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version seven. http://demongin.org |
Restoring Hecklers
Hecklers at Glenn Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally provide new insight into the Tea Party movement.
Sunday, 2010-08-29 | NPC Encounters, Politics, Washington DC, Zona Roja
| America today begins to turn back to God. For too long, this country has wandered in darkness. |
| Fox News talk-show host Glenn Beck, August 28th, 2010 |
On Saturday, August 28th, I rode the Red Line from Silver Spring, MD to Washington DC to participate in a rally at the Lincoln Memorial; the event was staged by entertainment media giant News Corporation (NWS) in celebration of its popular Fox News brand.
On the main stage, Fox fan-favorites Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin thrilled a predominantly white, mostly middle-aged audience with declarations of a new American nationalism. The central tenets of this surging nationalism, they announced, included:
- the proud re-affirmation of America as an explicitly Christian nation
- the concept that America's military is an institution of sacred designation and therefore politically distinct from the civilian government commanding it
- the right of Americans of European descent to explicitly and unashamedly reject historical, social and political responsibility for past transgressions against other nations and other ethnic groups
In short, this event, which took place on the anniversary of and at the location where slain civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. gave his iconic "I Have a Dream" speech 47 years prior, was an elaborate and tasteless parody of pacifism and civics staged by the world's number two entertainment media conglomerate.
And, as I said, I went out of my way to attend this thing; to observe tens of thousands of Christian militarists as they explored White Guilt by performing in a convoluted and bizarre for-profit farce.
My intention was to "infiltrate" as a sort of participant observer (I even had a nice, appropriately ambiguous T-shirt about the link between fire departments and Socialism picked out), but shortly after arriving, I met up with some friends--PhD candidates at the University of Maryland--who had made protest-type signs and who planned to infiltrate in a more overt manner. We stood outside of the rally for about half an hour, collecting like-minded antagonists (including an Eagle Scout with an impressive sash of merit badges, a USAF pilot in an Obama "HOPE" T-shirt and a few others) and then began to make our way into the rally at about 1030.
What we found in the midst of the rally was not at all what I expected.
In recent times, the Tea Party has become notorious for its colorful signage. Frequently bigoted, often misspelled and always conveying the celebrated anger that Tea Party activists and pundits alternately use to self-identify in national media and brandish in the faces of their political opponents.
But at Saturday's de facto Tea Party rally, there were almost no signs.
At some point during the planning and pre-production of Saturday's privately financed Fox News pep rally, its organizers must have stopped to reflect on the fact that the signage that put the Tea Party movement on the map has become something of a liability in the national media. "Glenn and Sarah asked everyone not to bring signs", one Tea Partier reminded my group of transgressors at one point, because "Glenn and Sarah" must have finally realized that in order to begin to lend some political legitimacy to their growing nationalist movement, they would have to ditch the fundamentalist freak-show that had, until this Saturday, characterized the Tea Party.
Signs were out and so was on-camera misbehavior. In fact, there were a number of people who took it upon themselves to intervene where they saw bad behavior threatening to break out. At one point, a white, sun-blanched, middle-aged heckler in a plaid shirt and khaki shorts approached our group and began to shout various confrontational, slogan-like incitements. He was about halfway into his second or third round of "you ought to be ashamed"s when a very similar-looking woman (white, middle-aged, harshly taxed by the inclement DC sun) got between him and us and forcefully (but politely) rebuked him for raising his voice at us. She reminded him that "this is what these people want" and not to let him "get caught on our cameras".
Though none of us were brandishing cameras, he point was well-taken: the level of videography in the rally was formidable and anything resembling a violent confrontation could very easily make its way onto the Internet and into the WordPress blog of any liberal blogger seeking to demonstrate that the "peaceful message" of Beck's "Restoring Honor" rally really was just a pretense for the might-as-well-be-a-book-burning party that MSNBC's Keith Olbermann had been calling it during the preceding weeks.
