How Many Lumps?

The inaugural Tea Party convention is this weekend, and I find myself wishing that I was there.

I want to walk among them, take pictures and video and interview them. I want to hear from individuals, what they want changed, and what they get out of the loose organization that is Tea Partydom. I want to do it until my head literally explodes, and the media story becomes one about the strange, exploding head guy, and not about Sarah Palin and whether or not the Republicans are trying to highjack the incipient movement.

See, I’ve been lying low, blogwise, while I’ve been trying to assess what my feelings ought to be regarding the Partyites. I’ve even stopped referring to them as teabaggers, as much fun as that was. I know that they are pissed off at the disfunction of Congress, the way big banks are getting no-conditions bailouts, and how the government has driven this country into a ditch. Those things piss me off too. There are some legitimate grievances here. So I thought, I’ll try to hear them out, get past the worst rhetoric and see what they really have to say.

Then I remembered that they take their talking points and inspiration from Glen Beck.

Many of them say that they hate Republicans as much as I do.

Then I remembered that their pin up girl is Sarah Palin, late nominee for the Vice Presidency.

They favor bettering the condition of the common man, and are sincerely populist in their views.

Then I remembered that I have never seen a black Tea Partyer, nor a Hispanic one, or heard any of them speak responsibly or rationally about immigration policies.

Then I listened to Tom Tancredo give the keynote address today at the Tea Party convention kickoff at Opryland (seriously, the event is being held at an Opryland site). The microphone had a bad buzz going, but what he had to say came across clearly. Much of it was virulently anti-immigrant, with one-liners about how a lot of them can’t spell ‘vote”, or at least not in English. The crowd, as they say, went wild. He denigrated Barrack “Hussein” Obama (another huge ovation), and, knowing his audience, took a lot of time to bash John McCain.

Then he asked for a commitment from the crowd to pass on “our Judeo-Christian culture”, since it’s what made our country great, again to rousing cheers. Anyone not liking it, he suggested, could go back home. I guess the folks who actually DID build Nashville, back in the good old antebellum days, were not representative of the Tea Folk as far as complexion is concerned, and came from somewhere south of the Judeo-Christian source, and under duress. He wound up his talk with praise for the American flag, and managed to summon up some real fake tears in the process. At least he’s been paying attention to Fox.

And then I figured that it’s something like this: If I were in some group, and a lot (okay, most) of them espoused values that were so far from mine - like racism, homophobia, the end of a woman’s control over her own reproductive rights, the embrace of pseudoscience,and a willingness to believe and support all manner of hate speech, then I guess I would not let myself be a part of that organization. It would be like saying Hitler was okay because autobahns are cool, even though I don’t hold with the rest of his program.

And that’s just one of the reasons that we part ways.