I didn't have the heart to ask her if she voted...

The sight of Margaret, dressed in gray, pulled at my emotions. I don’t think she’s worn yellow in two years. It’s true, there have been great moments for her; she was solemnly pleased when her beloved HRC became Secretary of State, tears ran down her bony cheeks when health care passed, the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act gave her spirit a warm sense of retribution. But I had not seen her for some months before the mid-terms and now, and finding her in the darkened study of her upstate home, watching her grandchildren play on the lawn, gave me pause for concern.

“Ma puce,” I said, taking a spent drink from her hand. “Is it really that bad?”

She looked up; her strong strong face had aged and aged.

“You’re kidding me, Pierre, tell me you are kidding me. Jim fucking Boehner is the Speaker of the House! They killed us, they absolutely killed us. A ‘Shellacking’, he called it! We lost eleven governorships, the control of nineteen state legislative chambers, nearly the majority in the Senate and they took away sixty-odd seats in the House! McConnell and Boehner are hell bent to leave Obama to one term; that’s all they have ever wanted from the start!”

I refreshed Margaret’s drink at the bar, then rethought the matter and kept it for myself, sitting down at the piano bench across the room from her.

“That is where the hope begins, my dear,” I say softly. “Orangezilla and Gamera haven’t got now and never had anything but fight. They, like most of the GOP, are monkeys at the ready to fling poop with or without reason. Two years ago, the party was a crumble and on it’s last legs. You are familiar with the phrase ‘Dead Tiger Bounce’? It’s a financial term for a declining stock that experiences and inexplicable, yet short lived bump. I’m telling you, Margaret, this is the twitching of a dead animal. Let me explain.

“In 2008, over 130 million Americans went to the polls. Last week? 75 million. Where in 2008, the youth vote was counted at over 23 million, the vote of the elderly at about 16. Last week, those numbers flipped. These mid-terms found white numbers up, especially among the over sixty set, no harm meant, while Latino and Black voting was down.”

“You see?! We’re giving in! We’re laying down and letting the Teahaddists win!”

“Not at all. If anything, the Tea Party crimped the GOP style in places like Delaware, Nevada, and probably Alaska, of all places. In fact, nationally, Sarah Palin came out smelling like those grizzly mommas she so admires.

“You see, this was no rebuke, this election was about a volatile and impatient public living, admittedly, in some very hard times. I’m afraid an irrational public as well. Forget what the Tea people think about birth certificates and Islam; people want to lash out and the Dems are the ones they see, mostly because the Right is hiding behind them pointing fingers. They believe that Health Care will increase the deficit, you and I know it will cut it by 1.4 trillion (Congressional Budget Office estimate). They believe that eliminating tax cuts for the wealthiest 2% is in some way to their advantage, when we know that Obama signed permanent tax cuts for the middle and lower classes. They believe that the party that turned our budget surplus of the Nineties into the massive deficit will be able to cut spending without increasing taxes, this the party that also drug us, dishonestly, into a multi-trillion dollar war. They just aren’t thinking straight.”

“And that’s going to make me feel better?”

“It will, eventually. The only thing the GOP is going to be able to do is just what they’ve been doing for two years. They haven’t got what it takes to repeal anything, they haven’t got the sense or organization to pass anything of their own. It will give Obama the time he needs to get the mojo back, to re-mobilize the base he left behind when he decided to play Washington Insider. If he’s smart, if the Democrats can grow a pair, this thing should come out alright.”

How I learned to wake up and love the Tea Party...

Sacre’ Poutine! Such dreams that awoke me and shook me to my very hara! Wretched yet strapping Hillbillies, bent on violence raped the land, led by spine-curled witches; there was a fat, naked old woman on a gray sheeted bed twisting and speaking in tongues, her eyes fixed on some unseen horror, her maw smeared with what I believed was blood not her own! I was wrenched from sleep like one might pinch a bedbug from her mattress, with a tight, zit-popping squeeze.

Quite possibly, it had been my weekend’s heavy diet of AMC gore movies, laced with commercials for Jackass 3D, a soupcon of memory of having watched those Rand Paul supporters bludgeon what appeared to be Rachel Maddow’s cousin in Kentucky. It is said that this process of dreaming is to consolidate the memory, but less than 20% percent of dream content is attributable to any specific memory. In fact, the mind is acting through the night preparing to be awake; the leading emotions are elation, anxiety, and anger and we are relieving ourselves in sleep, so that we might go on the next day.

