Nothing to do with spices at all.

Watch out, folks. This one is long.

I’m going to do something a little different today – I’m going to take this blog on the road. I usually hate the road. The road is outside, and outside has several well-known problems – the yellow face, bears – so I usually try to stay away. But today, the circus is in town, and what fun-loving kid can turn down the circus? So I’m going to walk down to the Capitol and watch all the clowns.

I feel like the narrative that is told about the tea party movement is one that I am eager – TOO eager – to believe. Old, white, ignorant, racist – this is the story that I would want to tell, if I were trying to tell it as a story. Which, of course, is the media’s job. But I’m always skeptical of stories that play this strongly to my obvious biases.

The whole problem with that – as I learned in the last entry to my Israel blog – is that I don’t drop my biases when I walk into a situation; I take them with me. I’m walking into these tea party protests looking for racism, looking for ignorance, and I’m sure I’m going to find it. I don’t know what the cure for that is; I’m going to try looking for the opposite – try to look for people who are non-white, try to look for the good arguments – but know that I’m not particularly likely to actually accomplish this. So, just remember – because if I’m doing my job right, if I’m writing well, it’s hard to remember – what you’re seeing is heavily filtered. I promise you that everything I write will be exactly what I saw… but who knows if what I saw is the same thing the person sitting next to me saw?


Anyway, I’ve got another problem, too – one that I often had during my Israel blog. Sometimes, living a life and writing about it are difficult goals to reconcile. I’ve got my final fennel post 90% completed in a different, open file. I’ve got my first two oregano posts written in my head, waiting only to be filtered from their pure form through this hideously inefficient pile of meat that I live in.

And yet here I am, sitting on the South Lawn, with a mess of middle aged white folks in front of me shouting “KILL THE BILL!” I’ve got to admit, it’s a fun time. I wish I was a better heckler, to be honest; I keep attempting to engage people in rational dialogue about the nonsense that they’re spewing. It’s not working. Whereas there is a lady behind me, shouting “TOO LATE! THE BILL IS PASSING! JESUS WAS A SOCIAL ACTIVIST! GOD BLESS NANCY PELOSI!” I love her. I wish I could just let loose with some good ol' fashioned hellraising like that.


I don’t remember where I first read this idea – but there are some phrases that get less and less true, the more they get repeated. “I am not crazy” is one of them. The first time you hear someone say that, it sounds reasonable. The fiftieth… well, it’s hard to believe someone who is shouting at the top of their lungs

“WE ARE NOT CRAZIES!”
“WE ARE NOT RACISTS!”

I have never had to shout repeatedly through a microphone that I am not a racist. At the same time, I rarely stand in a huge group of white people shouting racially charged things through a megaphone, so maybe it’s a viewpoint kinda thing.

Okay, I’m wrong – I’ve moved from the periphery to right behind the stage. From here, I can pretty much see the whole crowd. And there are two nonwhite people in in – an Asian lady holding up a red “HELL NO” (with the Obama campaign symbol for the O) and a “young, black, African American conservative” who has gotten a surprising amount of megaphone time.

Now a Congressman – Pete Hoekstra (I heard and originally wrote the name Orszag, but that’s Obama’s budget director – after coming home and doing some fact-checking, I got his name right.), Michigan – took the bullhorn for a second. And it’s sad, listening to him. I feel like the crowd needs a heaping dose of ironic distance – because he didn’t say anything at all. He knows that they’re going to lose. He knows that this fairly pathetic protest – a few hundred people at most – isn’t going to accomplish anything. But he also knows that keeping this crowd shouting is vitally important to him – so he spent the majority of his three minutes here stroking the crowd’s ego. Telling them how patriotic they are – how important they are. And they probably are, to his party, to his job.

Then there was a prayer.

I’ll generally join in with your prayers, even though I’m not particularly religious. But my one requirement is that your prayers can’t deliberately exclude me. I mean, I guess that praying to Jesus isn’t exactly a tough call to this crowd… but still. I’m here. I’m Jewish. And I would join in with your prayer – if it included me, even a little bit.

