We are all Spartacus

16. January 2010 · Comments Off on We are all Spartacus · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

You know, it amuses me no end, checking out the comment sections on various websites and blogs, especially when the commenter start to go to town, with regard to tea parties, tea partiers and the whole Tea Party thing. After the obligatory snigger about teabagging, I find out that Tea Partiers are screeching-angry, hateful, racist, rude, Nazis, sister-humping rednecks who hate everyone else, and most especially the fact that we have a black president. That apparently is supposed to be the thing that sticks in our craws the most – I guess the oh-so-observant commenters have missed the sign that said, “We don’t like his white half, either!” Oh, and we’re all old, and/or uneducated losers, and the Tea Party rallies are more of a mass temper-tantrum, there’s only a handful of them, and they’ve all been deluded by Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, or perhaps by the Republican Party, and we’re secretly being lead by all of the above, or maybe Sarah Palin and her little dog, too . . . So they can be safely ignored and scored by all right-thinking people.

Seriously, I’m almost sure that none of the commentators holding forth in this manner, from the high – say, the New York Times, down to the very low, which would be some whacked-out Kos diarist, or possibly some more than usually-deranged denizen of Hollywierdland, like Janeane Garafolo – have actually ever gone to a mass Tea Party event. Nope – I’d be surprised as heck, to find out they are opining from actual, real-world encounters with Tea Partiers.

See, folks – I’ve been to one monster Tea Party event, a good few smaller ones, worked on media strategy for a metropolitan Tea Party, and helped pound out their long-term strategy. I have something to base my opinion of Tea Parties and Tea Partiers on – such as the evidence of my own lying eyes. While it might make a portion of the public and the old-line media happy as a pig in swill to believe the angry-racist-red-necking-dumbass-sheeple meme, and to agree with all the other voices in the echo-chamber . . . I have to say up-front – y’all aren’t doing yourself any favors. Especially, you won’t have done yourself a favor, when the Obama Administration, and all its works and all its ways goes down faster than a Japanese carrier at the Battle of Midway. You won’t be able to figure out why, having been blinded by willful mis-perception. Reality, she is a right bitch, and she will eventually crash any party of the delusional.

Mind you, there is a smidgeon or sometimes more to justify the stereotypes: yep, there are Rushbo and Glenn Beck fans among the Tea Partiers, and a goodly number of evangelical Right-to-Life types; there are Republican establishments and politicians who have been quick to grasp the advantages of being perceived as having something to do with the Tea Party, and lord help us, there are a scattering of screeching, ignorant ranters and racists who call themselves Tea Partiers. But to assume that is the truth and sum of all is to delude yourself – and if you are a media person or an academician saying this, than you are deluding the public that you are supposed to be informing.

Here’s the real deal: the Tea Parties have a couple of unifying principles: small government, fiscally-responsible and strict constitutionalists pretty much says it in one sentence. Everything else is secondary, and at this point, kind of a distraction. Blessedly most are not distracted – although because of the sheer number of passionate people involved in a Tea Party does mean that sometimes contrary opinions are involved. Groups split, morph, form other groups. Among the flavors of political opinion drawn into the Tea Party brew are libertarians, people who run small businesses, generally middle-to-working-class, veterans, people who pay taxes, people who are angered by the same old, same old. There is anger as deep as an ocean about politicians who seem to be more of an aristocracy, spending decades in office doing what is best to secure reelection rather than what is best for the country. Many of the Tea Partiers that I know are just as angry at Democrats as they are Republicans – and they come in all colors and religious backgrounds. Myself, I’ve been describing the Tea Party movement for months as a herd of cats, all motivated by pretty much the same thing, and going in more or less the same direction.

Tea Partiers may also rightly be described as angry; there is temper-tantrum angry, but there is also purposeful and focused anger. The sort that I see within my Tea Party is the purposeful, goal-oriented kind. Their focus and their strategy – and it is a focus, not spasms of temporary anger about administration policies – is to search out, and elect people who will uphold the principles of small government, fiscal responsibility and adherence to the Constitution. In other words, they are starting from the bottom up. This is not spectacular; this doesn’t make a flashy television statement, or make it easy to follow, if you are not directly involved. There is no known leader, really – oh, everyone in the lefty commentariat goes on about Sarah Palin or Glenn Beck, or Rushbo, but they aren’t really our leaders. There are no leaders. We are all leaders, each of us pushing on towards a goal, according to our own inspiration and our own beliefs. Such beliefs are buttressed not by Fox Television, but in the provisions of the Constitution, which we are – if not familiar with it before – are studying with a renewed attention and appreciation.

And I sense, this is what may prove to be much for frightening to the powers that be, the old-line media sitting in easy and ignorant judgment, or the internet commenter who has enough actual first-hand knowledge about the Tea Party to fill up a small cheap tea bag. Not that we are all they have proclaimed us to be – but that we aren’t. And that there are a lot of us, working quietly and with intelligent focus within our communities, picking up the trash after our protest events, seriously applying ourselves to the intricacies of applying to be precinct chair, or running for local office, recalling to ourselves what it meant to be truly politically involved, instead of hiring through pro-forma elections some empty cipher with good hair and a smooth line of patter, to go to Washington and bring home enough pork to be elected again, one way or an other.

Yes – we are all Spartacus. And there are a lot of us, who have remembered what it is to be citizens. Not subjects.

A Gentleman from the NY Times Looks Down from a High Balcony

05. January 2010 · Comments Off on A Gentleman from the NY Times Looks Down from a High Balcony · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

And raises a lorgnette with trembling hands and wonders “Who are these people?” And then scurries back into the safety of his cubicle and tries to explain it all to his readers, who promptly break out in an epidemic of pearl-clutching in the resulting comments not seen since the days of Margo Dumont and the Marx brothers.

