Did Mark Twain foresee tea baggers?
I am re-reading Huckleberry Finn for the first time in 20 years. I just finished reading Pap’s speech about the free black man in Chapter 6 and was immediately struck by the similarities between the words and tenor of Pap’s speech and the rhetoric of the tea party movement. I was also reminded of the parallels between the personal characteristics of Pap and the many tea baggers who have accosted me and wrangled me into a political "conversation" in one of the bars I frequent in my small Red state community as I am trying to have a quiet beer by myself after work. Pap is a poor, white, uneducated male who resents anyone who is educated, middle-class, well dressed, dignified, or mannerly. And he is a racist. Pap’s screed about the "govment" allowing a free black man (who is wearing "the whitest shirt on you ever see, too and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver headed cane" and is a "p’fessor at a college" who speaks several languages) to vote instead of putting him up for auction to be sold seems to almost presciently articulate the sentiments lurking beneath (and sometimes above) the fear and anger vocalized about President Obama by the tea baggers I know.
I have as yet to find a way of having a rational, consensually civil conversation with a tea bagger over anything political. My wish is that, like Pap, they would decide out of frustration to just stop voting. But since that is unlikely, my hope is that moderates, liberals, and progressives turn out in droves at the polls in November and outvotes the tea partiers!