This is the lesson that I learned in Searchlight Nevada a couple of years back now:
It began with the Tea Party. The Tea Party when they were all widely fawned over by our wise beltway press like a mob of collective little semi-anonymous rock stars living their Warholian 15 minutes of fame all at once. At the height of their run as our national mass media darlings, they were coming to my backyard. They were sending a message, they said. Well, then you'll tell me to my face I vowed, and I made a few calls. It was about standing up and facing down a bully.
The Teahadi aren't fundamentally all that complicated or very hard to understand.
They see that there is a black man in the White House, a black man that they did not vote for, who has a "Jihadi" middle name that, by itself, alone, should have made him unelectable in their book. So, there can only be one explanation. It's just not possible that he was legitimately elected to the office of the Presidency of the United States.
Nor can it be legally possible for him to be able to hold that vitally important position.
It must've been a conspiracy or a screwjob, and they had plenty of theories on both accounts.
It was a long day back then. The grit in the wind. The narrow-ass old roads that were never meant to have more than a few dozen cars and trucks on them all at once. In hindsight, the real tell about what this was all about was that the big rally was out in the sticks, and not in Vegas or Reno. They would have gotten pushback on par with their own ranks if they'd rented a convention venue in the city or at a casino property for the main show and they all knew it.
I'm not going to lie to you. There weren't thousands of us. The vast majority of people who were there who weren't in the Tea Party were there to mostly silently witness and to always remember what happened there. Of course, the Andy Breitbart crowd spun tales of Harry Reid supporters egging the Tea Party buses and of skullduggery and physical assaults worthy of cheesy Walker Texas Ranger recreation choreography.
I saw two shouting matches that went absolutely nowhere, and a few middle fingers.
Here's where I risked causing a stampede for the fainting couch in some political and media circles, even though I live in Southern Nevada, even though I took the day to trek down to Harry Reid's hometown to see and experience what went on there that day, and that I was there and I know what it is that I saw and heard first hand.
A lot more of these angry and disproportionately white older folks (who, let's not forget for a second, were actually out there in that little desert town attempting to terrorize a sitting U.S. Senator by their own words in the first place) than the beltway news media or the various stars of the GOP bullshit industrial complex will admit to were out there on fire because they have a sore spot rubbed raw.
A forbidden desire.
A yearning or a craving, if you'll allow.
They deeply and desperately wanted (and still want) to be able to deal with their roiling hyperbolic anger and simmering frustration over that terrible black man that they didn't vote for, at the very least, by being free to go about pointing at him and declaring that "That N####R is not my President!" unmolested by any trace of well-earned outrage.
To say it, and then afterwards to have it not be all that big a fucking deal.
Don't let anyone try to tell you otherwise.
It's 2012. We have an extremely important Presidential election coming up. But let's not forget.
On Saturday, March 27, 2010 a former Governor of Alaska Sarah Palin stood on a stage in rural Nevada denouncing a sitting U.S. Senator in his own hometown in the desert, and did so under both American and Alabama flags without a hint of shame about why the other flag was there.
That matters. It matters, and it's important that it should never, ever, ever be forgotten by us.