“Electing Barack Obama will bring an end to the culture wars”, which is what Ann quotes Andrew Sullivan basically saying.”

Why would anyone have ever thought this? I suppose I could see how they thought it might help race relations in this country (it didn’t, but I could see why they might think that), but I would have never thought it would affect the culture wars. There are a lot of people who have more to gain from keeping the culture wars alive.

Anti-colonialists?! You mean our founding fathers were born in Kenya? I guess I have never seen Washington’s birth certificate…

You expect them to dress up like (looks around furtively and whispers) coloured people?

I don’t know who else is enough of a history geek to have watched “John Adams,” but one of the things I really liked about that series was that the director made a point of including African-Americans as background characters in every scene where it made sense.  And not as servants, but as, say, people in Boston walking around living their lives, or riding in a public stagecoach.

It really made me realize how often African-Americans have been erased from US history, even when they’re central figures in major events like the Boston Massacre and the War of 1812.  (In the Chesapeake-Leopard Affair, two of the three American citizens impressed by the British navy and treated as deserters were black.)

Supreme court judges are the ICBM’s of the Culture War.

Hasn’t “The Culture War” been going on at least since Socrates was put on trial and then forced to drink poison?  How could anyone expect that the election of one American president thousands of years later would do anything to bring the hostilities to an end?...

“don’t care” or “don’t KNOW” ??  I imagine it’s both, as usual.

What stikes me about the Culture War is that in many ways the culture war from the late 19th and early 20th century is still being waged. During the period of great Eastern and Southern European immigration to the United States, many Protestant Americans believed that the masses of Catholic and Jewish immigrants would de-Christinize the United States. This was still an issue when JFK ran for President. With the Park51 issue, the entire battle over the United States as a Christian nation is erupting again. Catholics are kind of considered Christian now but there is still a lot of Protestant anxiety and besides Newt, most of the vocal Christian opponents of the Muslim Y are Evangelical Protestants. Jews are invoked by the opponents but mainly serve as tools, most Jews actually being on the side of Muslims.

  It must be noted that America isn’t the only country waging a war about what it means to be a “real whatever” and what are the values of whatever country x. Many of the European nations are engaged in very similar debates right now, especially regarding whether Muslim immigrants could be truly French or Danish or whatever. In many ways, it harder for the Europeans because the cultures and traditions of the European countries go back longer and the European countries tended to have a relatiely more homogeneous population with some exceptions than the Americas, which were always much more diverse in background and culture. Many countries in Asia and Africa also have similar issues.

  Very few people are entirely comfortable with the idea that to be an American or French or Syrian is just a lega status with nothing else unifying the population than a government, preferably a democratic one and desire a more mythic form of unity, where people in the nationa at least have some culture and ideals in common. Of course, the extreme mythic nationalists want everybody to be the same and this doesn’t really work. Pure cosmopolitanism with nationality only as a legal status doesn’t really work either if only for the fact that many people find it off-putting and attempts to get most people to accept it are less than satisfactory.

The “feminists making arguments” link has a quotation at the end that’s breaking it.

I think it’s because they don’t care about the actual Boston Tea Party.  It’s just a convenient cover for nostalgia for a time when only white male landowners had the vote and slavery was legal.

I don’t think they even understand that much about the history of the American Revolution.  I think they have it distilled down to tax leads to protest leads to revolution against the tyrant.

Whoops, missed the whole beginning of the post where you question that.  Still, I don’t think the self-avowed Tea Party people need to know much at all about the actual American Revolution; they just know there was some kind of tax thing that sparked it, and there was a lot of bloodthirsty talk about being “patriots” who took up arms against the “tyrant.”  I really don’t think the Tea Party concept per se is primarily about race and difference.  I do, however, think that a lot of the crankiest Republicans who adopt the Tea Party line on taxes and liberty _also_ resent that the liberal/black-run government (cough) is stacking the deck against white people who play by the rules.  So I think I would disagree that the colonial cosplay element is itself nostalgia for white domination.  I think it’s mostly “put-upon people overthrow the empire.”  They’d probably dress up as Han Solo and Luke Skywalker if Glenn Beck had been pounding on that analogy for the past few years.

