Such nice, friendly, warm-hearted people, those tea party folks…if only they weren’t deranged!

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.

Comments

[Formerly Apostate]

It's not that many of these people aren't perfectly nice. It's that it's irrelevant that they might be nice.

Little Eichmanns, all of them. A lot of Nazis were perfectly sweet old ladies and perfectly decent family types. Getting sentimental about them - or validating their fears because it's oh, so human, is not helpful.

These people support a racist and misogynist party and they're genuinely afraid of the brown hordes. It scares them that they're no longer living in a country run entirely by white men.

College professor! What excuse do these people have to be this ignorant?

[El Jefe]

I'd say there are two tacks towards why it matters that folks like this couple are at once capable of sweetness and decency and capable of bigotry and the enabling of real, deep evils. The first (with apologies to F.A., and precisely because I respect her response) is the religious one: their own souls are at stake as well as the consequences of their actions, and it matters for their own sake that they consider the evils which extend from the actions they choose. So getting at their better angels (not just saying "it's a shame, because they seemed so nice") has measurable effects. The other's more practical and gets along just fine in a godless universe: we are all we've got and the consequences that play out in this life are the only ones around, so we need to knock the good-German pins out from under such dangerous movements. The world we save in that case is very definitely our own. So we have to get past belief persistence (the way all of us cling more tightly to what we value when it's challenged) to help them change themselves, where they live.

Lance is, I'm sure, more than usually aware just how many fusty old tories there are in English departments, and how many more there were back in the day. Their idealism for old-school notions of book-learnin' a jello-mold Western culture (a part of humanity I like mostly because it's a glorious mess) into the kids sounds pretty typical esp. in the over-60s.

As for hitting them where they live, they'd probably just curl up and snarl about successful socialist enterprises like the military and the fire department, or the fact Shakespeare's alive in the UK, well, and often brilliantly played by black and Asian (usually South Asian) actors. But reminding them with Lance's sort of former piety that Holy Mother Church is probably still the single largest socialist enterprise on earth (yeah, it's top-down, but state socialism usually is) might rattle some fuses. Or get with that whole "little Eichmanns" theme and throw some Boenhoffer and the Scholls at them, skating past their Lutheranism. St. Theresa's meditation that "Christ has no hands but our hands, no feet but our feet," etc., when read in full, is a pretty Bolshie screed. Just like the fact that cops, who historically have been hired guns for property too often, can change seas when they realize no one (and so everyone) is specified in that "serve and protect" oath. (Thanks, Chris. Takes guts to face the fact we're all flawed every single day. Nice comment about Doonesbury, btw.)

[muddy]

I used to get this nostalgia thing from my parents, pining for a golden time they had passed and that I had never seen. They were born in the teens, and died approx 10 years ago, and would frequently say, sighingly, that they had seen the best of this nation's history, and that best was never to be seen again. Yes, they did not blush to be considered the Greatest Generation. Sort of the flipside of the 4 Yorkshiremen. I would argue with this, saying that's all very well when you're not being lynched, or you don't need an abortion - or any women's rights at all, and etc I'd go down the line. Well they did admit that segregation was bad, but they had lived outside the country for 20 years starting in the mid 50's and had been in the very NE prior to that, so I don't think that really hit very close to home. And my mother would say how she *liked* to be a housewife, and she didn't need any special rights and was a Catholic and so Choice was never in question. So I'm left saying, well lucky for you you're white and your husband has a nice upper middle class professional job with benefits and pension, and you don't want to have a career, and you were happy having a giant pack of kids spaced over 18 years of childbearing, and your husband was a nice kind of guy who didn't smack you around or drink. But what about people that didn't want that or get the nice stuff? Well, we care about the other people, dear, that's why we're Democrats.

I swear my head would about explode, because they *were* Democrats, and pretty liberal ones really. But this sense of "it was fine for me" really did color their view of everything, and nothing in the future was ever going to be as great as what they had had.

My mother always said the right things about race, and (once she found out there was such a thing in about 1985) sexual orientation, but then would be very taken aback when I demonstrated that I had learned it as it had been said to me, and I believed it, whereas she was just saying it, as the right thing to say.

Well I could go on all day. But this idea of one era being the best and the future never measuring up is a standard since the times things have been written down, and no doubt for as long as stories have been told. Every era has good things and bad things about it. Her era was not sweetness and light as she would make it out to be, and how could it be.

They didn't even have the internet!

[Linkmeister]

Regarding your concluding sentence: Remember The Diggers? According to Wiki, they originated that 60s-70s catch phrase "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." Then there's The Grass Roots: "Let's Live for Today."

Mom occasionally falls into sloughs of despair about the direction the country's going too; I generally tell her that her grandparents probably felt the same way. Yet we survive.

[actor212]

Fear.

What did you expect after 25 years of having poison poured in their ears by hate radio?

That's how I would have confronted them, nice or not.

[chris the cop]

El Jefe,

It's been awhile since I chucked the badge and had to deal with the public in those terms, but thanks.

Form. Apost,

I don't even know where to start, but I'll just say to call people like the couple Lance met "Little Eichmanns" is just way over the top.

[Tom]

Call me when you find a tea bagger who is a Charter Member of the Concord Coalition.

[Michael L]

I would have to say that their world view is pretty accurate, they just don't have all the reasons right. But it's hard to argue that banks and financial institutions are firmly in control to the detriment of the average American, that constitutional liberties have been drastically eroded, that the environment is not going to be saved anytime soon, and if the above is true, it may be that our economic future -or future at all- is in grave doubt. And surely the so-called liberals in congress can share the blame for all of the above.

[Steve M.]

You don't have to turn into these people. My in-laws are in their late seventies and they haven't drifted right -- they read lefty blogs and quote Paul Krugman and support single payer and think Obama's too centrist the same way they thought JFK was too centrist fifty years ago, when they were young marrieds. Creeping Foxism is far from inevitable.