And so, it seems, the Tea Party is changing, going mainstream and cleaning up its image. Its leaders appear to have pulled off something of a hat-trick: they have convinced their famously vitriolic and enraged followers to be shrewed in their dealings with the media, to leave their trademark signs at home and, most importantly, to self-regulate.
In short, they have begin to show some genuine media savvy, which, if you went to the event with the idea that you were going to get in among these people and be an eye-witness to the sort of public political performance art for which the Tea Party has become so well-loved on the Internet, is kind of a huge disappointment.
Or, I should say, it was kind of a huge disappointment until I realized that there was something else going on; something equally interesting and noteworthy (if slightly less sensational).
The rally's attendees, with a few notable exceptions[1], wore a uniform: a striped or solid-colored short-sleeved shirt (usually polo, sometimes button-front) and khaki (shorts for men and short pants for ladies). There were, as some commentators have already noticed a healthy amount of red, white and blue sequins and home-brew "slogan" shirts conveying traditional conservative messages: many venerated Ronald Regan, some showed a heroic caricature of George W Bush asking if they missed him yet and others threatened RINOs (Republicans in Name Only) with political reprisal.
Their signs of protest having been left at home, many Tea Partiers were left to content themselves to wear their hearts on their sleeves, as it were, and this, in my opinion, forced many of them to express themselves personally, with their own words.
In short, there was a lot of heckling and not a lot of traditional Tea Party performance (e.g. sign-waving). I believe that this heckling, which naturally didn't photograph very well, was actually more informative and illustrative; I believe that it gave a better insight into the "hearts and minds" of the Tea Party than the signs would have.
The heckling generally conformed to one of three patterns:
- Dictionary attack: the most common form of heckling took the form of a rapid-fire contest about the meaning of certain important words.
As I mentioned above, Beck chose to hold a militarist rally in which white Americans were urged to forcefully reject responsibility for historical abuses on the grounds that accepting such responsibility would be a violation of the civil rights of white Americans on the anniversary of a famous pacifist speech and a watershed moment in the movement that eventually won political equality for non-white Americans. Based on the frequency with which we infiltrators were accused of being racists, I can only assume that this idea of "reclaiming" the civil rights movement for Americans of European descent has been heavily discussed and frequently rehearsed on Glenn Beck's television show.
Most hecklers who emerged from the crowd to confront members of my party wanted to hold an impromptu debate on the definition of racism. "Claiming that you deserve special treatment because of your race is the real racism", one sneered. "My grandfather survived the Great Depression because he worked hard and didn't ask for a racist hand-out", fantasized another.
But "racist" and "racism" weren't the only concepts being redescribed and redefined on the fly by the rallying supporters of Fox News.
Other participants felt a profound need to relegislate history. A rotund old man with a snowy white beard shouted a rambling, discursive lecture on the patent injustice of violence done to white Americans by foreign nationals during America's foreign wars; this was, I can only assume, part of the reason why American military preeminence is such an integral part of the Constitutional freedoms that Americans enjoy. A very soft-spoken, very over-weight gentle-giant type gave a long, whispery talk about various, obscure mass-murders perpetrated during the 20th century by America's traditional political rivals (e.g. Russia and China) against various marginalized peoples meant, I assume, to justify American military aggression against these countries.
Still another demanded to know if any of us knew what a "republic" was and why "capitalism" was an inherent and necessary part of that. This was followed by yet another agitated and rambling recitation of half-remembered stories about antique conflicts involving vague historical edifices such as "the Church" and "ancient Rome".