I dunno, Flip.  It’s not like we’re talking about literally illiterate, uneducated people. The costumes and props that they have are surprisingly accurate in many cases.  They do their homework in ways that actually matter to them.  They know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the earliest incarnation of America was one where white men of English descent held literally all the power.  They may not know about the ethnic diversity of the colonies at the time, but they have a real eye for had all the power.  And that, more than anything, is what I think attracts them.  I also think it’s because open nostalgia for the antebellum South has become harder and harder to justify in the decades since it hit its apex with “Gone With The Wind”, and this is a way to play that same note but with a little more subtlety.

Even in the time that the Tea Crackers have so much nostalgia for, there were feminists making arguments that would still be considered radical by many today.

That’s an important point. The teabaggers aren’t pining for a time when no one had feminist or “socialist” ideas; they’re pining for a time when you could just tell them to STFU. That’s a lot meaner, and closer to the point, whether they realize this distinction or not (which they probably do).

@Amanda Marcotte: yes, and that’s how we can tell that the Teabaggers are racists.  There’s no way that people who are educated enough to even know that there’s such a thing as a “historically accurate uniform” could spout the kind of idiocy they’re spouting unless they’re hurting themselves in some fashion to avoid admitting something.

They are playing white Protestant dress-up, openly pining for the days when people of color were explicitly second-class citizens or chattel.  When people feel that way, the Culture Wars aren’t over.  They’re barely started.

Thanks for putting in the qualifier “landowners”, a lot of people miss that in the rhetoric of the teabaggers. They just don’t want to undue Franklin Roosevelt, they don’t just want to undo Abraham Lincoln, they want to undo Andrew Jackson too!

I also notice the teabaggers never, ever directly talk about the Civil War, not even in passing. Even at Glenn Beck’s Whitestock they were in front of Lincoln but only made vague, inaccurate references to Lincoln being a “man of God”. Of course that’s only true if you’re talking about ta deist conception of God.

I don’t think they even understand that much about the history of the American Revolution.  I think they have it distilled down to tax leads to protest leads to revolution against the tyrant.

That, and if you’re of the Glenn Beck type, you also believe Mormon Jesus directly wrote the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, that they’re not man-made documents shaped by historical forces but sacred scripture direct from God, and that since this is true every time we interpret the Constitution differently or amend it we’re screwing with holy writ and making Mormon Jesus cry.

A couple of the earlier tea parties last year did have a few people in “Indian costumes” of one sort or another, but it didn’t especially make them look more enlightened:

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3545/3448603094_aa0170b7b9.jpg

http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2009/04/15/us/16teaparty2_600.JPG

Ben D., thats a very important observation. The Tea Party like the Christian Right are essentially an romantic anachronistic movement, like the ones that infected the European nobility and gentry during the early to mid-19th century. They hate the changes around them and the only think they know about it is that there power is decreasing. To get away from the changes, they want to go back to an idealized past that never really existed. The European nobility wished to return to a Middle Ages out of the Arthurian legends where Knights performed deeds of daring do rather than the real Middle Ages. The Tea Party like the Christian Evangelicals wanted to return to idealized antebellum America that never existed.

  I once read an article about Patrick Henry University. If I remember correctly, Patrick Henry University’s History Department propagandizes the view that the ideal America would be that of the 1820s and 1830s minus slavery. Mind you, in the actual 1820s and 1830s; America had slavery and the abolition movement was really getting started. The first parties explicitly advocating worker’s rights were founded in the same time period, in the United States. Many of these early proto-worker’s parties were explicitly skeptical about religion. The can Catholics and other non-Protestants really be American debate started at this time period to. What they want is a past that is out of a theme park.

It’s strange that the figures Teabaggers idolize the most (Patrick Henry, and especially Thomas Paine) were on what you might call the far-left of the American Revolution. Especially Thomas Paine, he was the original Dirty Fucking Hippie, and was completely shunned later for his views on Christianity.

neff, I don’t know if those really read as direct references to the Mohawk costumes the actual Boston Tea Party raiders wore.  They just seem kind of generic, silly, and racist.

