By BJ Bjornson
Via the commenters at Balloon Juice, a must-read post by some guy on a motorcycle chat forum that starts with an anecdote from Mississippi Burning and runs with it.
And welcome to the Tea-hadist mindset. With Barack Obama in charge...who are you going to be better than?
And don't think some of us recognize the symptom because we are a pack of condescending know-it-all asshats. We are...but that has fuck-all to do with the observation.
. . .
But you always knew what hand you were playing, because the cards were mostly dealt face up. Your boss was still white. Your union steward was still white. Your mayor and your chief of police were still white.
The workforce may have been integrated, but you still knew who you were better than. Nobody dared yell "You Lie!!" at a white boss.
. . .
They say it is about "freedoms"...but they can point to no freedoms that have been lost over the last 14 months.
They say the Constitution is being destroyed, but when you ask them what parts of The General Welfare Clause or Congresses' power to regulate Interstate Commerce are being violated...they stand mute with rage
They say it is about taxes...but they can find no drastic tax increases in the last 14 months.
. . .
And they say they want their Country Back.
Well, Bing-fucking-O.
Now we have it. They want to return to a time and place where they at least knew who they were better than.. . .
And it ain't just President Obama. It is a lot else: If your job can be done on the Indian sub-continent, who are you better than? If China can launch a spaceship, who are you better than? If the world looks at the mighty Dollar as little better than an American Peso, who are you better than? If an immigrant can work your ass into the ground, and do it smiling for a lot less money, who are you better than?
Much more at the link, and I couldn�t add to it if I tried. Consider it recommended reading.
There's no question there's a large element of racism in the opposition to Obama, but it would be a mistake to dismiss the anger as entirely unjustified. Obama himself claimed some of it was understandable:
ReplyDelete"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
The tone is condescending, but there is a grain of truth there, no?
Great riff, BJ. The motorcycle guy sounds like another Eric Hoffer in the rough. Balloon Juice is like a box of chocolates.
ReplyDeleteGrowing up in Georgia I sometimes heard the saying "Thank God for Mississippi" whenever national statistics were listed by states for various subjects. Poverty rates, housing quality, and education levels seemed always to have Southern states at the bottom, but it was a comfort to know that some other Southern state might be even worse.
This comment at Balloon Juice made me think of that...
someone said there are these types in America�I�m guessing the 28% of die-hard Bush Jr. fans�who would be happy living homeless under a bridge cooking sparrows over a trash can fire, as long as the family under the next bridge over didn�t have any sparrows.
===========================
This comment about the Tea Party folks (love that neologism Tea-hadists) is worth passing on...
"And they say they want their Country Back."
If you go to a bar and get fucked up enough, someone is probably going to come along and take your car keys. The same principle applies with governance. Conservatives had years to themselves to run the government, and they ran it into the ground. Then they got out of the wreckage and pissed all over it. And then shouted �I pay your salary, asshole!� to the attending police officer wall wandering around in a drunken stooper.
The Baggers should be thankful, really. Friends don�t let friends drive drunk.