Congressman Hoekstra walked out during the prayer. That seemed like a bad move, to me, but nobody noticed.


Bart Stupak evidently voted no. I wonder if a single person in the crowd today will remember how wildly they shouted “we love you, Stupak” when election day rolls around. (Note from after I got home – apparently those people had no idea what they were talking about. Stupak is a firm yes, as of 4:15.)

Now they’re singing “We love you Stupak, oh yes we do.” I honestly don’t know what to make of that.

And now – as if they felt like they needed to top that – they’re chanting “NAN-CY”, with the quiet cadence of “DA-RYL.” Do they think that the ball is going to roll through her legs? That she’s going to accidentally vote no, because they threw her off her game?


More invocation of “our lord Jesus Christ.” I have to admit, there is a part of me which is actually made nervous by the chanting. I know it’s ridiculous – I’m not implying that I think that anyone here would be anything except polite if I were to mention that I was Jewish, or claim to be Buddhist, or whatever – but it really is something that makes me uncomfortable.


At the edges of the crowd, as we go from the punchy, three word signs to the more complicated invocations of Founding Father rhetoric, it becomes harder and harder to tell which people are protesters and which people are involved in ironic counter-protest. I actually had to ask a woman whether her sign – with an extensive quote about how tyranny is often cloaked in the disguise of “the people’s will” - was intended to be for or against the bill. She answered my question completely when she asked me, in response, if I understood what the quote meant. I thanked her politely and walked away.

I have to admit that my favorite three-word sign goes over the word limit – but purely in service to the message. Thanks for making things clear, lady!

OBAMACARE DOES NOT
(CARE)


Next to me, a group of kids in their late teens are holding up signs with the picture of Obama in whiteface as the Joker. I can’t help but wonder – do they not get the racism? Do they know, but not care? Or is that their intention? (One of their signs says “uninsured by choice.” Thanks, lady – I’m glad to know that you want me to pay for your healthcare, instead of paying for it yourself.)

Ooh! Thank you, Mr. “Obamacare creates tyranny, not jobs”! Your sign just the right size to shade me and my computer screen.

Now back to “GLORY BE TO GOD.” Over and over again. And now a song – “our god is an awesome god.” And the battle hymn of the republic. I honestly feel like an idiot – but I can feel that I’m reacting to this. My pulse is jumping. I’m starting to sweat a bit. I guess it’s the same feeling that you get when you walk into a restaurant, or bar, or other social situation, and realize that you’re the only [member of race/class/religion] there. It’s primal – I don’t think anyone is going to attack me, but at the same time, my little reptile brain gets the message loud and clear – I am alone.


There’s a guy holding up a “KILL THE BILL” sign that has a caricature of Obama, dressed in a sharp blue tux, in a coffin. (Postscript - I can’t seem to find it on the web, or I’d link to it.) I went up to him and asked if it didn’t occur to him that people might perceive the sign as racist, or if it occurred to him but he didn’t care. (I’ll admit, it took me a minute to screw up my courage to do this.)

It was actually an interesting conversation, for certain values of interesting. It took me a few minutes to convince him that I was genuine – that I wasn’t just trying to pick a fight with him. Which was, in fact, true – I actually wanted an answer to my question. Which he definitely, definitely didn’t want to give. Which more or less answered my question, but… He asked me what was racist about it; I carefully pointed out that it was showing a caricature of Obama, prominently displaying African-American features like his lips. It’s showing him in a coffin. And he’s wearing a suit that makes him look like the dandy in a minstrel show. (Another postscript – I had to look that up. I associated the costume with ‘minstrel show’ but I don’t know enough about racist stereotypes to know that there were different characters in them, and that this one was “the dandy.” Kind of like a racist commedia dell’arte.)

