Inane Ramblings

03 August 2010

Tea Party still gets it wrong


Perhaps you’re lucky enough to live near a historic site that is also a living museum….I think it’s a cool thing to see and hear re-enactors going about the business at hand, whether it’s Colonial, Revolutionary, Civil War era, or even WWII. There’s a certain amount of voyeurism there, depending on the skill of the re-enactor and the setting, it can often feel like you’ve stepped out of a time warp and are peeking in on our past.

One of the better places that does this is Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia. I’ve been there. Unlike some places surrounded by modernity, Williamsburg took great pains to preserve the “historic block”, and it’s over a square mile of dirt roads, horse poop, and colonial era architecture. It’s really a neat place.

But now, it’s come under fire. It saddened me to learn that the Tea Party has taken over in recent weeks. For some unknown reason, they’re there shouting at the rallies, and trying to engage such historical figures as Patrick Henry and George Washington in debates about modern policies and how the sitting President is secretly a socialist. To their credit, Williamsburg remains nonpartisan, and the re-enactors do their best to respond in the appropriate 18th-century manner.

This whole thing has got me thinking, though. As I write this, I’m sitting about a mile from where the *actual* tea party took place. I’ve blogged about that elsewhere; the Tea Party has completely missed the point, and like the “Minutemen” or the “America First” crowd, they have misappropriated a name from our past and are using it completely counter to what the originators had intended.

But that’s a common thread among the Right. Remember President Reagan using Springsteen’s “Born in the USA” as a campaign song? I believe it’s a fault of conservatives; I just don’t think their brains are wired the same way as yours and mine. All of the hate and vitriol they absorb on a daily basis from Rush, Beck, and who knows who else, has somehow affected how they interpret the past.

For some folks, Paul Revere, or Lexington and Concord, or the House of Burgesses, are just things that happened in a history book. For those of us that live and work by these places, they are sacred ground. I drive on Paul Revere’s route at least once a week, and every day I drive to the store I pass by the Battle Green at Lexington center. These places aren’t dry, historical things that exist in the abstract.

Real men stood on these places. Men who believed in something, and believed it was worth fighting for. It’s incredibly moving and humbling to stand on the Green and remember that the blood of the Patriots is still in the very ground I’m standing on. To some extent, I think the people of the South, or Texas, have that same connection to their history that people in the so-called ‘heartland’, or sitting behind their TV desks just don’t have.

This is something the Right fails to take into account when they hijack the past. Those of us that live here know what the truth is, and we’re not happy with how it’s been manipulated to suit the needs of a few ill-informed demagogues.

American history started here on the East Coast. The Revolution started here on the East Coast. The seat of the National Government is here on the East Coast. I think, more than anyone else in the United States, we’re in touch with our history and what it really means to be a Patriotic American here on the East Coast.

The religious right, and the Conservatives among us make much ado about playing to the “heartland”. But what is the true heartland of America? It’s here…Lexington, Saratoga, Gettysburg, Trenton, Shenandoah, and uncounted other places that all contributed to the birth and growth of these United States. But somehow, we’re the ones castigated and outcast because we’re not “Real Americans”.

Somebody needs to review their history.