New stories portraying tea party types as nice, friendly, well-meaning, thoughtful people, like this one in the New Yorker and this one in the New York Times, baffled me when I first read them.
“But these people are deranged!” I’d think. “Their politics are insane. Look at the signs at their rallies. Listen to what they say. They’re fruitcakes! They have raisins for eyes! And they’re seething with rage. They are talking themselves into turning violent. How can a reporter come away from a conversation with any of them thinking that the most salient point about them is what good folks they are at heart?”
Yesterday, though, I came away from a conversation with a couple of tea party types thinking, What a nice couple.
First, keep in my mind where I met them---in the cafe at Barnes and Noble. They were sitting at the next table, which, like mine, was piled with books and magazines they were browsing through---no wonder Steve Kuusisto refers to B & N as “the loitering library.”---and as far as I could see none of those books or magazines were explicitly political, although I learned in talking with them that the book the man was reading, about the nature of human thought, had political implications in his mind.
They were older, in their seventies, pleasant-looking, and cheerful. They were the kind of people you smile at and say hello to for no particular reason when you pass them in the street, but otherwise nobody out of the ordinary, and I probably wouldn’t have taken much note of them, except that they were involved in a lively discussion with people at a table across from them and the woman was saying, “That’s why they’re coming across the border by the busload! It’s not working for them!”
She meant busloads of Canadians who couldn’t get the treatments they need at home because Canada’s socialist health care system was horrific, just like England’s!
I couldn’t help myself.
“Oh come on!”
And she said, “Oh oh. Another liberal!”
And we were off to the races.
You don’t need me to get into the details of their arguments. It was exactly what you’d expect. Liberalism equals socialism equals communism equals fascism. The President is an evil genius and a moron. The government can’t run anything right but yes, they’re on Medicare and they like it, but it’s not a government program really, because they paid for it, and anyway it doesn’t really work and anyway again it won’t be here in a few years, the Democrats are out to destroy it nevermind that it’s a Republican Congressman pushing a budget that explicitly eliminates Medicare and, while we’re at it, Social Security. Socialism has never worked. Sweden doesn’t count. Socialist programs don’t deliver. France and Canada don’t count. Except as examples of how national health insurance doesn’t work. Don’t forget those busloads of Canadians. No, they haven’t seen them. But they’ve heard about them. Liberals like me don’t know the truth because we get our news from the liberal media. They know because they get their news from…
You guessed it.
We went back and forth for a little while, but I got embarrassed. I don’t go to Barnes and Noble to listen to other people argue politics and I figured neither did all the people around us. Besides, there was as little chance of my talking them out of any of their positions as there was of their talking me out of mine.
I tried backing out of the conversation as tactfully as I could by apologizing for having stuck my nose in and interrupting their reading.
That’s when they turned…nice.
They began to apologize too. She reached out and laid her hand on my wrist and invited me to pull my chair over. Together the three of us steered the talk away from politics and onto other things, mainly the story of their lives.
They’ve been married for fifty years. They’re Catholic. He’s a retired college professor. They ran a bookstore for years and years. They love Shakespeare (although it’s too bad they don’t teach the plays in England anymore because they’re considered racist) and his favorite editions of Shakespeare’s works are the little blue books from Yale, which they were both thrilled to hear that I also own because my parents gave them to me for my eighth grade graduation.
When you get down to it, as I explained to the Mannion guys on our drive home, they were the blonde and I in another twenty-five years or so.
Except for the paranoid politics, I hope.
But that’s what it is, a hope.
Because I don’t know how afraid I’m going to be when I get to be their age.
And that’s what they were, afraid. Not in a timid, too scared to leave the house, on the verge of tears way. In a brave face-your-fears because there’s nothing else you can do way.
Despite our mutual determination to keep the conversation friendly and away from any more politics, it kept creeping in, and what became clear was that neither one had any more hope left for the future of the country. As far as they could see, everything was collapsing. It didn’t really matter that Obama was out to destroy Medicare because in a few years there won’t be any money left to pay for Medicare. Ditto, Social Security. There banks and the insurance companies are rapacious and corrupt but nobody can do anything to stop them and they’re going to eat us and themselves up in a hurry. Hospitals and doctors are going to go bankrupt trying to treat all the old people who’ll be flooding into the waiting rooms as life expectancy increases and Baby Boomers live to one hundred and five, except that they won’t live that long, because they won’t be able to pay their medical bills and anyway doctors don’t know what they’re doing.
The future as far as I could see they saw it will belong to a ravening, raving mob of hungry, desperate, sick illiterates----our schools have failed, kids don’t learn anything, nobody reads anything, let alone Shakespeare, it’s all the fault of liberals who have been running our education for fifty years, but it doesn’t matter, really, who’s to blame, we can’t pay for good schools anyway.
There are days when I share this nightmare. In fact, I should say, there are fewer and fewer days when I don’t.
I didn’t talk with them long enough or intimately enough to draw any conclusions about how deeply they’ve internalized these fears or to tell how long they’ve felt them and where they come from, if they come from sources other than too much watching of FoxNews.
I did learn that he was still recovering from an operation that almost killed him back in the fall.
I have no way of knowing how much this contributed to their sense that the world as they know it is coming to an end but the fact is it almost did.
The Tea Party movement is still mainly a force for Democrats and Progressives to reckon with because of its potential to provide Republicans with an angry and therefore motivated cadre of voters. The way to counter it is to excite and motivate Democratic and Progressives and get them to the polls come November.
There is no point trying to win them over. Only nine per cent of them voted for Obama to begin with. In and of themselves they are more likely to produce more Right Wing Republican candidates than Republican victories.
But the world as they know it is always ending for somebody.
Death makes sure that none of us wake up in the same world we went to bed in.
Losing a job, taking a new one, getting sick, losing friends, watching children grow up, getting old, seeing the world change and then go on without any notice being taken of our former place in it and without any sign that it cares about us or what we have lost it’s all terrifying and maddening and terribly sad.
We have nobody to turn to for comfort but each other, but when everybody’s just as scared and just as angry and just as sad, where’s the comfort?
That’s why there are churches.
That’s why there are mass political movements.
There’s safety and comfort in numbers.
Especially when you’re given an explanation that not only solves everything but gives you something to focus your thoughts on beyond your sadness and your anger and your fear.
I called the couple from Barnes and Noble Tea Party types. They don’t belong to the Tea Party. Yet. There’s no Tea Party around here for them to join. Yet.
There aren’t enough actual Tea Party members to affect the outcome of many elections. What there are are a lot of people who are afraid.
The world as they knew it has already come to its end. Their vision of the future is bleak. And as far as they can tell nobody who has the power to change it cares or even seems to notice how bad things are.
Of course it doesn’t help to have a major political party that’s decided that its way back into power is by reassuring people that their world is in fact coming to an end, that Death and Destruction are manifest and coming for them in the form of Muslims and Liberals.
But it doesn’t help either to have another political party that can’t seem to rally itself behind its own programs and plans for making the future a brighter and more inviting and less frightening prospect.
In the end, though, this is not a political post anymore than my conversation with that couple was a political argument.
I would have liked to have been able to convince them that things will get better because health care reform will pass and will actually reform some things, that there’s still more stimulus money to be spent, that the jobs bill will create jobs.
But I probably did more to change their minds about the way the world is headed just by owning those little blue editions of the Yale Shakespeare and by being there with a pair of polite and friendly and well-behaved teenage boys who had stacks of books on the table in front of them.
The world as we know it ends everyday…
…and starts all over again.





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