06.29.12
Tea Party Funk Machine
In 2009 Craig Miller of Lebanon, PA, confronted fake Democrat Senator Arlen Specter at a town hall meeting. It made great television and went nationwide, a GOP rally point for virulent opposition to the Obama administration’s plan to rework the health care system.
Miller was incoherent, then and in later television appearances. He couldn’t express, even in a basic way, the specific nature of his gripes other than to rage over alleged violation of the Constitution. However, his anger was very real. Three years on, it’s still visceral. It wilted and ultimately destroyed a sick Arlen Specter who was unprepared for it. What Specter got that day, he had coming. Craig Miller, and everyone else, deserved so much better than him.
The outburst was emblematic of the lack of Democratic leadership and its choices of wan uninspiring ruling class pols so used to being surrounded by sycophants and legal bribe-masters they can’t engage with people outside Washington in any way. After having been given the keys to power at a time so fraught in American history, they decided being empty unresponsive suits was most prudent.
I wrote the melody, a very hard rock funk thing (in the Seventies it would have been heavy metal), called it Hey Craig Man! and realized it was impossible to write any lyrical narrative. The only thing that worked was non sequiturs and balderdash about heevahavas, nudists, poozle, on your floor, outside your door, plus Pennsylvania Dutch-isms. There was nothing you could take away from the event except failure.
I stuck it on the web as an MP3.
Yesterday, with the upholding of Obamacare, I remastered it and added Tea Party video.
Readers will note it’s still nonsensical. There is no other way to describe what went on and what still goes on. Craig Miller may have never appeared at a political rally/townhall meeting again but tens of thousands like him continue to do so.
(For the rock music types, I was imitating an effect from something old called the Seamoon Funk Machine.)
Reader Mikey D secured a copy of Thomas Franks’ “Pity the Billionaire: The Hard Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right” for DD blog to review and it arrived yesterday. I again thank him profusely!
It describes a stupefying chain of events in American history. With the world economy leveled by Wall Street misdeeds, the time was ripe for a popular uprising to rival that of the coming of the New Deal.
That didn’t happen. Instead, against all reason and common sense, the opposite. The popular uprising, in the guise of the Tea Party, instead blamed the US government and all of civilized democratic society, coming to accept a twisted conspiratorial story which blamed the economic collapse on secret liberal plots that inflated government for the express purpose of interfering with, and then destroying, pure capitalism.
It was as if at least half the country suddenly decided, bizarrely, that their favorite characters in the tale of Robin Hood were the Sheriff of Nottingham and Sir Guy of Gisborne.
It marked signal failure by the Democratic Party, a total inability to tell and sell a moral story on the true nature of what happened, for reasons ranging from alliances with the wealthy class that had caused the disaster and inability and unwillingness to communicate that it stood for anything populist. From the nobodies to President Obama, the party engaged in what amounted to political malfeasance toward its base.
The outrage at what became derisively known as Obamacare was part of this.
I’ll share a complete review of “Pity the Billionaire” in the days to come.