Tea Party Vitajex

By John Ballard

Thanks to one of my early assignments I had a chance to watch A Face in the Crowd, a classic film starring Andy Griffith and Patricia Neal. A straightforward story line follows "Lonesome" Rhodes (Griffith), an Arkansas drifter with a gift for singing and playing the guitar from a down-and-out beginning to a position of national prominence, thanks to the dedicated efforts of Marcia Jeffries (Neal), a journalist captivated by his charm.  Aside from showcasing the underappreciated acting and musical gifts of Andy Griffith, the film captures a timeless theme, hubris, a character flaw in Rhodes that drives him to a tragic end as power goes to his head.

Johann Hari's insightful column this morning points to parallels between Rhodes' rise to fame and influence with characters in the Tea Party movement. I am impressed by how clearly a smart young man sees American trends from a distance. Having come across Hari's name and commentary before, only today did I look him up to find he is still in his early thirties. Impressive.

 

To understand what has happened in the mid-term elections, the best guide lies in an unexpected place � the dusty vaults of Hollywood. In 1957, Elia Kazan directed a film called �A Face In The Crowd� that read the tea-leaves of the Tea Party back when Sarah Palin was merely a frosty zygote. One morning a poor wandering Arkansas chancer named Larry �Lonesome� Rhodes is lying passed out on a jail cell where the local sheriff has detained him overnight. A pretty young radio producer arrives and asks if he�d like to tell her a story to be played on her show where ordinary folks speak to ordinary folks. He sings and rambles and offers corn-poke homilies. The clip is a huge hit � and he is soon given his own show, filled with country music and country wisdom which then shoots off into the stratosphere.

 

When Lonesome Rhodes becomes one of the biggest stars on US television, he starts receiving offers. Advertisers say that if he endorses their lousy products, they�ll shower him with millions. He knows how to sell to ordinary people � and he is pushed to go further.

They ask him to sell the political causes that will make them richer too. He starts railing against social security and the old age pension and anything that taxes the rich to help the rest. He uses the tunes and slanguage of working class Americans to get them to emotionally identify with the people who are screwing them over. He�s brilliant at it � a gurning hyperactive huckster, saying that support and security for ordinary Americans is a betrayal of America. He makes himself rich by lying to the people he came from.

Fast-forward to 2010. John Boehner came from a poor family of twelve children, and heroically worked three jobs (including as a janitor) to put himself through business school. But when he got to elected office, it turned out that there was alot more money to be reaped from serving the interests of rich people than serving the people he came from. He took money from the insurance companies, and voted to deny healthcare coverage to sick children and to the people who hurried to the World Trade Centre on 9/11 to try to dig people from the wreckage, exposing them to deadly toxins. He took money from defense contractors, and supported every war going. He tirelessly champions the overdog, while hoovering up their cash and flying on their private jets to some of the most luxury resorts in the world.

In the campaign, Boehner said his priority was to �stand up for ordinary Americans� against �the elite�, and to �cut the deficit as a matter of urgency.� So what has been his first priority as Speaker? To fight furiously to keep the gigantic Bush tax cuts for the elite richest two percent of Americans, even though this alone will add two trillion dollars to the deficit over the next decade. It�s very revealing. He immediately dumps on his propaganda causes � ordinary Americans, and the deficit � while slavishly serving his one true cause: serving the interests of rich people like the ones who happen to pay for his campaigns and his jaunts.

This is the story of the modern Republican Party. They use the cultural signifiers of the good people of Middle America to get their emotional identification, meanwhile they pillage Middle America and redistribute its wealth to the rich. Sarah Palin is the queen of this cause. She presents herself as a warrior for hockey moms and Momma Grizzlies, while spreading fictions to stop those very people supporting social programs that could save their lives: remember her claim that Obama�s healthcare plan involved setting up �death panels� to execute the old and disabled? Her true slogan is Shill, Baby, Shill.

As the movie ends, however, Dusty Rhodes has a fall from grace because of what would now be called a "hot mike," in this case a live television feed that reveals him to be the deceitful character he became.

...At the end of the film � spoiler alert � Lonesome Rhodes is finishing a show and, as the end credits roll and the music swells, he rants against his viewers, believing they can�t hear him. But in the control box, a producer deliberately flips a switch. Suddenly millions hear him say: �Those morons out there. I�d give �em dog food and make �em think it�s steak. Good night you stupid idiots. Good night you miserable slobs. They�re like a bunch of trained seals � I toss �em a fish and they lap it up.�...

~~~~���~~~~

Hari's commentary is on target but the parallel breaks down because the Tea Party insurgency is nowhere close to grasping how they have been manipulated by money and forces about which they know nothing. Unlike the gentleman in the second clip, today's oligarchs are far less transparent.

I want to believe these newcomers to Congress will take time to allow some of the more enlightened staff people already there to show them the ropes. They need to know, as all politicians instinctively do, that there is a wide gulf between appearance and reality, and what you leave unspoken is as important as what you say out loud.  They need to read again those wise words from the Declaration of Independence (which they hold in high esteem, very much like the King James Bible), that all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.

Unfortunately, at this stage of the game established professionals in both parties have been cought off guard by a crowd of neophytes. And making changes, even when the need for immediate change is apparent, is not part of the human genome. We are far more like the proverbial frog slowly boiling to death than jumping to safety. And Tea Party Vitajex will be the swill of preference a while longer.

There have already been plenty of "hot mikes" which is why so many of the Tea Party candidates eschew reporters. Being from Georgia I am having flashbacks to the time when Lester Maddox became our governor. Having an avowed segregationist as governor was a national embarrassment in the late Sixties, the good people of Georgia endured his term, making the best of it by passing it off as a big joke. Kinda like a boy, guilty of date rape, who blows it off saying "Boy, you won't believe how drunk I was last night!" The sad truth was that many of those people, like many Americans today, were secretly pleased to see somebody get one final poke in the eye to forces of change that were sweeping away a way of life that should have ended decades before.