Reptiles in Many Respects

The first line from this long article in Playboy written anonymously by a Tea Party consultant caught my attention:

Everything I know about being a good consultant comes from Fight Club.

Also this:

I get out of Washington whenever possible, especially during tourist season. In late spring I visited a Tea Party rally in suburban St. Louis. It was what you would imagine: angst-ridden Caucasians sitting in lawn chairs with signs such as My daughter is nine and already $41,000 in debt. It was not an angry crowd, and in all candor I never heard a racist word uttered.The speeches went on for hours. The sun was shining. It was the kind of day when you could take a nap under a tree. The organizer had personally delivered about a thousand activists. It was her big day. Two hours into the speeches she sat down on the warm grass next to me at the back of the rally and said, "This is the perfect day. Now all I need is a joint." That tells you everything you need to know about my friends.

And this:

Of course, the Tea Party is not as cohesive as anyone thinks. It’s not a party or even an organization. You have to understand the state of the Republican Party to understand how there can still be oxygen in the room for the Tea Party. Bush mangled the GOP brand into a grotesque form that conservatives haven’t recognized in five years.

But the real "pull quote" and takeaway for me was this:

We’re playing to the reptilian brain rather than the logic centers, so we look for key words and images to leverage the intense rage and anxiety of white working-class conservatives. In other words, I talk to the same part of your brain that causes road rage.

Well worth the read.

You Should Totally Apologize to BP

Boy, it didn't take long for this site to spring up.

You should submit your apology to BP. You can submit videos, photos, quotes, whatever you want, as long as you apologize for the thing you did to BP. Did you eat all BP's cheetos? Did you forget to fill up their tank the last time you borrowed their car? Let it all out. Make amends. Say you are sorry.

There's also a Twitter hashtag #imsorrybp

Playwrights Get Paid

From the LA Times:

How do you keep playwrights down on the farm, harvesting their imaginations for theatrical works, after they've seen how much more they can earn from film and television?

The answer proposed Friday by Arena Stage, the leading theater company in Washington, D.C., is to pay five of them "a living wage," with the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation footing most of the bill with a $1.1-million grant.

It establishes the American Voices New Play Institute as a three-year experiment aimed at making playwriting a real job, rather than something writers who love the stage try to squeeze in between the teaching or writing for film and television that nearly all playwrights need to make an actual living.