Like some of you, I occasionally listen to AM Radio. These days, with Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Laura Ingraham, Michael Savage and other extremist nutjobs dominating that media, sometimes it’s hard to take. However, we must be brave and soldier on. Occasionally gathering intelligence about what the opposition is doing involves listening to what their saying. An old Dixiecrat once told me he subscribed to the liberal Texas Observer journal “to see what the enemy is saying,” and that was wise on his part; we may profit from his example.
Junction City’s KJCK (1420 AM) unfortunately runs Ingraham’s and Hannity’s feature-length commercials for the Republican Party. I assume as usual this is a purely business decision; the local on air personalities do not seem anywhere near as rabid. Few listen to radio anymore anyway; the audience for the Ingraham and Hannity whine fests are primarily retirees, as you can readily see by the kind of Senior-friendly products mentioned on the commercials. Liberal talk radio has not been able to break the right-wing monopoly primarily because the local stations make good money running them and this is what the big radio conglomerates like Clear Channel Communications put out. The corporate power structure likes the premise: trick folks like old, retired Ed down the street into voting against themselves by following the advice of Republican shills like Hannity and Ingraham and they win.
And that’s what the whole “Teabagger” thing is all about. Its manufactured anger – the creation of “Astroturf” (as opposed to grassroots) mobs to benefit the Republicans. As a matter of fact, on November 11, 2009 –Veterans Day – a Teabagger rally was held in front of Junction City City Hall. Actually I heard about this on KJCK in one of the local segments. Interestingly, the announcement of the event asked that participants bring “polite signs”. No doubt this was in reaction to the criticism these events have had for signs comparing President Obama to Hitler and/or Stalin, the reprehensible “Bury Healthcare With Kennedy” signs they put out after Senator Kennedy’s death, and so on. Later, the same announcement was carried in The Daily Union.
Now, I wasn’t expecting much – Junction City is not exactly known for its activism. We don’t have the history of racist radicalism that they have in the Idaho panhandle, for instance. But I decided it might be neat to observe this event just to see what it’s all about. And, as, after all, this movement is entirely based on attacking a Democratic President, it wouldn’t hurt to bring my own sign anyhow to show not everyone here in the heartland marches in lockstep. I had several ideas for the wording, but finally settled on ‘HEALTH CARE FOR ALL IS A BASIC HUMAN RIGHT’ in large letters with little elaboration. After all, I’m white and male and stylistically challenged. I did however add the Obama campaign logo thingy at the bottom right.
Before the event I stopped by JCPD and informed a patrol supervisor of my plans. He assured me that if I stayed across the street I had a right to be there just like our Astroturfed friends. I arrived about twenty minutes before it was due to start and already I felt kind of sorry for the teabaggers. Hardly anybody showed up. Maybe there was twenty-five, all white, and almost all elderly. But some of those were people going in and out of City Hall and members of Veteran’s groups who had been there earlier for the Veteran’s Day ceremonies and stayed behind to watch. I made sure, from across the street, when the teabagger woman running the thing asked all the veterans to raise their hands that I did too.
She spoke first and primarily just gave a summary of Anti-Obama talking points off talk radio. The only other speakers were a representative of Republican Senator Sam Brownback, and State Representative Barbara Craft. Craft spoke at length about the state budget to which the little crowd listened respectfully but otherwise to which they had little reaction if anything. It was like watching paint dry.
There were maybe five or six teabaggers with signs, some on brown cardboard I couldn’t read. One (carried by an elderly man with a “Don’t Blame Me – I Voted for Sarah” t-shirt – how’s that for showing just the disdain the right-wing feels for Senator McCain?) said something incoherent warning about how President Obama was prepared to take folks’ guns away. Since I barely comprehended it I doubt hardly anyone else did either. There was another warning against “socialism,” which was quite ironic held next to a fire department, a socialist enterprise if there ever was one. I hate to toot my own horn, but it’s not really immodest to say my own simple sign was loads better than any of theirs, but it was. Of course, I’ve had media training for bureaucrats and can comprehend how to speak in sound bites, too. Folks paranoid about this or that or overcome with vague, righteous anger tend to not focus on putting out a coherent message.
If there was ever any doubt the entire Teabagger Movement is nothing but as Astroturfed fake anger movement fueled to organize for the Republicans, for me it was removed on that day. The only speakers besides the leader were a Republican elected official and a representative of another Republican elected official, and as the signs showed, the entire movement is organized in response to the program of President Obama, the first Democratic President in eight years.
Teabaggers like to claim their movement is one of “patriots,” but it’s hard to be patriotic toward your country when you hate most of the people in it. More correctly they represent what the late (conservative) historian Richard Hofstader called “the paranoid style in American politics”. Their models are the McCarthyist anticommunist witchhunters of the 1950s, the John Birch Society, and the angry white Southerners opposed to integration. The Goldwater movement of 1964 attracted the exact same sorts, as did Richard Nixon’s “Silent Majority”.
To some extent the Ross Perot movement of 1992 attracted the same group, but the Perotistas were polite and well-mannered, positive about their candidate. Like today’s movement, they had large blind spots to facts, things like how Perot got rich from government contracts to provide data services for welfare programs, and how he was hardly a “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” kind of honest politician, but a longtime political insider who manipulated both Republican and Democratic Presidents and Governors.
The Teabaggers are anything but. They’re the descendants of the “Angry White Men” of 1994 who put in Newt Gingrich, or as Molly Ivins called them, the “Soreheads”. They’re the Republican partisans angry about gun control (none of which is being advanced today), taxes, and what have you. They’re just out to stop President Obama and if he’s for it they’re against it and that’s the bottom line.
Oh, they plan another protest at City Hall on April 15. If possible I’ll be there to counterprotest. Join me and we may very well outnumber them!
Monday, December 7, 2009
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