A Party with Attitude

Check out a rambling piece by Lee Harris at Policy Review titled, "The Tea Party vs. the Intellectuals." I say rambling because in a few short pages Harris ranges from "Polite Company Conservative" intellectuals like David Brooks and David Frum to George Orwell and the Italian communist thinker Antonio Gramsci to the "iron law of oligarchy". Whew! But relax, it's not as imposing as it sounds. (Nor as rigorous as it probably should be.)

Anyway, the bottom line is that the Tea Party movement is defined more by attitude than ideology and that attitude is best captured by the slogan from the Revolutionary War period, a slogan many Tea Partiers have adopted as their own, "Don't Tread On Me!" A more contemporary way to say the same thing might be, "Leave me alone!"

According to Harris, the fact that the movement is more attitude than ideology is important because as attitude it becomes largely immune to counter-argument. "I'm mad as hell, I said. Do you mean to tell me I'm not mad as hell?" But it is also immune to counter-argument for another reason, and this is the real meat of Harris's piece.

Because the Tea Party movement is mostly made up of people who were not previously politically active, nor particularly attentive even, they are virtually impervious to elite opinion, liberal or conservative. They don't know who people like Brooks and Frum are, nor do they read the New York Times or watch network news. As a result, they can't be humiliated when they're dismissed by them as bigoted, shrill, or even violent. In fact, just the opposite happens. The more the organs of elite opinion scorn them, the more justified they feel in their contempt for them in reverse.

Both of these aspects seem to mean the Tea Party movement is with us to stay, at least for a time.

I think Harris overstates the case that the Tea Party movement is short an informing ideology. A call for, a demand for a return to constitutionally limited government sounds like a plan to me. But no matter, his conclusion is sound nonetheless.

The only truly effective check on elite rule is the fear that the people will become fed up with it. When the people decide to try to rule themselves, their first step toward self-government will be to toss out the old elite. True, the people may simply end up by bringing in a new elite, but this is little consolation to the elite that has been replaced. Hence, any ruling elite that wishes to maintain its hold on power will learn to exercise its power within prudent limits, not overreaching and creating dangerous resentment and backlash among the people. This formidable check on elite power does not arise from flimsy constitutional safeguards, which can always be circumvented, but from the suspicious, even paranoid attitude of defiance displayed by ordinary citizens, which is much harder to get around.

The lesson of history is stark and simple. People who are easy to govern lose their freedom. People who are difficult to govern retain theirs. What makes the difference is not an ideology, but an attitude. Those people who embody the “Don’t tread on me!” attitude have kept their liberties simply because they are prepared to stand up against those who threaten to tread on them. To the pragmatist, it makes little difference what ideas free people use to justify and rationalize their rebellious attitude. The most important thing is simply to preserve this attitude among a sufficiently large number of people to make it a genuine deterrent against the power hungry. If the Tea Party can succeed in this all-important mission, then the pragmatist can forgive the movement for a host of silly ideas and absurd policy suggestions, because he knows what is really at stake. Once the “Don’t tread on me!” attitude has vanished from a people, it never returns. It is lost and gone forever — along with the liberty and freedom for which, ultimately, it is the only effective defense.

I wrote some time back about the spirit and the letter of the law, of the Constitution. No matter how dead the letter, if the spirit is alive, we'll be fine. But God help us when the spirit, the attitude, dies as well.

Un-, Anti-, Non-, or Post-American

Over at National Review Online, Mark Steyn has once again hit one out of the park. I'm telling you, this guy is a national treasure. He manages to be both serious and humorous, often laugh-out-loud so, like no one else in punditry. His only real competition comes from his colleague at NRO, Jonah Goldberg

Anyway, while this piece is focused on Barack Obama, it's actually about the type he represents. Steyn reports that, "In recent months, a lot of Americans have said to me that they had no idea the new president would feel so 'weird.'" The weirdness they now sense is of a piece, I think, with what Dorothy Rabinowitz was last week trying to describe in her Wall Street Journal column about "The Alien in the White House." The silliness of the efforts to discredit the president by the so-called "birthers" aside, many are beginning to realize that this guy just doesn't feel like, well, one of us.

But Steyn is careful not to simply dismiss him as the other. He's, as they say, more nuanced than that.

