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i think the tea party is a strange revolt of the serfs. they are revolting against the scary impersonal modern capitalist system and want to replace it with a new feudalism in which they will be exploited by lords whose name they know directly and be able maybe once a year or so to visit the lord's manor and spend the rest of their time pretending they are that person. they'll be able to console themselves about their miserable lot in life by thinking about some imaginary natural order and how great it is that they know their place in that natural order even if that places is at the bottom of a giant chute that delivers shit onto them at least they'll know the name of the person who squeezes off the bon-bons at the opposite end.
sometimes i think the tea party is merely a giant paranoid reaction to the scale of globalized capitalism, from which can follow a sense of being-erased as a person or a sense that the framework within which one had operated is being dissolved. and thanks to the giant passivity generating machine that is american edutainment, these folk can't relativize their own position. so they panic. and then there are very wealthy individuals committed to the politics of being narcissistic assholes who are willing to spend vast sums of money directing this panic this way and that.
either way, it's all counter-intuitive. i would have thought people would revolt against capitalism. but these people want to revolt against what prevents capitalism from descending into barbarism on its way to imploding. they are revolting against the mechanisms that enable the system as it is to operate at all. their solution to a wobbly-bad situation is to make it worse.
sometimes i wonder if the tea party is full of trotskyists.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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