The Empire Strikes Back

A BIT OF A ELITIST, EGGHEAD, NORTHEAST INTELLECTUAL RANT

I try to be a moderate, well OK politically. It's hard sometimes for me, I'm very liberal on social issues, I don't care what you do that doesn't affect me or the general welfare. Don't care who you love, who you sleep with, who you marry as long as it's consensual. Don't care what you drink, eat, smoke whatever as long as you're not driving my bus or sitting in a firehouse or something. In contrast, I would like to make abortion as rare an event as possible, I lean towards pro-life tendencies but am aware enough to know that sometimes women have to make this terrible choice and I want it to be safe, I'm pro-soldier and pro-national security as long as we pay for it, and pretty much think that long weapons (rifles and shotguns) should not be abridged. I think parents and students should be the focus of schools allowing for charters and choice. I believe in personal responsibility but also the second chance. I'm an investor in stocks and think people should be allowed to invest, innovate and get rich. Also I tend to be a fiscal conservative, but lean towards tax increases to pay down debt versus tax cuts that just make the problem worse. So I guess this basically makes me a tax and save libertarian.

I haven't been an political extremist for a long time, in fact as most, I tend to get a little more conservative as I get older, jaded by life experience and as a father a little more protective and paranoid of outsiders. I do however try to remember where I came from and all the opportunity, choice and second, third and fourth chances that I got.

So currently, I'm really struggling. For the past 30 years the right has been pretty organized, oh there were bouts of real weirdness but they figured out their talking points and starting fighting battles in school board meetings and on the local level. The strategy was brilliant, building a national political machine that built itself on post-Vietnam malaise, declining industrialism, evangelical Christianity and the perception of declining family values. The battles ended up securing a conservative majority in the Supreme Court, electing 12 years of Bushes, 8 years of Reagan, 8 years of a largely centrist Bill Clinton whose administration was often tagged as liberal, immoral and corrupt by the same right and a fiscal ponzi scheme that allowed a nation to have lower taxes, high economic growth, and even more government services such as social security, medicare and a military budget that equaled the rest of the world combined.

Then finally the wheels came off the bus for the right. 8 years of George Bush, constant war and an economy that sunk to the bottom hit the conservative movement hard and moderates and independents began to think that President Obama despite the unfortunate name and skin color would make for better leadership than the old crazy guy and the moose hunting ice princess from Seward's Folly.

There were always populist elements among the right, the footsoldiers outside abortion clinics for example but they were always pawns of a bigger well oiled machine. Now it's as if a train full of zombies has jumped the track spilling it's contents across the nation. There are voices of the rabble who have waited for the opportunity to serve a buffet of strange information to the masses, the undereducated DJ's turned political leadership of Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and other self taught demagogues with easy to repeat sloganry and catch phrases. Imagery that can somehow simultaneously evoke Nazism, Socialism of all kinds and Communism in some odd manner and some (certainly not all) evoking thinly and sometimes not veiled images of racism and nativism.

Many of the crowd feel that they are modern versions of the founding fathers, vestiges of a better time at the birth of a nation, they see themselves as a vanguard (some) and others has representing "real America", you know the America that we saw on TV in the fifties, the nostalgic fantasy of the Reagan era even. You know when Norman Rockwell walked you home from school and the only black people around were Sidney Poitier and Nipsy Russell.

The signs and actions are disturbing, cartoonish even and the gatherings are of a lot of really pissed off white people. I'm not sure what they are so pissed off about, you seem to look at the crowd and there are a lot of old and fat people there. So if you're fat, than you must not be starving, hell you can still hit up the breakfast buffet at Shoney's and the Sizzler on Saturdays. Chances are you're going to end up needing some ObamaCare eventually. And the elderly, hey wait don't all you old folks have some of that delicious socialized medicine that we call medicare? How are those social security checks treatin' ya?

Conservatives will argue, "well Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, MoveOn, etc", OK if Cindy Sheehan jumped off a bridge would you jump off a bridge. I thought their actions were stupid too, it's like those people who go to church and then go home and beat their kids and treat people like crap all week. The people who come armed and are supporting militias are among the scariest, they are the intimidators, but most are just harmless buffoons who think that their country has gone down the tubes in the last 8 months. (God only knows where these people were for the past eight years)

I do fear the Lone Wolves in the group, the people that take it to another level, the homegrown right wing equivalents of SDS or the Weather Underground or Black Guerilla Army. Most of these folks will go home, get pissed off, watch Fox, pick up their social security checks, unemployment checks or other government aid and head down to Walmart for some crappy Chinese imported stuff. It's harmless likely except to the political discourse that feeds off theater instead of reality and data. It's much easier for media, particularly with the dearth of print and serious journalism to bring some cameras than do analysis of complicated issues that are actually going to cost people money and have them make difficult choices.

I want to analyze these Tea Parties in detail among the different issues that they are attempting to address, there does not seem to be the same hatred of Wall St. and the big financiers that helped to create most of the fiscal mess, as you may have seen during the Great Depression. It is again, a considerable part of the population that seems to be venting their anger at a government that has been somewhat forced into a situation of large Keynesian deficits. Dissent is healthy of course and I mean in no way to stifle anyone's right to expression, but we really don't have to listen? Do we? Is this truly the best way to run an airline? Will the Republican Party draw it's energy from the mob?