I don’t know who else is enough of a history geek to have watched “John Adams,” but one of the things I really liked about that series was that the director made a point of including African-Americans as background characters in every scene where it made sense.  And not as servants, but as, say, people in Boston walking around living their lives, or riding in a public stagecoach.
I did see that, and thought it was great - one of the people testifying in the Boston Massacre trial scene was a black guy (historically correct)! Of course, I also know people who would watch that and either (1) sagely comment that the black people are slaves or (2) rant angrily about “political correctness.”
If memory serves properly, didn’t “Doctor Who” have an episode where the scene moves to Elizabethan times and there are black people wandering around London being, well, people living in Elizabethan London? I seem to remember hearing a great deal of sturm und drang on this topic about how OMG POLITICAL CORRECTNESS DURR DURR DURR DO NOT WANT.

I think this post is very correct in pointing out that a lot of the Tea Partiers are clinging to a very specific view of America. They dream of a time where (white) men were manly men, women were beautiful knew their place, minorities - if they existed at all - were quiet, children were adorable and never got into trouble, and everyone was very, very happy. Also, lollipops grew on trees, weeds never grew in the garden, playing outside didn’t make you dirty, every woman was strong, every man was good-looking, and all the children were above average. It is a charming dream - if you’re a white man - but it never existed. Never. The Tea Partiers ignore the existence of Mercy Otis Warren - not to mention that of Sojourner Truth.

@ Ben D.:  I’m _appalled_ that Glenn Beck claims Tom Paine.  I guess it’s the rhetoric of “common sense” that did it?  Otherwise it’s kind of like claiming Martin Luther King or… oh, right.

@ Amanda:

They know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the earliest incarnation of America was one where white men of English descent held literally all the power.

I dunno.  To me it seems as though they fetishize the revolution rather than the society that produced it, or that it produced.  Thus you get things like the “Don’t Tread On Me” flag.  I think it might converge, in that they see the American Revolution as a moment in which “people like me” rose up against the tyrannical government and refused to pay their stupid taxes.  The romance of the antebellum South is for a society based on honor and manners and deference, but I’m not sure the Tea Party relies upon a similar vision of the Revolutionary world.  I think it’s all about The People vs. The Tyrant.  It’s just that their modern-day complaints about what makes the current government The Tyrant are so inflected by race, religion, and ethnicity, it all ends up running together, like an everything bagel of resentment.

The Tea Partiers ignore the existence of Mercy Otis Warren - not to mention that of Sojourner Truth.

Also: smallpox, cholera, women dying in childbirth as a matter of course,incurable tooth and gum diseases, lack of indoor plumbing, etc, etc, etc.

I guess the other option is that the Tea Party takes place in a mishmash of Olden Times that includes both antebellum “Song of the South” shit before all the darkies got uppity, and also American Revolutionary muskets and tricorn hats, and also Ronald Reagan is there tearing down the Berlin Wall.

This “anti-colonial” strike is just a dog whistle statement saying that the uppity minorities don’t get how good we (white, Christian conservatives) have treated them, and as such, are trying to get rid of us.  It’s telling the people who are in the know, that we (conservatives, Tea Partiers) need to get out and vote or revolt or what have you, in order not to end up like the British or other previous colonial powers that lost their colonies and eventually their empires and are now not superpowers anymore.  And what’s so wrong about being anti-colonial?  Weren’t we anti-colonial when we fought the British?  I thought Republicans were all about freedom and what is free about being a colony of another country? 
I really, really wish that the media would call him out on this but I know I’m dreaming.  They never do; the beltway media sees him as an “intellectual” conservative and one of the “serious” statesman of conservativism.  It’s so blantanly racist and such a sign of his mindet of oppression that it’s almost dizzying in its’ harshness and simplicity.

@ Ben D.:  I’m _appalled_ that Glenn Beck claims Tom Paine.

Not only did he claim him, you know what else? He said Thomas Paine was against “spreading the wealth around” (he actually came up with a theoretical system in the 1790s that is very similar to modern Social Security), that he was a “Godly man” (!), and that his views were unlike the ideas of the French Revolution (!!!).

