On April 15, more than 250,000 people attended “tea parties” in 346
American cities. In the East Bay, events were held in Oakland,
Richmond, Pittsburgh, Antioch, Danville, and Pleasanton. The size of
the crowds varied from a scant 30 in Richmond and 50 in Oakland to
nearly 2,000 in Pleasanton.
Much about the rallies was ridiculous and deliciously easy to make
fun of. Many took advantage. Nancy Pelosi had a great line in an
interview on KUTV, saying that the participants were not part of the
grass roots but rather “Astroturf.” MSNBC’s liberal dream team,
Olberman and Maddow, exploited the rallies’ tea-bagging image to
hilarious erotic effect. Marc Cooper wrote in the Los Angeles
Times that the “recipe” for those attending the rallies was to “go
to a hobby store. Buy a model UN One-World-Government Black Helicopter
and a tube of glue. Toss the model kit. Sniff the entire tube of glue.
You’re all set for the party.”
Some rally rhetoric was certainly disjointed or nonsensical.
Politicians who voted for earmarks excoriated them. Supporters of the
Bush deficits, the largest in our lifetimes, complained about
government spending and Obama deficits. It was impossible to stitch the
tea baggers’ themes up into any coherent whole.
Meanwhile, those whose job it is to deliver the electorate to the
handmaidens of torture and tax cuts for the wealthy lauded the day, as
was to be expected. Their ideological king, Karl Rove, wrote in
The Wall Street Journal, “Derided by elitists as phony,
the tea-party movement is spontaneous (and) decentralized.” What a
hoot! As the web site ThinkProgress.org documented, the
principal organizers of the local tea-party events were the well-funded
right-wing think tanks Americans for Prosperity and Freedom Works.
But while the rallies would never have happened without the money of
the swift-boat crowd and the constant drumbeat and organizing of Rush
Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, they were not insignificant.
For one thing, they showed the power of the far-right’s house organs.
In every town in the nation, you can get right-wing talk radio and
listen to the lies of Fox News. Like it or not, they are influential.
It is significant that these mouthpieces can get people into the
streets in 346 cities. True believers will respond to these calls given
the penetration of this form of media. Maybe progressive Twittering
will catch up, but I am not so sure.
Although the message was confused and the protesters a bit sad, the
psychological reasons they hit the streets are important, and say much
about one group’s reaction to our current world. It was not “collective
insanity” as Cooper wrote in the Times. Many were reacting to a
palpable sense that things are going very wrong. This is a feeling that
permeates our society today and most of us share. It is an especially
uncomfortable place for Marlboro men and women. The demonstrators
realize subconsciously that they are impotent in their ability to
respond to these feelings. This is not the American Dream that they had
been promised by Rove and Howard Jarvis. Like an unwinding clock
spring, this sentiment will spasmodically arise again and again over
the next generation.
The people at these rallies are scared. And why shouldn’t they be?
We are constantly assaulted with fear. Chronic fear, like stress, takes
its toll. The constant drumbeat of the war on terror, claims that our
kids are dangerously seduced by the Internet, and reports such as the
recent one that someone has hacked into the software governing our
nation’s electric grid and water system are hard to ignore. Add these
atop more rational fears such as global warming, bad things in our food
and water, and dangers on the streets of the East Bay. And now, on top
of all of the above, we have an overarching fear for our economic
lives. For the first time in years, a majority of not-yet-retired
Americans told Gallup pollsters that they do not anticipate having
enough money to retire “comfortably.” It is scary to think about having
to hustle for food and shelter when you are old. Many people thought
such a fear was a thing of the past. And the future looks compromised
for the next generation. “Bring your kids and experience history,” Beck
said on Fox News. “Our kids are being sold into slavery.”
I don’t know about slavery, but I think we can all agree that we are
leaving a mess for future generations. But the reason for this is not
high taxes but a system that favors a short-term time horizon dominated
by greed. There is a contradiction today between the time horizon of
individuals and the time horizon of humanity. Global warming and huge
budget deficits, for example, may only severely affect the young and
unborn. Caring only for ourselves as individuals and not for humanity
as a whole allows scant concern for these future affects.
Many people worry about the lives of their grandchildren, given the
state of the world. These progressive sentiments contain the seeds of
opposition to our system. Such emotions, which oppose a rivalry between
individual time and species time, reflect an important caring for the
collective, even when they are misused by troglodytes like Beck.
But at least the tea-party attendees got into the streets to express
their concern. One wonders where their critics were. Certainly many are
giving Obama a pass, given what we have lived through in the last eight
years. Yet why are the ridiculers not protesting Obama putting the same
guys in charge of the economy who got us into this mess in the first
place? Nobel Prize winner Joseph Stiglitz recently observed that the
people who designed the bank bailouts are “either in the pocket of the
banks or they’re incompetent.” The Wall Street royalty may have been
thinned, but it remains in charge. The tea baggers recognize this.