It is hard to imagine Obama wandering along to watch a Memorial Day or Fourth of July parade until the job required him to. That’s not to say he’s un-American or anti-American, but merely that he’s beyond all that. Way beyond. He’s the first president to give off the pronounced whiff that he’s condescending to the job — that it’s really too small for him and he’s just killing time until something more commensurate with his stature comes along.

But it's not just Obama. Steyn captures beautifully this, as I say, type.

There are millions of people like Barack Obama, the eternal students of a vast lethargic transnational campus for whom global compassion and the multicultural pose are merely the modish gloss on a cult of radical grandiose narcissism. As someone once said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” When you’ve spent that long waiting in line for yourself, it’s bound to be a disappointment.

Perfect...almost. I'm afraid Steyn's a bit too generous.

While this type may not be fairly described as either un- or anti-American , and are perhaps better defined as non- or post-American, for all practical purposes it amounts to the same thing. In a pinch, you can't count on'em. And shouldn't.

BaRock 'n' Roll

Speaking of music, Rolling Stone, of all magazines, has just released a lengthy expose criticizing the Obama Administration's handling of the Gulf oil spill. Evidence of the Left, facing real crises, abandoning their ideology, not to mention their uber-president, for common sense solutions? Not a chance.

The most revealing part of the article, if you can make it that far, is found in the last paragraph.

President Obama pushed to expand offshore drilling, in part, to win votes for climate legislation, which remains blocked in the Senate. The political calculus is understandable – the risk of an oil spill weighed against the far greater threat posed by global warming – but in the end, he may have succeeded only in compounding one environmental catastrophe with another. Even if the climate bill is eventually approved, the disaster in the Gulf will serve as a lasting and ugly reminder of the price we paid for our addiction to oil. "It was a bargain with the devil," says Steiner, the marine scientist who helped lead the response to the Valdez disaster. "And now the devil is gloating." (my emphasis)

The far greater threat posed by global warming!? These people are certifiable. If the GOP can't make record-breaking headway against this crowd this November, the leadership ought to be taken out in the street and,...and,...well, let's just say they ought to be replaced with more competent leadership.

"Hugo!" The Musical

Does Academy Award-winning director Oliver Stone need to rethink his love letter of a movie about Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez? Think I'll wait for the DVD. Then again, maybe not.

An Entertainer's Story

You need to read this piece by John McWhorter at City Journal. It's about the life, career and, frankly, the meaning of the late Sammy Davis, Jr. If you're my age and are familiar with Davis, it's in part a stroll down memory lane. But it's a painful walk, and, in the end, I think it's both unnecessary and unkind.

McWhorter, an interesting fellow in his own right, begins by questioning Davis's star quality: "I never quite got the Sammy thing." I'm with him there as I never got it either. With the article's subtitle, he questions it even more: "The extraordinary gifts and fleeting legacy of Sammy Davis, Jr." I'm afraid I agree again. While the legacies of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, his "Rat Pack" cohorts, remain secure, I suspect that if you're under a certain age, you've never even heard of Sammy Davis, Jr., and this is so despite the fact that during the 1960s and 70s, he was nearly omnipresent on the television.

As McWhorter sees it, the reason Davis is increasingly unknown is that actually his chief talent was for mimicry, at which he was apparently extremely good. And for precisely that reason, he never established for himself an identity as an entertainer that was fundamentally his own. But it's worse than that according to McWhorter. For the same reason, he also failed to establish an identity of his own as a man. He writes that,"Before the sixties, Davis imitated whites; afterward, as he tried to go with the times, the best he could do was to imitate being black."

It's sad, but I think there is something to what McWhorter observes. Besides not quite getting the Sammy thing, I remember that Davis's on-stage persona always made me squirm a bit when I watched him perform. He was obviously very talented, but he seemed to me to be forever trying just a bit too hard. As if, and this is really the point of the piece, he wasn't really comfortable in his own skin. Apparently for McWhorter, who is himself African-American, this fact about Davis makes him a fitting target of scorn.

As I read this article, I couldn't help but remember A Soldier's Story, the 1984 movie screen-written by Charles Fuller, who also wrote the 1981 play from which the film was adapted. I love this movie and highly recommend it. It's superb on so many levels, the story, the back-story, the setting, the music, the acting,...everything! It's about an all black Army unit comprised mostly of Negro League baseball players who are whiling away World War II at a post in Louisiana. Their sergeant is mysteriously murdered and a black captain/lawyer is sent from Washington to investigate. The suspicion is that local Klan members killed him and that the post's white leadership is covering it up. The setting, the Jim Crow South, makes getting at the truth by a black attorney of the murder of a black soldier difficult at best, but that obstacle is what drives the drama.

