Teabaggin'
I stood in the cold rain for two hours of teabaggin' fun yesterday afternoon fascinated to witness the final stage of the inevitable detachment of the right wing's fury from even the least semblance of reality. The anger itself now seems to be the primary purpose of the anger.



The speeches certainly touched on common themes-- vague complaints about the perversion of the Constitution, unspecified warnings about America's headlong path to socialism/communism/Nazism, surprisingly frequent calls for the return of the gold standard-- but the protest seemed completely diffused, a vitriolic fog desperately trying to wrap itself around changes these people find unfathomable.

What these people were out to protest was not any specific set of policies but rather a whole world-view, "liberalism," which decades of Fox-washing has warped into something sinister and unquestionably evil.



It should be acknowledged,that, considering the shape of our nation, a measure of anger is certainly warranted. We should be angry. Our nation has been fucked over by the plutocrats and the media. As one of the speakers said, an anaestheologist involved in the "liberty movement" (who practically spit poison as he denounced the Fed), "I am sorry that I am wandering but that's what I do when I AM PISSED OFF."

This apology, however, presupposes that his purpose was to make a coherent point. It was not. He was rather there to be angry and he was doing a fine job of it. He merely had to mention the words "Ben Bernanke," for example, to elicit loud boos and hisses. At the mention of Bernanke, a man standing in front of me, holding a sign about Socialism, yelled out, "The foreign banks!" a non sequitur that pretty niftily captured the collective stream-of-consciousness.



The Teabaggers are livid, of course-- pissed that our banks need bailed out, livid about the stimulus and the deficit, livid about... taxes, somehow. Though they will never admit it, however, what angers them most is the thought that their ideas are on the verge of being discredited for a generation or more (at least until some avuncular future B-actor can convince the people that good government is an evil notion) and that the American "tradition" (of which they consider themselves sole judges and proprietors) is turning out include the the policies of the Satanic liberals. Suddenly Americans are starting to remember that our history has been a continuous flight from flinty libertarianism-- and that a lot of prosperity has come from coordination and smart government planning.

Ultimately what we witnessed at the Tea Parties was a group of people angry at the rest of the world for the failure of their own ideas.