Saturday, April 30, 2011

Obama and the Tea Party - A Different Twist

  
A few months ago, The New Republic carried an insightful review Kate Zernike's Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America by Kate Zernike.  A key passage seems relevant in the current round of Birther talk:

But more than just nostalgia for a whiter America fuels this tantrum. “I can’t believe this is the America I grew up in as a kid,” says one of Zernike’s subjects. Pages later, another one reminisces about her own childhood America: “People would talk to their neighbors, have block parties, there was less stress in life.” What is striking is that those testimonies came from a twenty-nine-year-old and sixty-six-year-old, respectively—childhoods spent decades apart, in Americas that looked different from each other. They eulogize not so much the common, long-gone America of their childhoods, but the state of childhood itself. The relentless hurtling away from the simplicities of youth is what the Tea Partiers rebel against. But the grown-up world, with its complications, compromises, and disappointments, is here to stay, which is a cruelty that no election can salve. 
~ Elbert Ventura, Teaism

Obama is the first president in decades to both honor the separation of powers (let Congress take the lead on budgets and legislative details) and talk to us as reasonable adults (not children).  Do we know how to engage in adult discourse? 

After decade of pandering and simplistic, emotional presentation of our options, is some of the anti-Obama ranting a childish reaction to rational, adult conversation?

Are we seeing a national, primarily-but-not-exclusively-right-wing temper tantrum?


Image Information: 
President Barack Obama smiles before speaking to the press in the Briefing Room of the White House April 27, 2011 in Washington, DC. US President Barack Obama released a long form version of his birth certificate after extended criticism by those who do not believe he was born in the United States.
(April 27, 2011 - Photo by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images North America)

1 comment:

  1. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. I think this is a very important observation. Children have temper tantrums when they feel out of control or when their desires are thwarted. In my own experience, I also watched my children grow fearful of their own emotions when in the throes of emotional outburst. One seems to feed on the other.

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