Lee—I talked to a guy a few weeks ago who told me he didn’t like Obama because Obama is a secret Catholic. Itold him not to worry because the commander-in-chief is actually a secret muslim, but until your post, I though he was just super crazy. Now maybe I think he just got his narratives crossed.

Also Pat Buchanan is uber Catholic, and like the King of the Nativists, but perhaps he is to unapologetically racist (and anti-semetic) for even the teabaggers.

Also Pat Buchanan is uber Catholic, and like the King of the Nativists, but perhaps he is to unapologetically racist (and anti-semetic) for even the teabaggers.

Pat Buchanan is an old-school Robert Taft/Charles Lindbergh-style isolationist in foreign policy, as opposed to a neocon in favor of absolute world domination and eternal, unipolar and unilateralist American hegemony at the point of a missile. That’s why he’s not accepted.

@ Ben:  I feel like that’s kind of like claiming Trotsky as a Czarist.

The cop in the top picture: is he part of the protest or just there to keep peace? He looks like the former: all puffed up and important.

The reason you know the Tea Crackers are liars is the same reason you know that the people who watched 300 and thought the Spartans represented America* are very, very stupid.

Nobody can read enough history to be able to dress up like a colonialist and not be able to figure out that the American Revolution was all about how local superrich aristocrats wanted to control their own poor people and not have decisions made for them by distant, even richer, more aristocratic people. The American Revolution had basically nothing to do with ordinary Americans, of whom even the white men weren’t significantly better off under independence. It took until the 1820s for ordinary middle-class white men to have any say in things, and black people were still fucking property.

This is not rocket science, and the fact that it isn’t is clear evidence that Tea Crackers are being totally disingenuous when they pretend they’re revolutionaries. It’s a testament to the corruption of our media that none of them are ever called out on this.

*and/or the people who watched Avatar and thought the blue people whose names I can’t be bothered to look up represented America, and/or the people who watch those awful post-1985 Star Wars movies and still don’t get that the rebels aren’t America…

Alysia at 29: Thats a new one.

Secret Catholic?

What’s funny in light of the “secret Muslim” thing is that Al Qaeda early on accused Obama of being a secret Jew (or at least his mother of being a Jew, i forget which) in one of their videos, and it’s a trope that’s believed in certain quarters in the Middle East.

My favorite feminist text is probably A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, partly because of the way Wollstonecraft used then-contemporary political and philosophical arguments to make her points, but also because it was published in 1792 and our culture still doesn’t get it.

Ha, he is secretly all of monotheism, apparently. Its almost beautiful, if you think about it.

Also, the google ad I get is for an anti-christ book…maybe its an omen.

And Paine and Wollstonecraft are on the same side politically, by and large.  Maybe Glenn Beck will try to reclaim Wollstonecraft next.

@felagund

Slightly OT, I suppose, but the thing that I don’t get about interpreting Avatar as any sort of political allegory is that the blue people are actually technologically superior.  They have arrows that go through bulletproof glass and metal for fuck’s sake.  They have a much more efficient and effective communication system as well as a natural environment that kills their attackers for them. 

The fact that the blue people look the part of a poor oppressed people (not to say that I was rooting for the crazy humans, I actually didn’t really care enough to pick a side) is enough.  What they do (or can do) doesn’t matter as long as they look like the “good” guys.  Hey, maybe I was more on topic than I thought.

@ alysia and Ben D.:  Well, _I_ heard Obama was secretly a Viking, and he worships Loki.  I’m not saying it’s _true_, I’m just sayin’ what I heard.

He can’t be Catholic. He’s an (secret) Imam…and a Radical Black Nationalist Christian…when he’s not a communistic atheist. That’s when he’s not busy taking money from the rich to give to poor and lazy people that are assaulting the sensibilities and liberties of Real Americans.

FlipYrWhig—My cousin’s friend’s college roommate has seen his shrine to Odin. True fact.

Comment #40: Atheist, A Feminist on 09/13 at 07:43 PM

Avatar just sucked.