In the course of the lawyer's investigation, through a series of flashbacks, we learn much about the character of Master Sergeant Vernon Waters, the slain black soldier. It turns out he was a self-loathing black man who directed much of his anger for being so at other members of his own race. He was angry at them for not living up to his own ideal of what they should be, and what they should be is more like white men. This made him mercurial and mean and his men hated him for it.

Save one, that is, the team's star player, C.J. Memphis who surprisingly pities the sergeant. At one point he explains his sentiments to his fellow soldiers: "Any man ain't sure where he belong, gotta' be in a whole lotta pain." But his goodwill is never requited as Memphis epitomizes for the sergeant the very kind of black man he despises. Memphis was an otherwise ignorant, inarticulate, backwoods Mississippian, whose very existence the sergeant cannot tolerate as it serves chiefly, in his judgement, to bring further shame to the entire race. As a result, in order to dispose of him, he frames him for a serious crime and has him imprisoned. At one of his visits to the jail we learn precisely what makes Sergeant Waters tick as he explains why he had no choice but to do what he did to the young soldier/ballplayer.

Them Nazis ain't all crazy. Whole lot of people just can't seem to fit in to where things seem to be going. Like you, CJ. See, the Black race can't afford you no more. There used to be a time, we'd see someone like you singin', clownin', yassuh-bossin'... and we wouldn't do anything. Folks liked that. You were good. Homey kind of nigger. When they needed somebody to mistreat, call a name or two, they paraded you. Reminded them of the good old days. Not no more. The day of the Geechee is gone, boy. And you're going with it.

As it happens, and I can't help but spoil the ending in order to make my point, no whites were involved in Waters' murder. He was killed by another soldier in the unit who hated him for the way he routinely treated them all, for the way he treated Memphis specifically, and for the way he seemed to be ashamed of the black race. When the lawyer breaks the case, he challenges the murderer with these words: "Who gave you the right to judge? To decide who is fit to be a Negro and who is not?"

Could we not ask these same questions of John McWhorter? As far as I know, Sammy Davis, Jr. never hurt anyone. In fact, he brought a great deal of joy to a lot of people, white and black. If he was a conflicted man who sometimes failed to summon sufficient courage, well, it was a conflicted age and courage was often in short supply. Might he, along with many others besides, be more deserving of our sympathy than our contempt?

All the Crap I Learned in High School

The title is from a line in singer/songwriter Paul Simon's early-70s hit Kodachrome: "When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it's a wonder I can think at all." Loved that song then, and now, and it came back to me in a wave as I listened to this pathetic exchange between Dee Dee Myers, former Clinton Press Secretary, and the regulars on MSNBC's Morning Joe. The subject was (are you ready?) the always present racist component to any and all criticism of President Obama. And on MSNBC, who'd of thought?

Maybe this'll tell you something about who I am: It is impossible for me to express just how fingernails-across-a-chalkboard grating it is for me to listen to a conversation of this nature. And I'm not referring to the subject matter, which riles me up too, but for another reason. Listening to these people talk brought me back to the early 1970s and high school student body meetings in which I had to listen to a bunch of middle and upper middle class white kids debate and lecture and posture about subjects over which they had absolutely no control. And they would do this with all apparent earnestness. I say apparent earnestness, because in very short order it would become clear that their concern about the subject at hand, if concern it was, was limited to the room in which, and the hour over which, the meeting transpired. This was amusing to me then. But unfortunately for me it didn't stop at amusing, it served also to make me more than a little cynical about this type of person, the type represented by those gathered around Joe Scarborough's table in the clip. EVERYTHING about it is "crap". Hence the memory of the song and the line from it.

I'm not nearly so cynical now as I was then. That early cynicism has mellowed and matured with age and has settled into a very healthy and reliable realism. And my realistic opinion of these people and their conversation: Crap!

Russia, Weeping for Her Children

Just in case you needed one more piece of evidence to convince you of the absolute evil of socialism, please read Anne Applebaum's report on a new book, Children of the Gulag, about the plight of children in the Soviet system. It is oh so sad and oh so predictable. But it also says something very important about the nature and effect of unremittent propaganda.