(In reflection, I enjoyed these confrontations the most, as they appealed directly to the (admittedly unusual and occasionally unfortunate) sense of humor that one necessarily develops when studying antiquity, as I have, in an academic setting. The pseudopigraphy, pseudonyms and just plain false-attributions attached to the most famous and controversial historical documents combined with the hyperbole and unapologetically lopsided moralizing to which all famous writers of ancient and antique literature are given requires their modern student to develop a light-hearted skepticism and ability to read between the lines. And you just don't find that sense of humor or carefully honed skepticism in the revaunchist historicism of a ranting armchair academic whose formal education ended with trade school and who read the Donatio Constantini online once and knows all about "The Templars" as a direct result of this "research".) At any rate, this was the most common form of heckling: the vast majority of people who heckled our group of interlopers accused us of being racists, of ruining their "peaceful, inclusive message" by bringing our hateful feelings into its midst and so on. Most of these concluded their shouting by congratulating themselves for respecting our First Amendment rights.
None of these seemed aware of the facts that "racism" is note mere name-calling, but actual discriminatory abuse, that a genuinely "peaceful, inclusive message" could never be instantly soured by the mere presence of contrary opinion or that allowing others to speak freely is not a demonstration of high civic virtue (but rather a simple matter of basic legal compliance). If any of these hecklers suspected any of this, or that a pro-military, anti-government rally staged by a for-profit cable television network was at utter odds with the pacifist message of a minister who wanted desperately for his government to intercede on behalf of its people, they weren't letting on.
- Condescending taunt: I frequently observed a sort of call-and-response routine wherein two men--traveling together or as part of a larger group--pretended to having a conversation about how sorry they felt for anyone as obviously deluded and misguided enough to reject the conservative agenda as dictated by Newscorp.
The general form it took was this: usually two (but sometimes three or four) older men, upon passing our small transgressing band, would slow down and begin to laugh in a histrionic, projectile fashion. Eventually, one of the men would raise his voice to announcement cadence (i.e. above the volumes usually reserved for direct address) and shout to the group about how he was moved at such a pitiful sight as the one before him. This was, without exception, followed by the other man (at a similar volume) agreeing that it was indeed pitiful that young people were so often ignorant of the facts and tended to be so easily misled: the consolation, the second man always added, was that "they're young; when they grow up and (blank)[2] they'll wise up: you did a lot of stupid things too when you were in college!"
Generally speaking, this kind of heckling went un-rejoined, as it was not (technically) direct address.
- Olive branch brow-beating: rarer (but not rare enough that a clear pattern did not begin to emerge during the course of the afternoon) was the kind of direct-engagement/direct-address heckling wherein one or more persons would wade into the midst of our group under the pretense of wanting to "understand" or "help" and then rapidly descend into the kind of assaultive proselytizing that one generally observes on college campuses and urban street corners.
There was plenty of this kind of fire-and-brimstone and more than a few offers of salvation through Glen's peaceful message and Jesus' (infinite!) compassion, but the paradigmatic example of the olive-branch-brow-beating, in what I observed on Saturday, was the born-again, recovering-alcoholic bikers who, witnessing for Christ's love and salvation on their riding leathers[3], spent a solid 15 minutes explaining the mechanics of salvation in the 21st century media- and consumption-scape to one of our group.
The last two or three minutes were predictably abusive and confrontational, if what I heard from my (admittedly distant) vantage was representative of the actual exchange.
Another of these was an imposing, bearded man with a shorn cranium who approached us, pumped his left fist wildly over his head and hooted, "Fox News! Whoo! Obama's goin' Doooooown!" before cackling uproariously and skipping away.
And there were one or two "gentlemen hecklers" who would calmly walk up to a person in our group with a sign and, in normal voice, ask what it meant and then politely (but firmly) disagree. I personally spent about five minutes discussing the blogosphere scuffle over the Maine Tea Partier who advised visitors (read: white, middle-aged out-of-towners coming to DC from rural and suburban communities) to avoid the Green/Yellow line; we agreed, in the end, that in any urban center there are places that aren't safe for tourists but that there are more constructive and less antagonistic ways to make that point.