It was just Dances With Wolves....IN SPACE!!!! Yawn.

I was watching this yesterday and was wondering what you thought about it:

http://www.ted.com/talks/jonathan_haidt_on_the_moral_mind.html

I bet most of you have already seen it, and I hope it’s not off topic for the thread, since it is culture wars.  It’s a charming talk, but after 24 hours of having it in my head, I get the feeling that the huge guilt trip only works because he is talking to a room full of liberals, and a conservative speaker talking to a house full of conservatives would never even begin to contemplate the remote possibility of them giving up group mentality.

“It was just Dances With Wolves….IN SPACE!!!! Yawn.”

...with a healthy dose of The Last Samurai thrown in for good measure.

That said, I enjoyed it.  On DVD.  At home.  Where I didn’t have to spend $40 for me and my family to sit in a noisy theater with marginal seats and a sticky floor…

Also, why are Sarah Palin and Newt Gingrich et al. bothering about what happens in New York?  I thought it wasn’t Real America to begin with, what with all us foreigners and queers and public transportation and vegan bars and sustainable-building-materials-organic sandwich joints.  Wasn’t this the Great Babylon?  Why do they even give a shit? Most New Yorkers (the ones I talk to, anyway) either don’t know or don’t care.

Obama can’t be a Viking, he doesn’t have a long and flowing beard.

Ben D, I friend of mine has referred to Avatar as “Dancing with Smurfs.”

MikeEss, of course, The Last Samurai was basically Dances With Wolves.....IN ASIA!!!

I look forward to the day when the “white man saves the noble savages” formula script is relegated to the same status as a movie like, say, Song of the South.

A couple of the earlier tea parties last year did have a few people in “Indian costumes” of one sort or another, but it didn’t especially make them look more enlightened:

What their rallies need are a bunch of authentic looking Native Americans in costume with signs reading “Muslims and Christians go home!”

Can you PROVE he doesn’t have a beard? I’ve heard he keeps his beard with his real birth certificate and Michelle’s “whitey” tape. They’re all up there with Thor in Valhalla.

Hmm, Obama is ruled by his father’s ghost according to D’Souza.  This would put him into one of the Eastern religions. Hindu?

Maybe he is Simba.

@FlipYrWhig at 39: Watch Glenn Beck quote Wollstonecraft to argue that the oppression of white men must be stopped…

I’m not sure about the lying part. Many people have just an amazing ability to compartmentalize—there are optical engineers who don’t believe in darwin, meteorologists who don’t believe in climate change, computer scientists who don’t believe in NASA. And not just stupid incompetent ones, people who are actually pretty good within their narrow areas of expertise. Some costume-reenactor types may be familiar with the actual conditions they’re reenacting, others are just complete loons for reproducing certain kinds of detail.

Oh, and if you’re going for idyllic early 1800s, that would be Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, only without Tom, Huck, Jim, or any of that unpleasantness about Huck’s dad. Walt Disney has done us all a great disservice.

Whatever the TPartiers know or believe about the Revolution they learned at Glen Beck’s knee.  Shudder.

I thought Avatar was fucking awesome, but that was because my wife and I saw it in 3D and we were tripping our balls/eggs off on mushrooms at the time. Several hours and several hundred “wows” later, we were like “that was bloody awful, really.”

“I think it’s because they don’t care about the actual Boston Tea Party.”

You are right, but I think part of it is the embarrassment over the use of the term “teabagging” or “teabagger” which they flaunted until us on the left pointed out the double meaning of it.  Since then, they have run away from any mention of tea outside the name “tea party.”

@ Lee:

Obama can’t be a Viking, he doesn’t have a long and flowing beard.

That’s all part of the deception!  The fact that there’s no way to prove it’s true is just, like, deniability.  And that proves it’s true!

What their rallies need are a bunch of authentic looking Native Americans in costume with signs reading “Muslims and Christians go home!”  Phoenician in a time of Romans @51

Like the t-shirt I saw recently with a quartet of Native Americans holding rifles and the caption, “Fighting terrorism since 1492.”

It was just Dances With Wolves….IN SPACE!!!! Yawn.

