Quote of the Day: Suggested signs for Tea Partiers

Andrew Kimbralls excellent piece "The Empty Pulpit: The Obama Problem" in Tikkun criticizes the lack of ballsy action taken on the very issues Obama all us progressive types fired up about during his campaign. The piece is a stand-out because it illustrates ways in which the opinions and slogans of the reactionary right can be countered with common-sense points that might actually change some hearts and minds (rather than capitulation to the right and rather than dissembling in the name of political realism, as has been the case).

In his point about countering the "Government is the problem" meme, Kimbrall suggests:

To be true to their “anti-big government” message, Tea Party rallies should have been festooned with signs such as “Fire the Fireman,” “No More Police,” “Bite the Postman,” “We Support Fewer Teachers and Overcrowded Classrooms,” “Collapse our Bridges — No More Infrastructure,” “We’ll Pave and Build Our Own Roads,” “Citizens for Salmonella,” “Unsafe Drugs for Everyone,” “Americans for a Weak Defense,” “Senior Citizens Against Medicaid and Medicare.” These signs were missing, of course, and instead we have the endless brow furrowing over “big government” in both parties as the discussion remains conveniently abstract.

OK, you rugged individualists out there. Get out your steamrollers and line-painting equipment. Self-sufficiency, right?

Quote of the Day: Matt Taibi on Tea Party primary wins

Tea Party Rocks Primaries -- RollingStone.com: "Everyone involved with politics understands the current dynamic. It’s not hard to grasp. You take very tough economic times, add them to a heavy dose of political opportunism, and multiply both by the aggravating factor of a nihilistic commercial media, and what you get is ethnic scapegoating on a massive scale."

I think he left out one important ingredient here. The resigned ignorance of the general population.

The Fury of Jilted Citizens

Philosophy professor J.M. Bernstein breaks down for us what he identifies as being the root cause of virulent Tea Party anger. He explores the underlying belief -- a prevalent myth in our culture of minimized, granular social units -- in the notion that the Individual is autonomous and owes nothing to our collective existence.

Tea Party anger is, at bottom, metaphysical, not political: what has been undone by the economic crisis is the belief that each individual is metaphysically self-sufficient, that one’s very standing and being as a rational agent owes nothing to other individuals or institutions. The opposing metaphysical claim, the one I take to be true, is that the very idea of the autonomous subject is an institution, an artifact created by the practices of modern life: the intimate family, the market economy, the liberal state. Each of these social arrangements articulate and express the value and the authority of the individual; they give to the individual a standing she would not have without them.

Bernstein makes a strong analogy between Tea Party anger and that of jilted lovers, drawing on Hegel's philosophy that:

... all social life is structurally akin to the conditions of love and friendship; we are all bound to one another as firmly as lovers are, with the terrible reminder that the ways of love are harsh, unpredictable and changeable. And here is the source of the great anger: because you are the source of my being, when our love goes bad I am suddenly, absolutely dependent on someone for whom I no longer count and who I no longer know how to count; I am exposed, vulnerable, needy, unanchored and without resource. In fury, I lash out, I deny that you are my end and my satisfaction, in rage I claim that I can manage without you, that I can be a full person, free and self-moving, without you. I am everything and you are nothing.

This is the first piece I've come across that seems paint a valid Big Picture. The angry jilted lovers are denying the interconnectedness that actually defines us and validates us as a society. It's worth a good, slow read.

What He Said

My Country, Tis of Me - Magazine - The Atlantic ... Michael Kinsley's standout passage:

... the Tea Party movement is not the solution to what ails America. It is an illustration of what ails America. Not because it is right-wing or because it is sometimes susceptible to crazed conspiracy theories, and not because of racism, but because of the movement’s self-indulgent premise that none of our challenges and difficulties are our own fault.

“Personal responsibility” has been a great conservative theme in recent decades, in response to the growth of the welfare state. It is a common theme among TPPs—even in response to health-care reform, as if losing your job and then getting cancer is something you shouldn’t have allowed to happen to yourself. But these days, conservatives far outdo liberals in excusing citizens from personal responsibility. To the TPPs, all of our problems are the fault of the government, and the government is a great “other,” a hideous monster over which we have no control. It spends our money and runs up vast deficits for mysterious reasons all its own. At bottom, this is a suspicion not of government but of democracy. After all, who elected this monster?

This kind of talk is doubly self-indulgent. First, it’s just not true. Second, it’s obviously untrue. The government’s main function these days is writing checks to old people. These checks allow people to retire and pursue avocations such as going to Tea Party rallies.

Driving While Hispanic, Being Presidential While Black

Frank Rich looks at the connections between Arizona's new "arrested for driving while Latino" law and the radical right's growing "Take Back America" campaign complete with its Birther members who would be so funny if they were not so sad and so scary. The GOP is bending over in full kowtow to the Teabaggers and I'm starting to think the overt racism of the past was less dangerous than the tide that is currently on the rise.

It's difficult, as always, to choose from among Rich's high-fidelity paragraphs a couple to quote. These were chosen sort of randomly:

It's harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party's controlling force -- the tail that's wagging the snarling dog. It's also hard to maintain that the Tea Party's nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has ''no idea where Obama was born.'' The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it's Obama and the ''lamestream media'' that are responsible for ''perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part'' of Arizona's law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting ''they will look at the kind of dress you wear.'' Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

Oh gosh, I can't resist adding one more paragraph:

In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.'s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans ''really don't have a reason'' to vote Republican, citing his party's pursuit of a race-baiting ''Southern strategy'' since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.

 Frank Rich so skillfully melds his pieces. He knits and purls together his thoughts, the news, our political history, and "startling" quotes you may not have heard about before. A read of the whole rather lengthy op-ed piece is highly recommended.