyway, the current movement isn’t about being “taxed enough already,” because tea baggers wouldn’t know what truly being taxed means unless they went back to the era that conservatives often pine for: the 1950’s, when very high tax rates on wealth had coincided with a very productive and far more egalitarian economy.
Anyway, Tea Party activists believe that if they align themselves with other mostly southern, mostly older, mostly more conservative and mostly actively Christian white people, that they will be given priority as resources are dived up. The entire cause of the Tea Party is to ensure that spending is cut- for everyone else but not for them. They go on and on about the debt and the deficit (I’ll bet you a front tooth that not a-one tea bagger in the whole entire you-knighted states knows the difference between the national debt and the deficit- or that there is a difference), but where were they during the Reagan and Bush I & II administrations, when the pattern was basically set for the national debt to skyrocket under Republican presidential administrations and for deficits to become like chewing tobacco at a Glenn Beck rally? They were in front of their TV’s in the double wide watching Carson between their toes with a Budweiser doing a balancing act on their over-stuffed beer bellies, that’s where!
Now that the financial debacles that almost brought down the entire economy had been foisted upon us by the crony capitalist pigs that were balancing credit default swaps on their over-stuffed bellies, the over-class suddenly becomes terrified of having to pay the bill. The underclass that had been saving a Bud in the fridge for their pal George W., should they ever come across him clearing brush, knows intuitively that the American people are ultimately going to be left with the bill from any major financial malfeasance in the banking and finance sectors, so they go right into sharecropper mode.
I call it “the sharecropper mentality.” The southern agrarian culture of days past often involved white people relying on the land owner to rent access to usable land, and they were in sometimes fierce competition with blacks and their fellow agrarian “white trash” amongst the extremely stratified agrarian culture of the Deep South. In our current era, instead of perceiving themselves as part of self-governance and an egalitarian society, white working class folks too often see themselves as competing for resources as per the old southern agrarian hierarchy. The right wing consistently utilizes the strategy of “divide and conquer,” and getting Americans workers to be divided against themselves and thus distracted from the doings of the Koch brothers of the world is a strategy that is consistently effective in America, especially in the South and in the Sun Belt. That’s where Nixon’s electoral strategies had manifested their brilliance. He came up with the “Southern Strategy” of transforming the Republican Party of Lincoln to the Party that we see today: loaded up with resentful white folk continually suspicious of minorities who they think want their jobs and their beer.
The cause of the tea bagger’s lament stems not from enlightened aspirations for the human condition a la John Locke or as expressed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in regards to the establishment of American ideals, or by Abraham Lincoln in his definition of a government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” The tea bagger’s lament does not reflect our founding aspirations, or the rallying cries for worker’s rights near the turn of the last century, nor does it even reflect upon our modern American society. It’s about electoral strategies in politics. It’s part of that “Southern Strategy” that still haunts our politics in America.
The Tea Party activists are not engaging in legitimate causes. If you want to get sentimental, then OK, they’re engaging in legitimate causes, but let’s get real here. This isn’t about flag waving or economic anxieties, at least not in regards to actually pining for a solution. They’ll berate you with complaints about “big government,” but they do not realize that the “big government” meme only applies to regular people. The crony capitalists know that it is “small government for you, big government for the capitalist crony big guys.” They want ordinary working people to lower their expectations in regards to their own government so that the nation’s resources can be spent on behalf of the wealthy. That is the battle that has been fought since just prior to the founding of our country, and that’s the part that truly reflects upon the Boston Tea Party, and it’s the battle that the tea baggers are now fighting on behalf of the Koch Brothers and all the other plutocrats battling to establish their Ayn Randian pirate Island in America. So, if they don’t like being called “tea baggers” then call them “Koch suckers.”
The essence of the Tea Party is the belief that the nation’s resources are limited and are not expandable. They do not perceive- and they won’t believe you if you try to explain it to them- that our nation is not like other failing Western economies such as Greece and Ireland and Spain and Portugal. Our nation has tremendous wealth and a robust economy, even when it is currently mired in dysfunction and corruption and hoarding. We can solve our problems, if we had the political will to do so. You can even play with an app that had been posted on the New York Times website, where you fiddle with spending cuts and tax increases to find out if your own priorities can successfully solve our deficit. I played it, and I won. I solved the deficit!
The founder of the Childrens’ Defense Fund, Marian Wright Edelman, said, “We do not have a money problem in America. We have a values and priorities problem.” Instead, the Koch suckers are duped into believing that our very limited resources (we’re “broke,” don’t ya know that?!) must be dived up according to one’s affiliations in regards to race, religion, social status and political affiliation, as per the days of old in the white, sharecropper south. OK, they’re not consciously believing that, but I’m asserting that it’s the crux of their movement. They are only being duped, however, for the purposes of the oligarchs.
There is no ends to their tea bag-chewin’ means. Their tactics will not work, and their desires will ultimately be ignored. The reason that the tea party rallies and complaints get so much media attention is because, unlike the progressive rallies and protests that have often far outnumbered the tea party rallies (did you know that millions protested all over the world against initiating the Iraq war? No? Well, that’s no surprise), the tea party genuinely has and can continue to affect the results of elections, especially in regards to Republican primaries. The only end result of right-wing successes in electoral politics, however, is to confiscate the nation’s wealth and resources for the plutarchy while the tea bag chewin’ share cropper Koch suckers are busily distracted and divided up against their fellow Americans- and the so-called “illegals.” The tea baggers will be left holding chewed-up tea bags and strumming their banjos.
Now, I hope that we all realize that the Democrats are deep into the pockets of the oligarchs as well. Our political system is so corrupted, and very little of consequence will change until or unless private and corporate money is taken out of campaign financing. There is a difference, however, between The Democratic Party and the Republican Party that can be “distilled” (we’re still talkin’ tea bagger here) thus: the Democrats have the decency to offer you Vaseline. The Republicans will use your own blood as a lubricant. Take your pick.
Now let’s make like John Boehner and a tea party congressman in the smokey back room of the House chamber: lift up your cup, now lift up your pinky, hold out that fine china, and clinky, clinky!