The Tea Party

[poliphilo]

We all hate government, right? Except the North Koreans. And maybe even they hate government deep down inside, where nobody can see. Government is always corrupt and stupid and disgusting. However, if you want to have a society of any degree of complexity you can't manage without it.  The bigger, more complex the society, the bigger, more complex its government has to be. 

The Tea Party dream is a dream of log cabins and coonskin hats and long-barrelled flintlock rifles. It's the dream Daniel Boone carried around with him, but which faded whenever he paused to set up a fort- which needs soldiers, administrators, law officers, decision makers- ie: government. It's a lovely dream if you fancy living way out on the edge- as a rugged 18th century individualist- and I can see why people buy into it- but there's no way you can make a 21st century nation conform to it without returning that nation to the wilderness. 

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

The maudlin sentimentality giving birth to such fantasies is what takes the place of intelligence and common sense among Republican Teabaggers. Their notions of history, international relations, good government, justice, common decency, and so on, are all equally childish and debauched.

As one would naturally expect, life on the American frontier was nothing as they imagine. Few lived there by choice. Most were driven to such extremes either indirectly by poverty or directly by the advance of civilization and more decent folk.

And of course, what is completely opaque to the British press, possibly by design, is that the drive to eliminate government imposition is just code throughout the South for rolling back racial equality, since it was the Federal government that stepped in and forced an end to racial segregation. What they want is not a return to coonskin caps and flintlocks, but a return to the Old South, where blacks were kept in their place and where the white trash ancestors of Republican Teabaggers enjoyed a better life as a consequence -- or so they imagine.

There has long been a movement in this country, led by wealthy corporatists and their minions, to eliminate all government programs except the military. They see the Federal government as a limit to corporate profits, and rightly so. Republican Teabaggery is just a would-be comical mask for that not so comical endeavor.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The myth of the old South is thoroughly pernicious. J.B Priestley has an excellent essay about how its failure to produce any art of any value gives the lie to its claim to be a "civilisation".

[mamadar.livejournal.com]

The loss of the Old South produced some excellent fiction, however--Faulkner and O'Connor, just off the top of my head. It took defeat, humiliation, tragedy (from the Southern point of view) to create Southern literature.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's right. The South has produced great art, but only since it got rolled over.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I tend to agree that the South was not civilized, but trust that Priestly was not suggesting that civilization necessarily flourished outside the South. As we have discussed before, American men of letters have historically been few and far between.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I dunno, I'm not a huge fan of American literature (it's just too foreign) but the 19th century roll-call isn't too shabby- Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Poe, Twain, Dickinson; these are not just good writers, but writers who broke new ground.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

As I recall, this is the second time we have broached the topic of American letters.

I cannot but agree with your roll call and its significance. Melville, Poe, and Twain, are among my favorite authors of whatever age and clime, but their inclusion tends to damn American literature, generally, rather than uplift it. Melville and Poe were both extreme outliers, Poe especially, and part of what marked Twain was his loud and rather humorous rejection of the hallowed myth of American literature.

Emerson of course seems so profound and so terribly important, when we read him now, just as he seemed to be in his own day. After Emerson came Thoreau, but after Thoreau came no one and New England transcendentalism went no where. It failed to inspire, not because Emerson and Thoreau were not themselves inspired, or because they were incapable of inspiring others, but for the simple reason that in the New England of their day there was no one to inspire. They might as well have read their work in a cabbage patch, expecting the assembled heads to be edified and uplifted thereby. Emerson and Thoreau were great minds, but as such they practically stood alone.

I happen to be reading Emerson at the moment and am very impressed. In some ways he is still ahead of his time, sad to say, and in the darker expanses of the Republic I suspect he could still stir up controversy, were explicit rumors of his ideas to spread that far.