Vote For Kodos: Fear and Loathing at a Tea Party Meeting
I have ever been wary of the mob mentality, most especially in the realm of public policy. When I was a senior in high school, a member of my class lead a protest against the school administration. This chap had been a relentless brown noser, ingratiating himself to every authority figure whom he thought could aid his ambitions to be class president and gain admission to the university of his choosing, but by the spring of our senior year those ambitions had been achieved and so the usefulness of his adult patrons had come to an end. So, in a bid to sate his ego be recasting himself as a righteous rebel instead of the toady he'd always been, he organized a sit-down strike in the hallways against some or another petty injustice visited upon the students by the administrators. He didn't give a tinker's damn about his fellow students or the perceived injustice, it was all for his own aggrandizement. I encountered a classmate on her way to join the protest, a clever, beautiful girl who asked me to come along. "Come on, Mike," she entreated, "don't you want to join?"

"With the mob?" I scoffed. "Never." So, I was one of the very few seniors who went to his classes during the several hours it took for the administration to give in to the egomaniac's demands. I had always shared Alexander Hamilton's suspicions of the mob, but this incident forever sharpened my view of large public protests as {a} mobs, mindlessly destructive mobs and {b} mobs orchestrated by shadow figures with self-serving agendas and hidden, almost invariably nefarious, motives.

Fast forward from 1997 to 2009 as we witness the "tea party" movement that arose to oppose ObamaCare, the quasi-nationalization of America's health care system, and "the banks." There is no excuse for the abuse that has been heaped upon the tea parties by the Left, the hypocrites who argued under President Bush that dissent was the highest form of patriotism, yet liken dissent directed against President Obama to treason. Nor for the proliferation of the "teabaggers" slur, which marks the first time anyone on the Left has ever said an unkind word about sexual deviancy. That said, there is no excuse for the idiocy with the tea parties, such as the protest signs that read, "No socialized medicine/Save my Medicare," as if Medicare was not itself the largest government-run component of our health care system. Or the hatred of "the banks" as the cause of all our economics woes, coupled with opposition to any and all government intervention in the economy; so, "the banks" are evil and the federal government, the most significant body with the ability to keep "the banks" on the straight and narrow, shouldn't play any role in the economy? Yeah, that makes sense.

But I did not fully grasp the full scope of the danger the posed to our great republic by the tea party mob until my father asked me to attend a meeting of the Genesee County Tea Party in his stead while he was in Delaware at the Ford Motor Company's annual shareholders meeting. The dregs of humanity were on display that night, dear readers. Those with sensitive natures should steel themselves. One knave, wearing Confederate battle flag suspenders, wished to ask a question of a candidate for Genesee County Treasurer, a Democrat. The son of the Confederacy asked the candidate, "Are you a conservative?"

The candidate replied, "No," his tone conveying the additional commentary, "No, of course not, have you recently suffered a blow to the head? I've never claimed to be a conservative; I'm running in the Democratic primary, for pity's sake. What's wrong with you?" Yet the man in the Confederate battle flag suspenders acted as if he's scored a great coup, as if he'd caught the candidate in a cunning trap.

There are two issues here, {a} racism and {b} stupidity. The tea party movement may not be inherently racist, but no one said a word about the man's Confederate battle flag suspenders, the organizers did not ask him to leave. To my way of thinking, that is itself a tacit endorsement of the man's publicly displayed racism. The man in the Confederate battle flag suspenders himself provided the segue to idiocy when he later argued, in a very loud side discussion, for the necessity of defending the Constitution. The Confederacy was a rebellion against the Constitution, you bloody moron! How can you argue that the Constitution must be defended while so proudly wearing the symbol, which I dearly love to call the "Confederate swastika," of the Constitution's deadliest enemy? The mind boggles at such existential contradictions.

But far be it from me to condemn a "movement" because of the foul racism and appalling stupidity of any one man. Let us not forget the chap who said that he didn't care who was elected to public office, as long as they didn't have any previous experience, had never before held an elected office. Oh, except they should be young, we should get some young people in office. And then there was the fellow who vociferously defended President Obama. After all, President Bush (sic) "hadn't done nothing in eight years" in the White House; so, we owed President Obama more of a chance to prove himself. Also, this fellow added, we should support President Obama because it was President Bush who "brought 80,000 Muslims to down there in Dearborn." The implication seemed to be twofold, that having a substantial population of adherents to the Muslim faith in Dearborn was somehow an inherently bad thing and that the only reason there are any Muslims in Dearborn is because President Bush "brought" them there.

I explained all that had happened to my father, registered my disgust at his proud association with such a repellent organization, and swore to him that I would never again return to the soul-blighting site of the Genesee County Tea Party's meetings for any reason. The T-shirts sold by the Genesee County Tea Party sport the Gadsden flag on the front and on the back the words, "Republicans, Democrats, Americans!" The man in the Confederate battle fag suspenders, the man who championed inexperience, and the man who insisted President Bush "brought" Dearborn's Muslim population to Michigan certainly stand outside both the Republican Party and the Democratic Party, but surely we can find a more specific descriptor for all three than just their nationality, American. I would propose a new T-shirt for the racist, imbecilic, altogether loathsome Genesee County Tea Party: "Republicans, Democrats, Bloody Idiots!"

The tea parties are not "AstroTurf," they are legitimately grassroots organizations, but that doesn't make them any less poisonous to the American republic. A mob need not to orchestrated from the shadows to pose a grave threat to those things it ignorantly claims to defend.