The People Yes

The leaders -- or, better, beneficiaries -- of the Tea Party-goers and other restive American conservatives are venal, authoritarian, simplistic, and resentful. Liberal leaders are all over the place: good or bad, strong or weak, smart or stupid, informed or superstitious. The Partiers themselves, 'though they be exactly, one hundred-eighty degrees, wrong in their analyses and prescriptions, have a leg up on politicians of all stripes, and on a lot of private liberals with heavily decorated rear bumpers: They know what the stakes are.

This is from Carl Sandburg's The People Yes:

The people yes
The people will live on
The learning and blundering people will live on.
       They will be tricked and sold and again sold
And go back to the nourishing earth for rootholds,
       The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback,
       You can't laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas.

The people so often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,
is a vast huddle with many units saying:
      "I earn my living.
       I make enough to get by
       and it takes all my time.
       If I had more time
       I could do more for myself
       and maybe for others.
       I could read and study
       and talk things over
       and find out about things.
       It takes time.
       I wish I had the time."

Is The Tea Party Racist?

Art Spiegelman (Maus, In the Shadow of No Towers) sketchbook page, circa 1973.

Barbara and I delivered together yesterday, 265 miles, the longest route yet. We saw two things. The first was a jogger, white guy, early middle age, no shirt, burn over deep tan. A little later we saw a billboard: "Tired of hope and Change?" Picture of a man from the shoulders down -- navy blue suit -- shredding the Constitution. The man's hand was so dark I couldn't tell it from the suit.

Interior, Day. Tea Party World Headquarters. Barney leans over his desk, talking through an intercom:

"Mabel, call the model agency. I need somebody else for the Obama billboard. No, he was a nice enough guy, but that jogger in shipping is darker than he was. Have them send over a real jigaboo this time. No, don't say it that way. Be, you know, 'politically correct.' People have to know it's Obama. PhotoShop? What's that?"