In the old days, if you wanted to get a tea party underway, you would have to get a nice fire started. These days, however, things are a little backwards: the Tea Party is already well underway, but they're still setting fires--or at least keeping them going. And nowhere has this been more true recently than in the State of Tennessee.
It's no surprise that Tennessee would provide some of the most prominent epitomes of a political movement that seeks a return to the hard-hearted monoculture that the Tea Party seems to long for. There are certainly progressive communities in Tennessee, as well as hardworking activists doing all they can to make a difference--but all in all, it's an uphill battle: there were only a few states that bucked the national trend toward the Democratic Party and did not give Obama a higher share of the vote than John Kerry received, and Tennessee was among them.
As KingOneEye posted earlier this week, the Tea Party is not a movement of regular citizens "alarmed" at the direction our nation is headed. It is instead a Newscorp-driven movement of white social conservatives who--as Matt Taibbi found about about Tennessee's neighbors to the north--ride around in scooters paid for by Medicare while railing against government involvement in healthcare. It's not that the Tea Partiers hate government; quite the opposite. They love getting public services, as long as those services are provided only to them and others like them who "deserve it." And everyone else can simply burn to the ground, for all they care. Literally.
And whom exactly might that include? For starters, anyone who doesn't fit into Bill O'Reilly's famed "White Christian Male Power Structure." People such as the members of the Muslim community in Murfreesboro, who had to suffer accusations that the expanded community center they wished to build wouldn't just lead to increased traffic and environmental problems, but was actually a "training center." A sensible position to take--everyone knows, after all, that the most likely place for Islamic terrorists to train would be a large community center with very visible signage right on one of the city's main thoroughfares, right? No matter--someone decided that they needed to "take their country back" by committing an act of arson at the construction site.
Not that Muslims are the only ones to feel the brunt of this renewed vigor to return America to its original principles through acts of arson: a mere few days later, two members of the LGBT community in Vonore--a lesbian couple that had been together for many years--were burned out of their home by another radical who undoubtedly believed that his actions were bringing our country that much closer to the the spirit of the Founding Fathers--as channeled, of course, through Glenn Beck's nightly seance skills.
Random acts of senseless violence, however, can occur anywhere; the gay community and the Muslim community often suffer acts of discrimination through violence, and the coincidence of these two acts of arson occurring in the same region within a couple of days of each other could be seen as unfortunate, if perhaps symbolic. But then there's the case of Gene Cranick, who was forced to listen to his pleas fall on deaf ears as firefighters watched his home burn to the ground, with his dogs inside.
To the best of our knowledge, Gene Cranick isn't gay or a Muslim. He wasn't a victim of arson. Nobody was trying to force him out of his residence because of discomfort with his creed or color. His only sin? A failure to live up to the obligations inherent in the free-market theology of privatization of the services that many of us simply take for granted as a function of the taxes we pay.
Now, many free-market supremacists in the conservative movement have argued that Mr. Cranick deserved to watch in tears as his house burned to the ground because he had not paid the measly $75 to the local Fire Department for service outside the city limits. But if the genuine issue were about making sure that adequate fees were rendered for services provided in the true spirit of the free market, there would have been at least two solutions to the problem: the South Fulton Fire Department could have accepted Mr. Cranick's fee at the time of the fire, or, barring that, the Fire Department could have put out the fire and then billed Mr. Cranick for the costs.
Neither of those occurred. What happened to the Cranicks is not really a consequence of free-market ideology. Rather, it is the by-product of a perverted view of social conservatism that is far more focused on a sociopathic, driving need to see people get punished for transgressions against their law-and-order version of Christianity. Digby recently quoted a telling passage from Christian conservative radio personality Bryan Fischer, who had this to say in support of the officials who ordered firefighters to stand by while a family watched their house go up in flames:
This story illustrates the fundamental difference between a sappy, secularist worldview, which unfortunately too many Christians have adopted, and the mature, robust Judeo-Christian worldview which made America the strongest and most prosperous nation in the world. The secularist wants to excuse and even reward irresponsibility, which eventually makes everybody less safe and less prosperous. A Christian worldview rewards responsibility and stresses individual responsibility and accountability, which in the end makes everybody more safe and more prosperous.
This is the Tea Party in a nutshell: a movement of angry reactionaries marked by zealous intolerance of anyone who doesn't fit their demographic profile of a real American, combined with a sociopathic desire to enforce the proper punishment on anyone who doesn't live up to their old-time Judeo-Christian values of crime and punishment.
It's a story best told by three fires in Tennessee.