[Peace-discuss] Jokers to the right, maybe, but where are the clowns?

[C. G. Estabrook]

I wish the Dems felt uncomfortable for the right reason - guilt for consciously 
betraying the people who elected them: (1) money for military thugs and 
contractors and death for the Middle East; (2) bonuses for Wall Street and 
unemployment for Main Street; and (3) profits for insurance companies and no 
health care even to the standard of other industrialized countries.  It's a 
sorry record - it's going exactly in the wrong direction - and it's no wonder 
that people are rejecting them at the polls. There'll be more of that in the fall.

And who is the Left that the Tea-partiers are supposed to make uncomfortable or 
fearful? Here's what the authentic Left says:

	First of all, don't believe anything you hear from power systems. So if Obama 
or the boss or the newspapers or anyone else tells you they're doing this, that, 
or the other thing, dismiss it or assume the opposite is true, which it often 
is. You have to rely on yourself and your associates -- gifts don't come from 
above; you're going to win them, or you won't have them, and you win by 
struggle, and that requires understanding and serious analysis of the options 
and the circumstances, and then you can do a lot. So take right now, for 
example, there is a right-wing populist uprising. It's very common, even on the 
left, to just ridicule them, but that's not the right reaction. If you look at 
those people and listen to them on talk radio, these are people with real 
grievances. I listen to talk radio a lot and it's kind of interesting. If you 
can sort of suspend your knowledge of the world and just enter into the world of 
the people who are calling in, you can understand them. I've never seen a study, 
but my sense is that these are people who feel really aggrieved. These people 
think, "I've done everything right all my life, I'm a god-fearing Christian, I'm 
white, I'm male, I've worked hard, and I carry a gun. I do everything I'm 
supposed to do. And I'm getting shafted." And in fact they are getting shafted. 
For 30 years their wages have stagnated or declined, the social conditions have 
worsened, the children are going crazy, there are no schools, there's nothing, 
so somebody must be doing something to them, and they want to know who it is. 
Well Rush Limbaugh has answered - it's the rich liberals who own the banks and 
run the government, and of course run the media, and they don't care about you 
-- they just want to give everything away to illegal immigrants and gays and 
communists and so on.

	Well, you know, the reaction we should be having to them is not ridicule, but 
rather self-criticism. Why aren't we organizing them? I mean, we are the ones 
that ought to be organizing them, not Rush Limbaugh. There are historical 
analogs, which are not exact, of course, but are close enough to be worrisome. 
This is a whiff of early Nazi Germany. Hitler was appealing to groups with 
similar grievances, and giving them crazy answers, but at least they were 
answers; these groups weren't getting them anywhere else. It was the Jews and 
the Bolsheviks [that were the problem].

	I mean, the liberal democrats aren't going to tell the average American, "Yeah, 
you're being shafted because of the policies that we've established over the 
years that we're maintaining now." That's not going to be an answer. And they're 
not getting answers from the left. So, there's an internal coherence and logic 
to what they get from Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and the rest of these guys. And they 
sound very convincing, they're very self-confident, and they have an answer to 
everything -- a crazy answer, but it's an answer. And it's our fault if that 
goes on. So one thing to be done is don't ridicule these people, join them, and 
talk about their real grievances and give them a sensible answer...

Amen.  --CGE


Brussel Morton K. wrote:
> On the subject of the Tea Party and its racial overtones, see
> 
> http://www.truthout.org/white-racial-resentment-bubbles-under-surface-tea-party-movement56709
> 
> 
> One commenter of this article asks:
> 
> /Is there much difference between the Tea Party and the John Birch Society?
> There's nothing new here. It's rural versus urban.... I remember it all from
> growing up in rural Michigan in the 1950's. Southern? I don't think so. It's
> too easy to brand white southerners as the only racists in America. Remember,
> Timothy McVey was from Michigan. The Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan was
> from a neighboring Michigan town in the 1960's. This is the racist fringe of
> Libertarianism./ / / I wonder how Carl et al. feel about joining  the chorus
> of Tea Party guests and advocates like Tom Tancredo, Glenn Beck, and Sarah
> Palin, all notable at their convention in Nashville? Carl and people like
> Cockburn seem to relish them, since they clearly make the Dems and the Left
> uncomfortable and/or fearful.
> 
> --mkb
> 
> 
> On Feb 6, 2010, at 4:18 PM, C. G. Estabrook wrote:
> 
>> Clowns to the left of me! Jokers to the right! Here I am stuck in the
>> middle with you.
>> 
>> Yes I'm stuck in the middle with you, and I'm wondering what it is I should
>> do. Its so hard to keep this smile from my face. Losing control yeah I'm
>> all over the place.
>> 
>> [The Tea party movement - a crazy quilt of new growth forest, weeds, and
>> Astroturf - is growing up outside the limits of allowable debate policed by
>> the Republicans and Democrats, causing them some anxiety. They know the
>> interests they defend have less and less support among Americans.
>> 
>> But where is the escape from those limits on the left?
>> 
>> As all recent presidents have, Obama advertised to his masters - American
>> elites - in the Mendacity of Hope that he could successfully occlude the
>> contradiction between the goals of that small group and the mass of
>> Americans ("Bring us together again!") and his principal - perhaps his only
>> - success so far has been the co-option of the anti-war movement.
>> 
>> Perhaps the Tea-partiers will gives an example - and maybe even the moxie -
>> to get it together again.]
>> 
>> 
>> Republicans seek 'Tea Party' allies
>> 
>> 
>> The Tea Party political movement in the United States has been gaining 
>> momentum since early last year by appealing to conservative Americans who
>> want lower taxes and smaller government.
>> 
>> Thousands of people are attending the first Tea Party convention in 
>> Nashville, Tennessee. And its something the Republican Party has taken a
>> keen interest in.
>> 
>> 
>> http://english.aljazeera.net/news/americas/2010/02/201026182135711755.html
>> 


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