Heaven help Richard Kim. That’s not my wish, it’s his–expressed in a piece entitled “Loose Tea” he wrote for the venerable left-wing magazine, The Nation. Honoring the liberal playbook by attacking the Tea Party on everything except substance, Kim starts out by criticizing the symbolic venue chosen for the recent tax day assembly of the D.C. Tea Party.
When tea party organizers chose the Washington Ellipse as the setting for their Tax Day protest, they were undoubtedly thinking of its theatrical potential. Behind looms the Washington Monument, an obelisk to the hero of American Revolution and Constitution and a fitting symbol of the tea party’s esprit de corps. In front stands the White House, whose occupant, according to protesters’ signs, is busy plotting more taxes, more communism and the end of America. Those who took the podium borrowed from the surrounding majesty to endow their struggle with an epic righteousness: “We are going to keep faith with every generation since 1776 that has successfully passed the baton of freedom to the next generation. We will not allow that…chain of freedom to be broken on our watch,” declared Congresswoman Michele Bachmann. But beyond the rhetoric and amid the crowd of a few thousand, the concerns were on a smaller scale–like about incandescent light bulbs.
Apparently when Tea Party people use symbolism, it’s a “kaleidoscope of kookiness,” but when then-candidate Obama erected $140,000 worth of fake Hellenic columns at Invesco Field for his 2008 acceptance speech, it was different. At the time, L.A. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote a paean to Obama’s use of styrofoam that the great Pindar himself would have killed to have penned:
I found myself thinking about those columns and their echoes of the deep architectural past — about how they were employed primarily to suggest time rolling backward all the way to the Greeks. Somehow, for Obama, a candidate whose campaign is sleek and modern in the same way Kennedy’s was — whose appeal is based in large part on his youthful energy and the freshness of his image — sleek and modern architectural symbolism simply will not do. His charisma needs some balancing heft, and in Denver his campaign found it in the solidity of classical architecture.
Translation: When Obama uses symbolism, it’s heft. But when the Tea Party does, it’s bereft.
Let’s be honest. Not everybody fell for that bit of political Parthe-nonsense. Plenty of pundits mocked Obama’s handlers for erecting those silly Greek columns, both for the cost and for the just plain overreach of it all. Given the current state of the Greek economy, one wonders if Team Obama will be leaving the Doric pillars in storage for his 2012 run.
Symbolism and historical referentialism are not new to politics. A year and a half before Invesco, Obama announced his intent to seek the presidency from the town square in Springfield, Illinois and specifically mentioned the setting in his speech:
And that is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a divided house to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for president of the United States of America.
Kooky, isn’t it?
After disparaging the Tea Partiers’ choice of venue for their gathering, Kim attempts to paint them as a coalition of nuts “…rallying to hold on to their wealth, status, authority and autonomy.” Passing over the false conclusion Kim draws from a NYT/CBS News poll regarding Tea Party members’ “have-dom,” consider his charge carefully. U.S. citizens trying to keep their hard-earned prosperity? That’s kooky. What will they rally to hold on to next? Their right to vote? Madness.
Kim mocks one Pennsylvania woman named Dot for worrying the government will confiscate her incandescent light bulbs. George Will revealed not long ago on ABC that the Will household is stocking up on those very bulbs. Curious George, meet Kooky Dot.
Looking for economic Ahabs, Kim finds only lunatics “preoccupied with chasing minnows of their own imagining.” Yeah. Like that projected 90%-of-GDP-national-debt -by-2020 guppy. This jolly statistic comes from no less a source than the CBO, which we now know from the passage of the Health Care bill never gets its figures wrong. The CBO warns:
Without changes to federal fiscal policy–involving some combination of lower spending and higher revenues than the amounts projected under current law–those rising costs will rapidly drive the size of federal debt held by the public well beyond the 67 percent of GDP projected for 2020.
In one part of the report, the CBO further admonishes:
Future discretionary appropriations are likely to differ from the amounts assumed in the baseline, and law makers will almost certainly enact changes to spending and tax policies…Under that scenario, the deficits from 2011 to 2020 would average about 7 percent of GDP, and debt held by the public would reach 98 percent of GDP by the end of 2020, the highest level since 1946.
There was a time in Russia, not too long ago, when the smallest unit of currency–the kopeck (the Russian penny)–could still buy something. That something was a box of matches–which cost just one kopeck. Hence the Russian saying “Economy begins with matches.”
For Sam Adams and the original Tea Party rebels, economy began with tea. For Dot and George Will, it begins with light bulbs. Today’s Tea Party kooks are just asking: “Where does economy begin for the Obama administration?”
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