This, even though the dream had given me much trouble, soothed me as I stretched in the bed, cold blue morning light seeping into the room. Of a sudden, I was no longer living in fear of the Tea Party.

Nom Dieu, I’m aware of the Fear: a Rabble of Rubes descending on Washington from the hills, tethered to their corporate leashes, with agendas designed to turn back the clock on our education systems, our social safety networks, and the very Constitution itself; hellbent on repelling Mexicans and their Anchor Babies; fixed on deconstructing not only the safeguards that keep the rich from taking more than is their right, but to abolish the laws which keep the laboring family from utter destitution and their wish to foist on us a backward and misconstrued concept of Christ through a gross entwining of unholy doctrine with the law of the land.

I know; Sharan Angle (Nev) would see a child to term through the womb of a girl raped by her own father, perhaps on account her TP pal, Glen Urqhart (Del) who has dear friends who were the product of rape (He also doesn’t believe Jefferson favored the separation of church and state, I think claiming that was Hitler). Bill Flores (Tex) and Joe Miller (AK) find The National Endowment of the Arts as something foul and unconstitutional, David Hermer (CA), who would abolish public schools at large; all products of a century of American Progress, who would see it turned back until someone of their background would more than likely not have the education or opportunity to climb out of the fields to find a microphone for their mindless musings. Ken Buck (CO), Mike Lee (UT), and Joe Miller would see the repeal of the 17th Amendment, so to say the American people can no longer directly elect their Senate (this after they’ve taken power, of course); Sharon Angle and others would see the demise of the 16th Amendment and the inimitable Rand Paul (KY) would very much like it if the 14th Amendment were not in the way of the good business people of his state picking whom they would not allow in their establishments (wink!). They would all jump at the chance to repeal Health Care, and some fear invasion by China by insidious plot (Christine O’Donnell (Del)), or Terror Babies planted for evil some twenty years down the line (Louie Gohmert (Tex). They decry the oppression of the U.S. government over corporate institutions like BP (Mike Lee, Rand Paul). They rail against the current administrations policies while they, in turn profit from them, like Scott Rigell (VA) who railed against Cash For Clunkers, while his car dealership reaped hundreds of thousands of dollars, or John Raese (WV) whose business has taken in almost 34 million dollars in Federal and State funds since 2000, and then says “I cannot think of very many times a government agency has helped me.” Or Vicki Hartzler (MO.) who says she “just wants the government to leave her alone.” Ms. Hartzler is a farmer who has taken Federal subsidies totaling $744,000.

Merde Sainte! Yes, it looks like dystopia is one dangling chad away from realization, but wait, my cuddly friends… let’s look again at the numbers. Let’s start with the average Tea Party member, one who will go on record as being committed to the concepts of smaller government (except when it comes to legislating morality): They are disproportionably white men, disproportionably over forty, disproportionably of a higher income than most Americans. These are the John McCain voters and some of them are actually committed to their political agendas. However, elections aren’t won by people who actually read and form well thought out political opinions (Karl Rove and President Obama both know this (Obama now only too well, as the tide of “I want to Believers” have receded back to The Jersey Shore). They are won by beleaguered soccer moms, and minions of hillbillies who respond like Pavlovian jackals to the prodding of their moneyed masters (the Koch brothers, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce), and when they hear guns and Jesus are on the ropes, they come barreling to respond!

But… in this age of instant samizdatian call to alarm, I believe the Republicans have hung their hat on the most slipshod of racks, their desperation not visible to the eye for all the moaning and hand wringing and backpedaling of the Democrats, a looser group of nitwits you could not find, where it not for their counterparts. The base of the Tea Party movement is built on a population with no interest in politics until of late and while, yes, a couple of the above whack-jobs will find a seat in a government they despise, politics will go on as usual in Washington. And there is the hope. In two years time, when Obamacare is still intact, when the godless Mexicans are not run from this country, when the economy has taken step after stronger step towards full strength, and fear is gradually replaced with the concept of an America moving forward, this Tea Party base will itself recede back into the Wal-Marts from whence they came and I can sleep peacefully again.