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there was no tea party under the bush people. from a remove, the tea party can be seen as a repetition effect---they inhabit the discursive space carved out by 40 years of neo-liberal hegemony--within that, there's been the conservative media apparatus busily repeating away since the early 90s.
what the panic was about has nothing to do with what tea party people say. it was about the implications of the bush period for conservative ideology.
one of the characteristics of conservative-land is the collapse of distinction between the first person pronoun of conservative ideological propositions and all of america--and, by extension, the capitalist barbarism for which it stands, one nation united under capital blah blah blah---so the whole world as stage in the imaginary space of conservative-land is as it is and continues as it continues because there is a coherent first-person pronoun space in a coherent ideological frame called conservative-land.
what these folk panicked about really was not even so much motivated by that delightful frothy mix of paranoia and racism that's resulted in such donaldian excrescence as the "birthers"---what panicked them was the collapse of their own political horizons as a function of the profound damage done conservative ideology by the bush administration. especially the endgame, when all the bromides about economic activity were visited upon us all in spades, with all their class war-based dysfunctions laying bare for all to see.
by any rational standard, that should have been the endgame
and people with no ideological perspectives that were not shaped by conservative-land freaked out.
that's the origin of the tea party.
that and some mister beal moment from glenn beck (an allusion to network.)
the incoherent freak-out of these folk was a prime candidate for recently deposed conservative deep-pockets asshats whose ways of seeing and operating were significantly responsible for the disaster that befell conservative-land. so they hid behind it and gradually "organized" the tea partiers and in "organizing" them basically co-opted the movement.
this is quick but is not an unreasonable take on what the tea party was and is.
so what they say is unimportant. of course they're going to repeat conservative bromides---the tea party mobilized because there's a population that was psychologically and affectively unable to deal with the implosion of conservative-land. what else are they going to do?
that makes the tea party an exercise in collective self-therapy, yes?
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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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