Tea Party America.

Don’t discount the Tea Part movement in America. It may thrust Sarah Palin into the White House. It’s a strange beast, a grass roots uprising of the impoverished middle ground organised in Washington and funded by the wealthy. This though isn’t philanthropy. Once upon a time that never was America was a land of freedom and abundance, zero taxes and equality; a land that John Wayne had in the back of his mind when he acted in films. And the Tea Party wants it back. Now most therapists and all ad men will tell you emotions drive conscious decisions. They’re in place before our conscious processes have a chance to apply their flimsy justifications. In a time of austerity this ‘time that never was’ has a powerful emotional draw and stirs one’s emotional imagery into action. One somehow knows the truth of it deep in one’s soul. This is the stirring that millions of good, God fearing Americans can feel, nebulous, nameless, structure-less maybe, but the honest to God truth. They see it, the empty houses, unemployed and urban decay, every day with their own eyes. They have been motivated, but to do what? Their emotional direction has been primed and needs conscious justification but they’re not interested in the painstaking detail of policy. They simply want action and a direction that rhetoric can provide, which in this case is supplied by a rejuvenated, almost fundamentalist Republicanism. In the wink of an eye it is forgotten that the last Republican administration was in large part responsible for the deficit they are all suffering from, whose free market stance made the wealthy even richer and caused the banks to fail, who pawned middle class homes to unscrupulous lenders. Nope, all gone, don’t remember a thing. So the wealthy provide the funds, because they want to be wealthier, Washington provides the direction, because we want to be back in power, and millions of good Americans provide the emotional power, because they want a better life. If only these three directions were in alignment, but they’re not.