Beck Rally Pre-Show

Alternet has an account of the "Restoring Honor" rally pre-event. An event steeped in religion and politics:

Divine Destiny was a three-hour mix of gospel music and patriotic songs from an “all-star” choir of local singers and dancers, inspirational exhortations for people and churches to do good work in their communities, and speeches by Religious Right figures about America’s need to repent for the nation’s sins and turn back to God.

Included in the line-up?

Miles McPherson is a former professional football player and current pastor of the Rock Church, a San Diego megachurch that was active in the campaign to pass Prop. 8 and strip gay couples in California of the right to marry.

Shock Jocking Our Politics

The New Republic has a piece by Alexander Zaitchik that reminds us what Beck is really up to with his "Restoring Honor" rally:

“It’s hard for people who never worked in FM radio during the 1980s to really understand how deep publicity-hunger runs in Beck’s blood,” says Kelly, a radio veteran who worked with and against Beck in two markets. “Morning radio DJ’s were the Navy Seals of getting your name out there and keeping it out there. It was all about finding the biggest stage to promote yourself and your shows. Take away the high rhetoric, and Saturday is just a masterful lesson in the art of the publicity stunt. Old DJ’s like me can only stand in awe.”

"The Waterworld of White Self Pity"

Slate gives us Christopher Hitchens' view of Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally in Washington D.C. this past weekend. Slate's accompanying video bolsters Hitchens' observation that like the rally, Beck supporters are vague and undirected:

Until recently, the tendency has been to think of this rather than to speak of it—or to speak of it very delicately, lest the hard-won ideal of diversity be imperiled. But nobody with any feeling for the zeitgeist can avoid noticing the symptoms of white unease and the additionally uneasy forms that its expression is beginning to take.

The Kansas Kochtopus

A long investigative piece about the tea-party funders, the Koch brothers of Koch Industries (headquartered in Wichita, KS) is in the New Yorker: The report showed that, from 2005 to 2008, the Kochs vastly outdid ExxonMobil in giving money to organizations fighting legislation related to climate change, underwriting a huge network of foundations, think tanks, and political front groups. Indeed, the brothers have funded opposition campaigns against so many Obama Administration policies—from health-care reform to the economic-stimulus program—that, in political circles, their ideological network is known as the Kochtopus.

Oh, and David H. Koch is a big-time philanthropist and arts enthusiast.

Frame-Flipping

Well worth the full read. Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic on the NAACP condemnation of racism in the Tea Party movement:

The NAACP's announcement initially struck me in much the same the way. But some hours of considering this have proven to me that my initial skepticism says more about the broad American narrative of race and racism, then it does about the justness of the NAACP's charge.

I think it's worth, first, considering the record of American racism, and then the record of the Tea Party and its allies. Racism tends to attract attention when it's flagrant and filled with invective. But like all bigotry, the most potent component of racism is frame-flipping--positioning the bigot as the actual victim. So the gay do not simply want to marry, they want to convert our children into sin. The Jews do not merely want to be left in peace, they actually are plotting world take-over. And the blacks are not actually victims of American power, but beneficiaries of the war against hard-working whites. This is a respectable, more sensible, bigotry, one that does not seek to name-call, preferring instead change the subject and strawman. Thus segregation wasn't necessary to keep the niggers in line, it was necessary to protect the honor of white women.

"Thank God for Slavery"

Judy Thomas' piece in the Kansas City Star on racism in the Tea Party movement is a MUST-READ.

For many tea partiers, racism is in the eye of the beholder.

Take Ron Wight, who stood with dozens of tea party activists at the J.C. Nichols Memorial Fountain in April, complaining about the Obama administration, its socialist agenda and being called a racist.

Those like him who complain about President Barack Obama are accused of racism, lamented the semi-retired music teacher from Lee’s Summit.

Then he added: “If I was a black man, I’d get down on my knees and thank God for slavery. Otherwise, I could be dying of AIDS now in Africa.”

Wight doesn’t consider that comment to be racist.

“I wish slavery had never happened,” he said. “But there are some black people alive today who have never suffered one day what the people who were black went through in the ’40s, ’50s and ’60s. Has somebody said something stupid or done something stupid? Yes, there have been incidents.

“But with everything that has been done in this country legally and socially for the black man, it’s almost like they’ve been given a great leg up.”

A MUST-READ

Wow. Just wow. Jay Rosen's The Quest for Innocence and the Loss of Reality in Political Journalism on his blog PressThink:

The quest for innocence in political journalism means the desire to be manifestly agenda-less and thus “prove” in the way you describe things that journalism is not an ideological trade. But this can get in the way of describing things!

You have to read the entire piece.

Requiem for Sanity in the Gulf

Mac McClelland from Mother Jones, who has been doing some heavy-duty shoe-leather reporting from the Gulf, attended a Tea Party rally in Louisiana and came back with this:

But the sentiments expressed at this particular rally were, as it turns out, about 300 percent crazier even than I had feared.
...the rally was mostly two hours of yelling about how climate change is natural—"I've never seen CO2 in the air, have you ever seen CO2 in the air??"—how Barack Obama is simultaneously trying to enslave the American population and steal from it, and how welfare recipients should have to be regularly drug tested. One speaker gave the usual "We don't need the government" speech, followed immediately by, "If the government was doing its job making sure MMS did its job, we wouldn't be here. Why wasn't the government looking down their throats?" Another speaker pointed out that we're at two wars, one in Iran and one in Afghanistan, and that if we're not careful, the president of Israel, Ahmadinejad, is going to gain enough power to take over the world.

"Whose agenda is Obama pushing?" one speaker asked, and everyone yelled, "George Soros'!" Then we watched a video montage including footage of American soldiers, stills of Obama in Dark Knight Joker makeup, and the sun rising and setting on the Gulf of Mexico, set to Queen's "The Show Must Go On." Then we watched another video with clips of Rahm Emanuel and ACORN employees intercut with pictures of Chairman Mao, all over the superdramatic theme music from Requiem for a Dream.

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.

Ralph Ellison Explained the Tea Party Movement in 1958

Ralph Ellison from Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke:

"For the ex-colonials, the declaration of an American identity meant the assumption of a mask, and it imposed not only the discipline of national self-consciousness, it gave Americans an ironic awareness of the joke that always lies between appearance and reality, between the discontinuity of social tradition and that sense of the past which clings to the mind. And perhaps even an awareness of the joke that society is man's creation, not God's. Americans began their revolt from the English fatherland when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor, masked as Indians, and the mobility of the society created in this limitless space has encouraged the use of the mask for good and evil ever since. As the advertising industry, which is dedicated to the creation of masks, makes clear, that which cannot gain authority from tradition may borrow it with a mask. Masking is a play upon possibility and ours is a society in which possibilities are many. When American life is most American it is apt to be most theatrical."