A Dead Horse

I’ve had this giant Tea-Party diagnostic think-piece in my head for about eight months now and it hasn’t quite gotten off the ground. Mainly, it’s because I’m lazy. The gist of the piece (and the only reason I thought it was worth writing up, because, hell, everyone with a pencil and Sacagawea dollar has banged out 2000 words on the Tea-Party at this point) was that the people who had joined this movement, or circle-jerk, were people who had never actually played close attention to politics before. And I’d built a mountain of anecdotal evidence that slammed this into the iron. Genuinely, I don’t think anyone has been bold enough to say what the Washington Post has been hinting at for months: Tea-Party People (can we go with TPP?) are a group of people who have never been part of the intellectual mainstream or, even, political discourse in this country. Then one day they lose their job, or get pregnant, or read a US Weekly, or give the persuasive guy they met on the Drudge Report’s message board a hand job behind the bowling alley and hello, they think they form a political direction.

Fair enough. Beginning to understand that there are things in this life more important then your own well-being or whether you children get preferred seating at Madagascar 2 are good changers of character. But at the same time, they can be quite dangerous in the helpless mind of 45-year ex-train conductor who considered Martin Lawrence a beacon of hope in the 90’s and Glenn Beck the same in this new millennium.

So this think-piece, oh I’ve been brewing it, but I haven’t turned out a good batch of it yet. The stew started turning quicker this week when Murdoch claimed (yet again) that Fox News leaned no further right then an unbalanced Tetris board. It pissed me off, but it didn’t disgust me quite as much as the crew that clamored to either defend or attack him. I mean, seriously, how can we possibly still be debating the merits of Fox News’s ideology? It’s so clearly displayed that it deserves no debate, which Murdoch somehow dredged up with his vile bullshit.

Murdoch attacked the New York Times as well. Which, being a dirty liberal cocksucker, struck a special cord within my heart. To act like Fox News should even be compared to the New York Times is painful in it of itself. But I’m too tired to fight that battle after eating Vicodin and spitting on Midwestern values in a Ukrainian vodka bar all night.

But anyway, I’m almost done with a new piece of fiction and I’ll post it soon for all who may be interested.