“No, tea baggers believe stupid shit because they want to. It’s willful ignorance. They spin outrageous theories because they know that the naked truth about what they believe would make them look like giant bigots and big meanies. So, instead of saying, “I don’t want health care reform because I like a system where poor people are shut out because that means I don’t have to see them in my doctor’s office,” they start yelling about the slide into socialism. Instead of saying, “I’m an incredibly selfish person who wants to keep my government-funded Medicare, but I don’t want to see that single mom down the street get health insurance because she’s a slut and I want to see her suffer,” they say that Obama’s trying to take their Medicare and that’s socialism. They’re not confused because they were badly educated and don’t have a grasp on critical thinking. In fact, I think a lot of us would be surprised to find that the person hollering ignorant shit about Obama’s birth certificate often turns around and is highly competent at a job that requires the cognitive skills they don’t bring to their politics. They’re willfully ignorant, and this distinction should never be forgotten when trying to understand them.”—
pandagon.net (via greaterthanlapsed) (via savagemike)
Teabaggers are willfully ignorant.
The tea baggers are for the most part wealthy, educated, white and male. What they fear (not just for themselves, but for their children and grand-children) is a level playing field. In education and in the workplace, a society in which daddy’s money, family contacts, the color of your skin and your gender are diminished as factors determining who succeeds and who doesn’t is a society in which white males from well-off families have to work a whole lot harder to attain what their parents have. That fear is the wellspring of inspiration behind tea-bagging.
Obama scares them to the point of insanity not by what he does but by what he represents. While most of us celebrate the fact that a black man raised by a single mother can be President, from where they’re standing (on the veranda of a suburban mansion, looking down on a neat garden and a swimming pool), he is a barbarian at the gates. Wealthy white males are happy with black people, latinos and women joining their crowd, but only as, “tokens”… only as, “one of us”, more-white-than-whitey, or ladies-that-act-just-like-us-and-share-our-values. Hence the endless tirades against, “political correctness”, hence their love for an Anne Coulter, a Mark Rubio or a Ron Christie; they’re comfort food to the closet racists and closet sexists, “proof” that it’s the others who are greedy freedom-haters, not they.
Poor people are a threat, not just because of those welfare checks and all that, “Socialism” that our tax dollars pay for… psychologically, that’s a side issue. The real threat from the poor is that they have more to prove; they were not born in comfortable surroundings, they bring new ideas to the table, new experiences. They are motivated, talented and articulate in ways that the upper middle class male simply cannot hope to compete with. They are hungry for success, but not always eager to pull up the drawbridge when they attain that success. They are less susceptible to the rich man’s egotistical delusion that he is, “self made”, that his talent and hard work are exceptional. Often, the success story from a poor background knows that he or she is not exceptional… just lucky. They are the living embodiment of everything that explodes the self-serving myth of privilege: that the poor have a monopoly on laziness. Being born rich makes it easier to attain wealth while doing next to nothing. And it is not poor people who go backpacking in Goa to, “just, like, find myself man” or spend years in mom’s basement, smoking weed for a living. They simply can’t afford it.
The rich white males have been enjoying their lavish (and exclusive) party for hundreds of years, partying together with the occasional outsider invited in to add novelty and a dash of color to proceedings. And like all exclusive parties, the partygoers are paranoid about gatecrashers. Gatecrashers tend to take over the place, play their own records and do their own thing. They invite more gatecrashers, and generally disrespect the regular partygoers. Suddenly, the invited guest finds himself overwhelmed, and nobody is listening to him anymore.
It hasn’t happened yet, but the very idea that it may happen is motivation enough for these people. Obama may have cut taxes, but they’re not fooled. He may be a Harvard graduate, but they’re not fooled. He’s bluffing. He’s not one of us. Where’s the birth certificate? He’s a Communist, he’s a Socialist, he’s a Nazi, he’s forming death panels and using the IRS as his own version of the Stasi. The end of the world is nigh, sinners repent.
The fact that they don’t even believe this stuff, that it’s all a charade serving their real agenda, is most revealing. The tea baggers are not the real Americans, they are the real elitists; they throw, “Obama’s a communist” around not because it’s true but because they think that poor white folks are dumb enough to believe it. They have such contempt for the intelligence of the average person, such a low regard for their value and their needs that they really believe that they’re turkeys who will vote for Thanksgiving. What their patronizing talk of, “guns and religion”, “Joe Six Pack”, “Hockey Moms” and their parroting of perceived folk wisdoms and whimsies truly reveal is their snobbish attitude to the, “little people”, their certainty that they can sell them paranoia, bigotry and fear in the same way that their Advertising buddies sell them coffee and viagra. The Tea Party is nothing more than an Elitist PR stunt, and the product is rank. So they do what PR people always do to create a buzz; pretend that it’s more popular than it actually is, pretend that simply everybody is talking about it and it’s a phenomenon sweeping the nation. Here’s the latest fashion, the newest bandwagon, jump on board. Be there or be square.
But it isn’t working. A thousand here, seven thousand there… it’s nothing. Ten thousand for Palin and Bachmann, their very own Gaga and Beyonce? Pathetic. Compare their numbers to those of the Reform Immigration for America demonstrations, or Gay rights demonstrations, or pretty much anything else. The Tea Party numbers are utterly feeble. Like its’ faux-intentions and phony fears of Communist infiltration, the Tea Party, “movement” only really exists in the fevered imaginations of its paltry band of adherents. They are the few, we are the many. And actually, we’re smarter and hotter than you.