We called it Dances With Smurfs.  Do you get the smurfs in the US?  You have to know the smurfs to get the obviously awesome joke.

Oops.  I see that, um, “joke” has already been made.

The message to the Christianists should be clear: if you don’t like the American tradition of universal freedom of conscience, go back to Europe.

We don’t want them, thanks. That’s exactly why we packed them all off over there at gunpoint in the first place.

I think a lot of people are loath to say, or even to believe, that the struggle can’t be resolved quickly, because then the temptation to just give up on it will be too great. It’s hard to play the long game while thinking that you may not see the end of it in your lifetime.

“It’s just a convenient cover for nostalgia for a time when only white male landowners had the vote and slavery was legal. “

Can you be nostalgic about a time you’ve never experienced?

“Can you be nostalgic about a time you’ve never experienced?”

...of course, just as it’s possible for some to be “nostalgic” for time that never actually existed (see wingnuts and their yearning for the “Leave it to Beaver” ‘50s)...

Actual reality is for the Professional Left, who can’t be bothered to create their own delusional parallel universe and use it to whack anyone who isn’t a fellow koolaid-drinking wingnut…

“I’m not sure about the lying part. Many people have just an amazing ability to compartmentalize—there are optical engineers who don’t believe in darwin, meteorologists who don’t believe in climate change, computer scientists who don’t believe in NASA. And not just stupid incompetent ones, people who are actually pretty good within their narrow areas of expertise. Some costume-reenactor types may be familiar with the actual conditions they’re reenacting, others are just complete loons for reproducing certain kinds of detail.”

This. Liberals tend to have this belief that education is a good thing and will make people more savy and knowledgeable, but it isn’t magic fairydust to make you smart/perceptive/not a Tea Partier/conspiracy theorist. James Loewen had this great bit in “Lies My Teacher Told Me” describing an exercise he’d done with his freshman level college class or asking them to estimate people’s attitudes about the Vietnam War by social class. They got it completely backward, estimating a majority of educated people against the war and a majority of uneducated people for it. I remember reading that and trying and trying to figure out why it was wrong, as someone raised in a pretty liberal home by two people with doctorates.

Plus, it’s not exactly unpossible to get a college degree without absorbing a wide-ranging and deep education.

the people who watched 300 and thought the Spartans represented America* are very, very stupid

Not sure about that. Frank Miller, who wrote the 300 comics, is a raging right-wing asshole.

I think Frank Miller is on the record as saying that 300 is not intented to be taken seriously and people that do are a bit on thick side. Not disagreeing with designating him a rightist, just that he ment it to be a fun take on the tale of the 300 Spartans.

OMG neff!

Paleface taxes too high!
Let Little Brave Keep Wampum!

Yep, the Taxed Enough Already party isn’t racist at all.

What a bunch of losers.  This whole hissy fit is b/c they can’t deal with the fact that they lost an election—especially to a n*gger.  The whole concept of democracy is beyond them, much less the freedoms of the 1st amendment.

And once again, 700 warriors from Thespiae get shafted

And once again, 700 warriors from Thespiae get shafted

They insisted on running around naked with a bunch of Spartans - you thought they were there just for the fighting?...

Nobody forces you to read this blog, Johnny-boy, but thanks for demonstrating the sharpest mind in conservatism since W. F. Buckley shuffled off this mortal coil…..................

#75: 1/10

@atheist

Now, I think that deserves at least a 3/10.  He does to all that trouble to “ridicule” us and still can’t help throwing in “a black.”  If he had any self-awareness at all, what he said might actually be funny.

OK Atheist A Feminist, 2/10, that’s my final offer.

Not only did I watch John Adams, we own the DVDs.  Yep, noticed the court scene especially.

Katherine,
Unfortunately, I’m pretty sure smurfs started here. My daughter was watching them 25+ years ago.  Not my best memory of her toddler/preschool years. 
They are a perfect example of the exceptional female phenom - only one female and she was all girly-girl and just called smurfette rather than by a specific individual trait since the only thing that mattered about her was that she was the girl.  Ugh!