A Long-Expected Tea Party

Part 1: First Impressions

The first impression that I had of the tea partiers was of an overwhelming sea of whiteness. And middle-agedness. The Tea Party is the sexiest thing in politics in America at the moment, in the sense that anytime one of its members or leaders commit even minor acts, such as shopping at Whole Foods or expressing a view that some group or individual is racist, it is treated by the News Media as an Extremely Newsworthy Event, in a way that MY uninformed opinions rarely are. Not that I’m bitter. But despite its ‘sexiness’, the tea party itself looks like the extras from the Andy Griffith Show, if extras from the Andy Griffith Show wore matching American Flag shirts.

My previous experience with the Tea Party came mostly from T.V., and most of that came from short clips aired on the Daily Show or the Colbert Report. Judging from these sources, tea partiers spend most of their time saying the n-word to black congresspersons, making badly misspelled signs, voting out moderate Republicans, and yelling at suspected Muslims in the vicinity of Ground Zero. On the other hand, I have heard polls suggesting that tea partiers are middle class, more wealthy and educated than the national average, and around 50% of them believe their tax levels to be fair. This lead me to believe that most of the attendees at these events are political voyeurs, much like myself, who are going to these events because they expect to find crazy people and be entertained.

So I was interested to see what I would find in the crowd today. One thing that instantly struck me is that the Tea Party is for real—it’s definitely not just 800 people and some dedicated Fox News coverage. The crowd was enormous. Beck said in his speech that there were 500,000 people in the crowd (okay, he said that he heard that there were 500,000 people there), and I think 200,000-300,000 is a good estimate. People came from all over. I talked to people from Texas, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio, California, Utah, Oregon and Mississippi, and I’m sure just about every state had someone there. I’ve never seen such an awful line at the metro, and I was on the mall during the inauguration. One little girl in the crowd said as we got off the metro, “Mom, this line is even bigger than the line at Disney World!”. To which her mother replied “Yes, but this is for a good cause.” Elderly folks, young children, middle-aged couples, groups of four or five 60-ish women—any social unit that white people travel in was well-represented.

Which brings me back to the race thing. The Tea Party is, to me, a resident of Fairfax County (one of the most diverse places in America), staggeringly white. There were definitely a few persons of color in the crowd as well, but they were easily in the minority—as is a less-than-one-percent minority. There were a few African-Americans from Florida standing on the middle steps of the Lincoln Memorial, holding signs that read ‘Democrats Started the KKK’ and ‘Democrats Are the KKK’, but I’m not exactly sure where or if they fit into the Tea Party.

And then there’s the actual political rallying. The whole idea of a Tea Party rally is another thing that is a bit baffling to me. I have always assumed that protesting is something that college students do in order to get laid. Unless I misread their motives significantly, most of the attendees of Beck’s rally are past that stage in life. To be fair, they were also some of the most kind, friendly and cheerful ralliers I’ve ever met, although a few were vaguely suspicious of my Georgetown T-shirt. Everyone seemed to be in a good mood, even the mothers with three or four kids who had to stand out in the sun for several hours, after a very uncomfortable metro ride. There was no sign of political radicalism, and the several black or Muslim people I noticed seemed to move through the crowd without attracting any more attention than anyone else did. There were a few signs I saw of Obama with a Hitler moustache, and one person handing out flyers had a sign denouncing him as a Socialist Racist Bigot, but other than that, no real political mudslinging. I found out afterwards that the organizers had asked folks not to bring signs, so perhaps without this edict, the skyline would have been festooned with ‘Keep Gummint out of my Medicaire’ banners, but somehow I find this hard to believe.

And then there was Beck’s speech. Which was the only speech I actually heard in full (the sound equipment setup was not perfect). I was expecting something much more political. He mostly talked about how much the laundry list of American Heroes inspires him and should inspire us and how we’ve always relied on God’s grace alone and the individual can accomplish anything, and more or less a bunch of other patriotic, conservative platitudes. Although, to his credit, he delivered them with force, timing and grace that I did not know he possessed. And the crowd loved it.