I don’t know if this is actually true – but I do remember watching a movie – and it making sense at the time – where the main character was sent to prison for defending himself violently. The court reasoned that since he was an advanced degree black belt, he was capable of defending himself from the attacker without inflicting the (high) level of harm that he did. (I don’t think that would actually ever happen, but it’s not an unreasonable line of thinking.) I kind of feel like that, sometimes, when I’m arguing with people. This guy kept trying to answer my questions with “let me ask you a question”, which is a great tactic if your opponent is an idiot. (Or if your opponent has come on your TV show, and has no ability to control the conversation.) But I’m not an idiot – I’m actually kind of good at this kind of thing. So he kept asking me questions, and I kept answering or deflecting, and then re-asking my original question. Eventually, he cornered himself – he asked me (and I’m dead serious about this) “so, this wouldn’t be racist if it were a WHITE person, but it is racist because there’s a BLACK person?”

All of a sudden, I felt about as proud as I would be beating up my son. I answered quickly that yes, that’s what racism was all about – an effigy of a white person lynched on a lamppost isn’t nearly as offensive as an image of a black person in the same position, because white people don’t have a history of getting lynched in this country. Just like white people don’t have a history of offensive caricatures that look like your picture. To which all he had to say was that he didn’t want to spend his life worrying about what other people thought about the things that he did.

A not-unreasonable point. Not one he was wholly comfortable with – as was clear from how long he evaded it – and not one that I can agree with, but one which I can at least understand.

And the nice young black man, who had ridden up on his bicycle halfway through the conversation and had been listening in, also agreed with that. I kind of felt like hugging him, though, as he softly and gently explained to the sign-holder – whose point that that I was the one seeing racism here – the way that seeing a sign like that made him feel.


I walked around the east side of the capitol as I headed home; the protest had slowly meandered around to the side of the building. I didn’t like what I saw here; it made me feel even dirtier than Hoekstra use the crowd. I saw (at various times) Michelle Bachmann and John Boehner walk out onto a balcony overlooking the crowd and, for all the world like El Presidente of some third-world junta, raise their hands as the crowd began to scream.

I talked to a lot of people today, on both sides. Some of the tea party people are morons. Some are racists. And plenty of them need to learn what socialism means. But you know what? More than a few of them are good people, with legitimate fears and legitimate gripes about the direction this country is going in. Plenty of them were angry and screaming – I had more than one person refuse to shake my hand, and got called names (that honestly, stopped hurting in fourth grade, but…) – but there were people in there that were cordial, interested in talking, and interested in trying to make other people understand why they were so upset.

And to see people like that get wound up, be it by Bachmann or Boehner or Beck… it’s sad. Patriotism is most definitely a class where your grade is based on where your heart is, not whether or not you’re right or wrong. I’m not saying that everyone there has their heart in the right place, of course. I personally feel that you can’t claim to be a patriot – to love this country and think it is the strongest on Earth – and also think that one bill, no matter how bad, can destroy it. It made me really, really sad to hear people espousing that point of view. It reminds me, in a way, of people who reject evolution for creationism. Really? You think God is all-powerful, but somehow not powerful enough to make things evolve? How does that make sense?

Really? You think America is so weak that Bart Stupak can destroy it? Then why do you bother to fight for it? Something that weak deserves to be put out of its misery, not protected.

But that’s not my point. The point is… right or wrong, patriotic or misguided… they deserve better than being used by some demagogue, who doesn’t see them as anything more than pawns in a game they’ll never even realize they’re part of. Watching people get used by leaders preying on their fears and hatreds… well, I’ll take demagogues leading people via their hopes and dreams, any day.


On the way out, I hopped into an argument two departing pro-reformers were having with an older lady from the anti-reform crowd. As was fairly typical, the pro-reformers were making logical and factual arguments, while the anti-reformer was making an emotional one. Were I judgmental, I would call those arguments “monumentally shitty.” When you make arguments, your opponent says “that’s not true, and here’s the proof” and you just ignore them and move on to your next point, you’re not winning that argument. Then again, neither are they; you’re basically saying that you refuse to have a conversation with them.

I hopped in, partially because I was a bit frustrated and wanted to verbally smack someone down a bit. Ten seconds after, however, a bunch of other pro-reformers walked by our conversation; one rolled up his sign into a megaphone and screamed in this lady’s face.