Contrastively, there were other hecklers who were either distressed or disabled, but beyond the words "distressed or disabled", they generally tended to defy easy characterization. There was a young man--one of the very few young men marching with Beck's supporters--who had the sides of his head shaved and the sleeves removed from his Lamb of God[4] T-shirt; he approached us, took a picture with his point-and-shoot, shouted "I'm not a racist!" and then angrily stomped about in silence for 30 or 40 uncomfortable seconds before half running and half stumbling towards the street. There was an elderly, mustachioed shutter-bug (replete in his canvas vest, cargo shorts and Panama Jack hat) who, while snapping numerous shots of us with his expensive-looking SLR, ranted incoherently about how he has "been doing this for 30 years and if you want people to listen to you, you have to dress like them! If you don't dress like them, you're just a show-off! Keep showing off, then, be a show-off and dress however you want!"
But, as I say, those were the exceptions. And, as I have been re-iterating, the vast majority of the attendees were of north western European descent, fair-skinned, over-weight, middle-aged and uniformly attired. The exceptions--the "people of all races" who Beck invited (but who declined his invitation in favor of Al Sharpton's counter-rally)--to this rule were mostly seen on stage, where they were presented to the all-white audience in "traditional" dress as evidence that Beck's platform of Christian militarism and abdication of white social and economical obligation actually appeal to people of all races.
The utter lack of demographic variance in the attendees, combined with the trends expressed in their equally uniform heckling patterns, leads to one conclusion: the celebrated "anger" of the Tea Party in particular and of Fox News boosters in general is a decidedly parochial and unavoidably parental one.
Rather than the book-burning, brick-hurling, red-necked, un-schooled, sign-wielding militia-men who I had hoped to encounter, I met a sea of frumpy-looking, over-the-hill white people struggling against the August heat in DC to keep their Land's End Outlet-ware from sticking to their love-handles and whose most consistently voiced gripe is that they're tired of being vilified for treating non-whites as second-class citizens (and don't want to be criticized if they feel like they want to start doing some of the vilifying again).
And maybe pay less annually in federal income tax.
In short, the newly hatched Tea Party--the media savvy one without signs--is a sort of pitiable thing. These people are old. They're crotchety. They're tacky. They're not interested in trying to act like they have very much money, personal dignity or formal education. They're anxiously and uncertainly proud of their intellectual and physical laziness, the forcefulness with which they keep their experiences and beliefs as narrow and limited as possible and the cultural isolation that they have been led to believe will keep them safe from a host of imagined fears, from the creeping menace of a hard-line Marxism that would do away with personal property to the marauding Islamic armies of a Third World that is only barely restrained by American force of arms.
In short, they have made themselves a tired, fearful and inept people; to see them gather is to behold a sad tableau of ten thousand different types of physical, emotional and spiritual sloth. This being the case, to encounter their anger--to find oneself on the business-end of their meager rhetorical weaponry--is to feel neither unnerved, nor unmanned, nor afraid.
To personally encounter the caviling rhetoric and attention deficit of this new Tea Party under Glenn Beck is, frankly, to feel the first faint stirrings of pity.
- "Notable exceptions" taking the form of political cosplayers, e.g. various Abrahams Lincoln, Uncles Sam and, more unexpectedly, the white, middle-aged "Moses", whose crimson-and-black open bathrobe was intended to indicate that, heeding Glen Beck's call, he had come to lead his fellow white, middle-aged "Israelites" out of the political and economical servitude that characterizes life in Obama's "Egypt".
- "Start paying taxes", "see how things are in the real world" and "learn about life a little bit" were three popular taunts.
- Which leathers were a matching his/hers set of vests adorned with "Clean & Sober" patches and various other emblems and regalia from their church group.
- This T-shirt prompted me to wonder aloud, later that afternoon, what might have been wrong with this particular young man. He was obviously disturbed in some clinical sense, but was he impervious to the lyrics of the band whose shirt he wore? Did he know that they originally called themselves Burn the Priest? "I also like Lamb of God", I said later that day, "and believe me: if they were here, the guys whose metal cred is based at least partially on their anti-war lyrics and scathing moral indictments of Judeo-Christian values would definitely have been sitting with us, not with Glenn Beck."
