Where do you even begin with
this nonsense?
Oceans of ink, terabytes of blog space and an eternity of television time have been devoted to the latest object of media fascination, the "tea party" movement. Now (finally!), a poll conducted by CNN gives us some hard data on the Tea Party Nation.
Oh great, CNN, which essentially ignored the movement until about two weeks ago, except when they weren't
trashing it. Also, has there really been an
eternity of television time devoted to the Tea Parties? Uh, no, not exactly.
Neither "average Americans," as they like to portray themselves, nor trailer-park "Deliverance" throwbacks, as their lefty detractors would have us believe, tea partyers are more highly educated and wealthier than the rest of America. Nearly 75% are college educated, and two-thirds earn more than $50,000.
More likely to be white and male than the general population, tea partyers also skew toward middle age or older. That's the tell. Most came of age in the 1960s, an era distinguished by widespread disrespect for government. In their wonder years, they learned that politics was about protesting the Establishment and shouting down the Man. No wonder they're doing that now.
Is it possible to have an analogy any further detached from reality? If I have a glimpse of those crowds, I'd say a good portion of those protesting these days came of age in the 1970s and 1980s. In fact those who now represent "The Man" are the dregs of the 1960s, the radical left that now has infested our government, the media and academia.
But wait, it gets dumber.
The tea party is a harbinger of midlife crisis, not political crisis. For men of a certain age, it offers a counterculture experience familiar from adolescence -- underground radio, esoteric tracts, consciousness-raising teach-ins and rallies replete with extroverted behavior to shock the squares -- all paid for with ample cash.
Again, this is absurd. Most of the tea partiers, it's safe to say, never had anything to do with teach-in and consciousness-raising, whatever that's supposed to be. We were taught in school and for the most part we were already conscious, unlike those who spent the 1960s in a stupor, which it appears the authors of this drivel did.
The partyers are essentially replaying the '60s protest paradigm. (We're aging boomers ourselves, so we know it when we see it.) They fancy themselves the vanguard of a revolution, when in fact they are typical self-absorbed, privileged children used to having their way -- now -- and uninhibited about complaining loudly when they don't. It's the same demographic Spiro Agnew called "an effete corps of impudent snobs who characterize themselves as intellectuals."
So there you have it: We're all a bunch of spoiled children, a smug, condescending look at folks, reminding me of Peter Jennings' sneering disdain for the 1994 Republican revolution, which he called a national
temper tantrum. How ironic these deep thoughts are coming from a pair of
impudent snobs who probably consider themselves intellectuals.
Of course what would be an "analysis" of the Tea Partiers if it didn't have the ominous hint of violence, now very much in vogue after the deranged Joe Stack incident last week, when many on the left immediately called him a "teabagger."
In a flashback of "turn on, tune in, drop out," the partyers reject mainstream culture, don the equivalent of Che T-shirts that say "Don't Tread on Me," and join sects with trippy names like Oath Keepers, Patriotic Resistance and Freedom Force. Instead of getting themselves "back to the garden," they get off the grid and, like the Bill Ayers crew, indulge in fantasies about armed rebellion against the establishment.
Oh, so
now they can mention Bill Ayers, an admitted terrorist? Can these people point to a single incident where Tea Partiers bombed anything?
Well, at least we know where these tools are coming from.
Jim Spencer and Curtis Ellis are Democratic political consultants based in Boston and New York, respectively
This apparently is Curtis Ellis. Seems to me he came of age in the 1930s.