Look, I’m an asshole. I don’t make any bones about it. I’m snide, I’m condescending, I’m occasionally insulting. But you know what I’m not? Rude. Well, to my friends, yes, of course, constantly. But to strangers? No matter how much I disagree with them? Never, without tremendous provocation – and in most cases, the more I get provoked, the more controlled and polite I get. I am absolutely not the sort of fellow who abides screaming in lady’s faces. So I spent the next five minutes working off my aggression on this asshole. You win more arguments by being polite than by screaming in people’s faces.

That’s the thing that I don’t get about the tea party; at some point they’re going to have to grow up. Sure, 3 million Americans – assuming that they can actually claim those numbers in any real way – is a lot of people, in absolute terms. But that’s less than 1% of the population, and it’s going to take more than half-crazed rants to start making a dent in the other 99%. So why work so hard to alienate people?

Why be an asshole to an old lady you’ve never met? Her viewpoints may be wrong. They may be stupid. They may be caustic and uninformed and frankly offensive – but not a single thing on that list is an excuse to scream in her face.

So there I was, five minutes later, screaming in this lady’s face. Trying to get her, in some way, to support a single thing that she said, or at least realize how horrible some of them were.

But I didn’t use a megaphone, you see. Also, I was very angry at this lady, in particular. That’s what makes it okay when I do it, and bad when other people do it.

Look, at least I can admit when I’m being a hypocrite. That’s gotta be worth something.

At about that point, the two other guys there were looking at each other uncertainly. “I don’t think she’s all there, man,” one said to me, as they walked away. I thought that was kind of rude – no need to insult people.

Three minutes later, I realized that they had been talking to her longer than I had been, and they weren’t trying to be insulting. After hearing her rambling about “being in the wilderness” and “having been in business”, I started to realize that they had actually meant it. She really wasn’t playing with a full deck, in a way which had nothing at all to do with the fact that she couldn’t see my brilliantly-made and incisive points.

I felt like quite the heel, as I wandered on back home. I asked one of the capitol police if this sort of thing was normal, if this size protest was a regular affair but it rarely makes the news. He seemed happy to have something to do other than stare straight ahead. It seems that now that the winter’s over, this size protest (1000 people at most, I would say) happens fairly frequently, and often multiple times in a single weekend. There hasn’t been a lot of it this year so far, because people may want to save their country, but not enough to freeze their asses off to do it.


I came back late the evening, for more of the same. Victoria and I had thrown a dinner party, and so I was fortified with a touch of the demon drink. The bill’s passage was a virtual certainty, the vote was being held, and it was late, late, late. The tea party crowd had shrunk to a shadow of its former self; a thousand or two to a hundred at most. The pro-reform crowd, on the other hand, was jubilant.

The mood of the tea partiers was surly, to say the least. Well, that might not be getting the whole of it in. Whittled down to this core, I found some conversations that quickly resorted to me getting surrounded, insulted, or ignored. But I also found people who were actually willing and interested in talking – people who it didn’t surprise me to find that I shared a lot in common with. People who were often apologetic for the way their compatriots were acting.

For my part, I had no problem with the pro-reformers chanting YES WE CAN, or 219 (the number of yes votes in the house) or whatever. But standing right above the tea partier’s area and shouting down at them? Come on. Don’t be a dick, especially when you win. (yes, yes, I know. It’s not hypocrisy this time, though, because I’m not claiming that it’s okay when I do it.) The point is, there was plenty of dickishness on both sides. I honestly didn’t know, at some points, who I liked less – the loud, ignorant assholes in the tea party area, or the smug, superior assholes populating the pro-reform area. I’m not saying that I don’t know which group I fit right into, of course…


I just don’t get the theory of ‘argument’ which says that you simply choose to never answer any of your opponent’s questions. I finally gave up on trying to talk to a guy – who seemed perfectly nice, seemed like a decent fellow, if not particularly bright – who refused to answer the simple, yes or no question – if a factory dumps waste in a river, should they be responsible for cleaning it up? He rambled about the free market for a bit. I asked it again. He started to ramble again. I asked him for a yes or no answer three or four more times, smiled, shook his hand, thanked him, and wished him good luck. (According to him, “Liberals” and “liberal cities” are the reason that Detroit makes such shitty cars, by the way. I’m not sure how that plays into my hypothetical question.)


