Elbows Down, Pinkies Up

Stand back everyone. I'm going to to do politics.




Welcome to the Tea Party

So what am I talking about here? Am I going to talk about that horrible Alice in Wonderland movie? I hope not. Am I going to talk about those people who dress up like Founding Fathers and spew nonsense about Obama? Heck yes. Am I going to make fun of them? Only when it illustrates a point. Let me be clear: I don't think Tea Partiers are stupid. They're mostly being swept up in a phenomenon that can capture just about anyone. My angle is Glenn Beck. I don't know much about Sarah Palin, and at this point I don't care to. She'll be interesting when she makes her Presidential run.




I'm going to assume you have a pretty good grasp on the idea of the Tea Party. Probably you have an image of an older heavy-set white Libertarian in a home-made sarah palin t-shirt yelling about socialism. You probably also think of That Guy on facebook that clutters your wall with long rambling posts on Terrorism and the Liberty Tree. To sum up, older, white, male, libertarian, and short in the brains department.

Or are they? Well, Glenn Beck certainly doesn't think so! And he's going to help all those poor tea partiest people fight back against the big mean liberal elite. He claims the tea party is made up of every race and nationality and political group in the country. Young and the old, the tall and the small. From all walks of life. And black people. Just like you see in the video.

In Beck's NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER The Overton Window, he describes his ideal Tea Party movement. Except here, he calls them the Founders Keepers. (Their website hasn't been updated since June, but I'm sure they're just waiting for the revolution. But you can follow their Twitter.) And boy are they diverse.

"The dirveisty of the gathering was another surpirse; there seemed to be no clear exclusions based on race, or class or any of the other traditional media-fed american cultural divides. It was a total cross section, a mix of everyone -- three-piece suits rubbing elbows with T-shirts and sweat pants, yuppies chatting with hippies, black and white, young and old, a cowboy hat here, a six hundred dollar haircut there -- all talking together .... in the press these sorts of meetings were typically depicted as the exclusive haunts of old white people of limited means and even more limited intelligence. But this was everybody." ~The Overton Window

The Founders Keepers do a lot of strange things like LARP Founding Fathers, but only speak in the words the Founding Fathers use in their letters and speeches. This is also the first TOTALLY FICTIONAL book I've read that has references in the back. You know. For fact checking.

Yeah, I know. I'm about 6 months late in the "omg so white" thing. But think of it as a refresher for your first lesson. In Tea Party Land, they're not white people. They represent everyone.