Tea bags: Idiocy and armed militias

By Alfredo Peppard

Pauline and I have been in Seattle for six weeks now and we have been dumbfounded by what we see on television. The tea bag movement is all over the internet but you have to see it on a big screen TV to fully appreciate the head-on idiocy of the thing. I have suspected for some time that a good many of my countrymen were at least a half a bubble off, but this gang of baboons utterly flabbergasts me. One thing that this is all about is that they are all mad as hell about something, whatever the hell it is. Just what is the tea party, tea bag movement, tea baggers, whatever you call them?

First, it is a television phenomenon which originates on Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News. The news crew didn’t go out and cover this movement; they created it. Limbaugh, Hannity, and Beck called it into being. Then every time more than ten tea baggers showed up in public Fox News gave them lavish coverage, with reporters and anchor persons expressing sympathy and understanding of these poor folk, burdened as they are by a crushing government. And so the cluster of slightly demented folks, some armed, become in the imagination of a definable group of Americans, the vanguard of a social justice movement. They want to take back America. They want to return to a more just past. But their idea of a “just past” is not one influenced by Thoreau and Emerson, certainly not the New England intellectual tradition that brought about Garrison, Sumner, and ultimately John Brown. No, their historical roots can be traced through George Wallace, Orval Faubas and Lester Maddox to that Society of English- speaking slave owners that spread from the Southern Caribbean to the Mason-Dixon Line. The bagger left wing wants to return to Jim Crow; its right wing wants to return to the slavery-ridden political and social status of 1850.

Their prominent spokespersons, candidates, and would-be candidates are typically young, good-looking, and utterly vacuous -- made for television. The leading Tea Party TV personality is the inimitable Sarah Palin. Palin is a marvel. With gestures, head tosses, flashing smiles, always with good eye contact, she can spout utter nonsense to crowds of enthusiastic yahoos and have them loving it. PT Barnum was right. But unlike the feather-headed Palin, the real heavy hitters have “News Shows” on Fox, with Glen Beck, the present favorite of the Baggers, playing the part of a patriot of 1776.

All Murdoch’s creatures are adept at manufacturing facts as they go along but what distinguishes Beck, Limbaugh, and Hannity is their ability carry out rants that begin with a whopper and go from there to the utterly preposterous. These tribunes of the couch potato constituency spew forth on a daily basis accusations of a dark conspiracy to enslave the American people -- a vile conspiracy being carried out as they speak by Nazis, Liberals, and Commies, the sworn enemies of all Real Americans; and at the head of this cabal sits a black President who is not an American citizen -- and on and on from there.

This style of irrational politics was prominent in the secessionist press in the 1850s. This style of rhetoric entered the politics of the modern world when Charles Maurras, who founded the Paris newspaper Action Française during the Dreyfus Affair, heaped pure vitriol and abuse upon any and all supporters of liberal thought in France. Anti-Semitism was his consistent core issue, and by 1930 Action Française brought into being a violent force of fascist street brawlers. In the 1940s they supported Petain. Both Mussolini and Hitler copied Maurras’ methods. It is not likely that many if any Tea Baggers ever heard of Action Française, much less Maurras. They are just reacting like reactionary yahoos always do.

The whole thing would be hilarious were it not for the fact they are heavily financed by some of the most anti-democratic billionaires you will find anywhere. These billionaires, with Rupert Murdoch in the lead, just want to overturn the last election. That’s all. Failing that, they want to make it impossible for anyone else to govern. These are the same jackals whose multi-media noise machine described Clinton’s escapades in the Oval Office as being tantamount to blowing up the Washington Monument. I would be falling off my chair laughing if they didn’t have armed militias in their movement.

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