Another conversation I really had to work up my nerve to have – the tea partiers were having their last kumbaya of the evening. There was a lot of shouting about revolution, about fighting “the war”, about “taking it back”. And right at the edge of the crowd were two young black women, smiling and taking in the scene. After stammering out an apology for bringing up such an uncomfortable topic, I mentioned my earlier experience, a Jew among Christians, and how uncomfortable it made me feel. I asked them if they weren’t uncomfortable at all, what with the language and the imagery and the overwhelming whiteness of the crowd. (The token black guy and asian girl had left. The hardcore crowd left at 10:30 at night was 100% white.)

They almost sounded relieved to talk about it. I got a straightforward answer: ”YES”, with wide eyes, smiles, and half-nervous, half-thankful laughter. Like this was something that they wanted to face, but it was somehow easier to do with me there. They talked about their experiences – that, like me, they didn’t really think there was any true danger. Unlike me, though, they thought – or at least admitted to thinking – that sure, there probably wasn’t – but you never know. (And I’ll admit, there was a moment that evening – when I got surrounded by a bunch of angry, frustrated tea partiers – that part of my brain switched to disaster planning mode.) But they were there – without rancor or enmity for the scary folk talking the scary talk.

I apologized again for bringing up such an uncomfortable topic, and moved on.

For some reason, the fact that they were both drop-dead gorgeous made it a lot easier to have that conversation. I’m not sure that makes any sense at all, but there it is.


I stuck around for another hour or so – until past midnight, and all the votes were in and counted. As the lawmakers began to file out, the bill’s supporters gave each of them applause, high fives, handshakes… hero’s welcomes. It wasn’t the largest crowd the building had seen today by a long shot - lined up two deep across a hundred feet of guard rails – but it was definitely the happiest. Small groups would break into a frenzy as their representative walked out; pictures were taken. The loudest applause, though, was reserved for the black representatives, especially Rep. Lewis, who had to suffer through some fairly nasty abuse yesterday. But today, they were basking in the crowd’s love – of all the congresspeople who walked out, Rep. Lewis was the one who looked the most satisfied, the most vindicated.

I stood and clapped for a while, even though I barely recognized any of the faces. It was fun, first of all. Second, how often do these people actually get greeted by people happy to see them? It can’t happen that often. Third, though, it was really interesting to watch people file out.

Some were jubilant, of course, slapping hands and posing with the crowd. But many of them didn’t look even the least bit excited. (I’m assuming, by the way, that the Republican members would have taken some other route out of the building, rather than walk past the group clapping and cheering the democrats. I could be wrong though.) It was late – for many of the members, I’m sure, way past their bedtime, and a Sunday evening to boot. But I’m sure that more than one of those people will lose their job because of this vote – and I can’t imagine that at least some of the harried faces I saw weren’t contemplating that exact thing.


One last comment, and I’ll call it a night. I pulled this quote off of Fox News’s site:

“Pro-health care reform folks, who were largely overshadowed by the much larger anti-health care protestors…”

No doubt. I was there, and I can tell you for sure – the tea partiers were, on average, MUCH larger than the pro-reform crowd. In a lot of cases, by a hundred pounds or more.

Hah. I made a fat joke, at the expense of people I don’t like. I am truly the slyest.


Thanks for letting me get this all out, folks – I had a lot to process today, and it’s easier to sort my thoughts out about things like this when I get to write them. And it’s easier to write them when I know that there’s a point to it – that the writing might be read. Tomorrow, I’ve got a few last bits of fennel to deal with, then on Wednesday I’ll talk about why your oregano is so shitty. I’m going to try to run updates Saturday and Sunday as well, so I can start the new spice next Monday, but I haven’t been stellar at updating over weekends thus far. We’ll see.