The Weekly Screed (#689)

“… I’ll let you be in my
dream if I can be in yours”
by David Benjamin

PARIS — Friend Steve, visiting Paris from rural Japan, posed the thesis that the Tea Party movement in the U.S. is a spent force. I replied that with southern governors again talking secession, Rand Paul burnishing his chances for the 2016 presidential nomination and Confederate Senator Ted Cruz usurping Speaker of the House John “Woody” Boehner, Steve was letting his hopes obscure the nihilist reality of right-wing politics in the R&B (red and blue) States of America.

In the same week, two op-ed writers, including the venerable socio-psychologist Robert Jay Lifton, characterized America’s political dilemma by quoting Bob Dylan from 49 years ago. Lifton cited the refrain in Dylan’s classic “Ballad of a Thin Man”: “something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is, do you, Mr. Jones?”

The clueless Mr. Jones to whom Dylan poses a series of poetic riddles is the downtrodden middle-class drone who lives in his suburban cocoon, obeys a boss he detests and never questions the army of authorities who nibble away at his political independence and personal autonomy. In “Thin Man” (“…You walk into the room like a camel and then you frown. You put your eyes in your pocket and your nose on the ground…”), Dylan sounds a favorite warning — that huge contemporary changes are leading toward a vastly altered, but not necessarily better, future.

Dylan hit this motif in “The Times They Are A-Changin’,” in “A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall,” in his “Talking World War III Blues” and, more subtly, in songs like “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” Dylan’s message of fear and prescience was common among the rebellious voices of the ‘60s. In the midst of his pessimism about humanity’s fate, he intimated that it remains in man’s power to unravel even our worst crises and craft a brighter future. Dylan conveyed a muted, but insistent, message of hope. The anger and disillusionment of Dylan and his contemporaries, me included, was forward-looking. In the anti-Vietnam War movement (“What if they gave a war, and nobody came?”), in Martin Luther King’s historic campaign of non-violence against American apartheid, in the national love affair with John F. Kennedy, that faint hope found a few heroes and a little justification.

We could do better, if we got together and tried. Surprisingly, not long after the turn of a new century, Dylan’s theme, JFK’s promise, the spirit of Dr. King, were all revived with the unexpected rise of Barack Obama. Remember?

Well, I do.

But Obama was greeted, noisily, by a new wave of populist anger, one that called itself the Tea Party. It hearkened back inaccurately to the civil disobedients of 1773, claiming ownership of a selectively edited Constitution and wrapping itself in layers of flags, including the Stars and Stripes, the Gadsden banner and the black flag of anarchy. But the difference that occurred to me as I recalled Bob Dylan’s lyrics, and the aspirations of those who took his poetry to heart, is that today’s apoplectic populists — who claim a clear view of the imminent Apocalypse — are Mr. Jones. They’re the same misguided shlemiels that Dylan mocked in 1965, but now they’re all pushing seventy and they’re not so thin anymore.

Worst of all, their gaze is fixed not a cloudy and perilous future whose problems regularly burst from the fog in terrifying clarity. They’re all looking backward, railing against problems already solved and issues mostly settled. Like Islamists yearning for the good old 8th century, America’s current species of populist insurgents stare fixedly backward — not to the Enlightenment patriots of the 18th century — but to the slave-state reactionaries of the 19th century.

Why would they bother about the future? They’re safely reaping the pensions, SSI and Medicare benefits that were secured by the liberals, labor unions and social reformers whom they despise. They don’t need to plan ahead. Their mission is to restore an imaginary past, time-traveling to days when America’s worst problems were swept silently into an invisible ghetto or flushed to the sea along toxic rivers, when Ozzie Nelson was everybody’s All-American and nobody’s neighbor.

The Tea Party has a list of projects, but none solve the actual problems that threaten the nation, both economically and democratically. None of them point forward. Although blessed by its benefits, Tea Partiers insist we can no longer afford to be our brother’s keeper. They would shred the social contract in favor of a ruthless Ayn Rand nightmare (in which they’ll already be dead, so who cares?). They would eliminate all taxes, wipe out food stamps and public assistance, burn down the Federal Reserve, raze the public schools and replace science with Christianist mythology, restore Jim Crow (only as a voluntary standard, of course) and invalidate Brown v. Board of Education, repeal the Affordable Care Act and return the poor and sick to the tried-and-true principle of natural selection. They would sand-blast from the Statue of Liberty Emma Lazarus’ promise to welcome “your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.”

The Tea Party would kill the last vestige of collective bargaining, leave food safety to meat packers, hog factories and pesticide profiteers, and restore air and water pollution to levels not seen since Rachel Carson pissed off the job creators of corporate America. Especially, they want Roe v. Wade reversed and women restored to a status once articulated by another aging Jewish folk singer, Kinky Friedman: “Get your biscuits in the oven and your buns in the bed.”

Most and best of all, they want the one thing that got them all fired-up and half-cocked in the first place. They want that nigger out of the White House. Now.

As I told Steve the other night, when that happens, by impeachment or by the election of a white president, the Tea Party — with no ax to grind, no motive to march, no effigy to hang, and no object for their seething, atavistic hatred — will go the way of the dodo bird, the pet rock and the Klan.