SONI: Notes on the Tea Party

Because something is happening here
But you don’t know what it is
Do you, Mister Jones?
&- Bob Dylan, “Ballad of a Thin Man”
I had been following the story of the Tea Partiers for a while &- studying their habits, plotting their path &- and before they came to Boston last Wednesday, I had them just about figured out.
Previously, I thought I had been witnessing the devolution of the American public &- a slow intellectual demise that had given rise to a mob of blabbering idiots. A group that knew little about the political process but had placed itself squarely in the body politic anyway.
Some of them were ignorant. But I found others to be normal people simply looking for answers to questions they didn’t fully understand.
But a lot of them were just ignorant.
With this premise, I set about constructing an explanation for the social phenomenon that is the Tea Party movement.
I saw the members of the Tea Party constructing their own set of logics, built on fabricated facts and blatant lies conveniently served up by conservative media groups and right-wing politicians. The Tea Party, I believed, had successfully negated the scientific community, and experts in general, by brushing them off as biased liberals intent on enacting their own agenda. Hence, any researched statistics showing a lower tax rate for the average citizen under the new administration were merely constructed falsities aimed at promoting the cause of the Obama-loving socialist left.
The Tea Partiers, I had thought, refuted scientific logic because it a) did not explain the inexplicable aspects of their lives &- unemployment, a tough job market, lower income etc. &- and b) did not fit the conservative narrative they had been given.
Thus, there was no logical middle ground on which to argue with these crazies. They had fabricated for themselves a totally different worldview &- a mental force field, impenetrable to the jabs of liberal opposition.
The anthropologist in me kicked in. I saw the Tea Partiers as a new breed of savages, with a mechanism of explanations &- a culture &- more akin to a collection of myths than to the modern tools of science. Where we saw a higher tax rate (on corporations and the rich, no less) as necessary measures to bridge the gaping budget deficit, they saw it as an unnecessary evil imbued on their community by the tyrannous African boogeyman Barack Obama.
I was armed for a war of words when I got to the Tea Party Express rally at the Boston Common Wednesday. With a shield of impenetrable logic and the hammer of intellectual judgment by my side, I was prepared to attack and defend myself from the stupid primitives who would no doubt come at me with spit and slander. I even expected a few loons with guns.
My roommate Glenn and I had made signs. Mine read, “I forget what I’m angry about!” His sign shouted, “Rabble, Rabble, Rabble!”
We arrived late, just missing the Tea Party Queen, Sarah Palin. Nevertheless, there were plenty of other dingbats around to rile up.
It was only a few minutes before we were approached. A jolly middle-aged man came up to us laughing, asking if he could take a picture of us with our signs. We gleefully posed before he began asking us what we thought about the scene and politics in general. It took me a moment to realize he was Tea Partier himself.
Moments later, as Glenn was midway through a tirade about defense spending and taxes, an elderly man with his hands behind his back sauntered over to me and asked, “Who’s angry?”
I looked around and began to understand his point. No one near me seemed too enraged.
“Well,” I said, jostling for an answer, “that dude on stage seems pretty pissed about something. And all those people cheering for him, too.”
“Yeah, maybe,” he said. “But I don’t really agree with most of them.”
We then proceeded to have a frustratingly civil discussion about the direction of this country and how we envisioned it.
He wanted less state intervention, arguing that increased bureaucracy lead to decreased efficiency &- a valid point. We both wanted less state spending, but we disagreed about where those budget cuts should hit, and how much of what money is raised is needed to fight terrorism. We also both agreed that the Wall Street elite and the upper-level bureaucrats in government had become inextricable after years of hidden coitus, and that the supposed conservative-liberal cockfight had been staged by a voyeuristic group of media corporations.
All in all, it was a constructive and courteous discourse between two people with different yet overlapping worldviews. We would argue about an issue for a few minutes before we both ran out of explanations, at which point we would have to agree that the problem was just “too complex” for an easy answer.
As we talked, there came a point in the conversation where my previous theory seemed wrong. Slowly, the threads of my tightly woven logic were being pulled apart, falling to the floor in a messy heap. I realized that the Tea Partiers were just as confused as I &- that we were all fighting to explain the inexplicable, and that at some point, we would have to give up and accept the primordial chaos that lies beneath our logical constructions.
Skating back to campus from the Common, the words of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz came to mind. “Perhaps,” Geertz mused, “the world, and hence man’s life in the world, has no genuine order at all &- no empirical regularity, no emotional form, no moral coherence.”
I like the idea of a grassroots movement that springs up to oppose what is wrong with our government. I just don’t like the idea of a radical conservative battle cry. The media have polarized the Tea Party by focusing on the craziest elements in the movement. But in reality, there is a core group of Tea Partiers who are as confused with the world as you or I. Perhaps we were all just trying to make sense of the mess.