As has been broadly publicized, the teabag crowd is planning for an encore performance:
Are you fed up with a Congress and a president who:
- ...want to take your wealth and redistribute it to others?
- punish those who practice responsible financial behavior and reward those who do not?
- admit to using the financial hurt of millions as an opportunity to push their political agenda?
- run up trillions of dollars of debt and then sell that debt to countries such as China?
- want government controlled health care?
- want to take away the right to vote with a secret ballot in union elections?
- refuse to stop the flow of millions of illegal immigrants into our country?
- appoint a defender of child pornography to the Number 2 position in the Justice Department?
- want to force doctors and other medical workers to perform abortions against their will?
- want to impose a carbon tax on your electricity, gas and home heating fuels?...
...If so, help organize and/or participate in a Taxed Enough Already (TEA) party in your community on July 4.
No doubt local organizers will again attempt to suggest that their local events are in no way tied to or influenced by the national movement, with its clearly articulated conservative agenda and its plain genesis in the GOP media infrastructure. All those other demonstrations in other states, as well as the Fox News reports are simply coincidences. The fact that these demonstrations are petrie dishes for nasty displays of bigotry is either ignored or not their problem. The blatant hypocrisy displayed by the fact that none of these people got off their duff during the excesses of the Bush era? Well... they just don't talk about that.
This is not to say there aren't plenty of people involved who think they are doing the right thing, but there's a point at which willful blindness does entail a degree of moral culpability. In this case the blindness comes with being used as meat puppets for a mega-corporatist agenda to reduce regulations and tax burdens on the biggest, richest exploiters in the nation - the very ones who bear ultimate responsibility for the financial cliff working people are in the process of being driven off. |
| Listening to the self-promotional ads for the local "demonstrations," though, one could be forgiven for concluding that organizers may be more interested in promoting themselves as celebrities than engaging with an economic reality that doesn't fit into the neat little prepackaged box they've so happily allowed themselves to be handed.
If I sound upset about this I am, and for a particular reason. In scheduling these demonstrations around July 4th festivities, organizers are nakedly attempting to co-opt crowds that are not their own, in order to give the photographic and propogandistic appearence of a broader base of support. Since the turnout disappointed during their original displays, they are now seeking to indentify where the crowd is and moving their signs there, rather than try and draw crowds on their own merits.
What does this mean at a personal level? We on the left have, for our entire lives, put up with being called treasonous and unpatriotic for views that, from my perspective, are the essence of patriotism. 4th of July celebrations, however, provide a break from that. I can stand in a crowd, cheeringthe fireworks along with everyone else around me. The guy next to me might be the worst kind of bigoted, scary, fascist hate-monger - but in that shared moment, I don't know and I don't want to know.
But along come the corporate organizers of the national teabaggery, who see our nation's birthday as every bit as exploitable as the willing, reactionary stooges they find so ready to promote their self-serving agenda on the ground. This 4th of July, rather than being content with coming together for that one fleeting time a year, teabaggers everywhere will crash celebrations of unity in order to pointlessly divide us to the best of their ability.
And they will all pat themselves on the back relentlessly for doing so. |