Of course, since this is David Brooks, the NY Times token “conservative” * whom I sort of visualize as being kept around the august premises of the NY Times as a live exhibit in an upper-crust menagerie – a sort of miniature, well-clipped, tamed and polished pet buffalo, neutered and well-housebroken, so that everyone else can look at him and coo “Oh, so that’s what one of them look like . . . really, they don’t appear all that dangerous, do they, Pinchy?”

Yeah, he’s a real expert on tea parties, and the people who run them, having noted magisterially from his high balcony that, well, yes – there are an awful lot of people down there, who appear to be a little upset, and oh- the horror – they are not being led by . . . well, anybody, let alone the best people . . . and well, what do they know? The poor dears, how can they really cope, without one of the well-educated, well-heeled, well-known and duly anointed to lead them? Oh, the horror – where is my fainting couch and my smelling salts! They actually have the nerve to think they can think for themselves!

And the comments get even more insulting, although I should be used to it now; the same old, same old – just a bunch of old white people, racist to the core, tools of the Republican Party, Beck & Limbaugh-worshipping, barely-literate, drooling, sister-humping, gun-loving morons, all they have is unfocused anger . . . oh, and a new twist: apparently the Tea Partiers are the new incarnation of Weimar-era Nazis – and we all know how all that worked out, don’t we?

Of course, this would have to be the same day that NPR posted an antimated cartoon which combined ignorance and insult to such a degree that the comment thread has now coalesced into a mass so dense that it threatens to sink into the earth’s core and emerge out the other side . . . of course, at a guess, a portion of the commenters are outraged Tea Party sympathizers who floated in on a link from Da Blogfaddah, and the rest are NPR regulars, a large portion of whom think that Garrison Keiller – evidence to the contrary – is razor-sharp cutting edge and still funny. Basically, another heaping helping of the above. SSDD**, as the saying goes. Or maybe just SS, different sclerotic old media dinosaur with delusions of detachment and adequacy.

If all you know is what you read in the NY Times, and hear on NPR, well then … you are a bit limited, I think.

All righty then – here’s the scoop, Brooksie. And Pinchy and Muffy and Buffy, and all of the rest of you wanna-be aristos with three last names and an Ivy degree. By all means go on believing all the tripe displayed in the comments on these two items. Go on believing all that balderdash about moronic, directionless, Nazi-like racists. Do, please – it’s what your chosen dispensers of news have fed to you, either explicitly or implicitly, through laziness or chosen ideology over the last year or longer. Pass over any evidence to the contrary. Ignore anyone who points out in a small, still voice that the Tea Party people are small-government, fiscally responsible constitutionalists, of all colors, and religious persuasions, and that many of them are doing a sudden crash course in political activism at the local, nuts’n’bolts level. And that yes, they are angry – but not ignorant, and not unfocused.

That flaccid little pink thing which they may very well be handing to you all after the next mid-term election? That will be your ass. Try not to look too surprised – the pleasure will have been all ours.

* Viciously skeptical quote marks
** SSDD – Same S**t, Different Day

An Oddly Satisfactory Christmas

26. December 2009 · Comments Off on An Oddly Satisfactory Christmas · Categories: Ain't That America?, Critters, Domestic, General, Politics, Tea Time

It was shaping up not to be a very merry Christmas for us, under circumstances which at first appeared even more strained than last year, when I was still working at the hell-hole job – a job which brought in a regular paycheck, but earned under circumstances which . . . well, least said, soonest forgotten. (Never forgotten though – but leaving me with a burning determination to henceforward earn a living doing work that pleases me, not work which I hate every second of every minute of every hour performing.)

This year I am working for a teensy boutique press. I thought we would be able to finish one project in time for a Christmas release, which would earn me enough of the profits from it to pay some bills, buy some presents and pay enough that I could afford the drive to California. That did not work out – the book will most likely be delivered to the client by mid-January. Dad absolutely freaked at the thought of me driving to California alone, (Blondie being in school and needing to care for the pets!) and Mom’s hospitable nature is worn to tatters by Christmas, anyway. So, gave up on that plan early last week, and Blondie and I spent Christmas at home . . . our home. The one with dogs and cats, and a Christmas tree which has seen all the ornaments removed to the upper 2/3rds of the tree, due to the Lesser Weevil’s tail, and the cats’ proclivity to knock down and play with those ornaments within in reach.

Even with not finishing that book, I have two clients who are paying me to edit their own memoirs, a possible contract to ghost-write another book, beginning in January, and a regular client who pays me for content for a real-estate blog; plus a constant trickle of royalties for the Trilogy, and Truckee’s Trail. All things considered, I’m economically better off than I was last year – or I may be, once everyone gets back to work after the holidays!

We even were able to afford a bit of a splash for Christmas. Through another member of our local Red Hat Ladies chapter, Blondie scored three days of work, delivering for Edible Arrangements. Last year, no one was hiring temporary workers for Christmas, so this year she had given up entirely. And I had my royalty checks, and the usual generous gift from Mom and Dad. We also had another unexpected and totally unlooked-for blessing. We did a good deed, agreed to do a favor for someone, almost in a fit of absent-mindedness. I was scribbling away on one of my writing projects, with an eye on the pizza dough rising – (yeah, our family tradition has pizza for dinner on Christmas Eve. We do home-made, with whatever we like on it, by god! Even anchovies!)

One of my nearby neighbors pounded on the door – totally ignoring the doorbell, and it’s a mystery to me why people don’t see that, since it has a little illuminated button anyway – and explained, breathlessly that as he and his wife were about do hit the road, could we do them a favor, do a good deed over Christmas, if we were going to be at home over the holiday. It was about a stray dog, he said. As he was loading the trunk of their car with luggage, this dog came up to him. A nice little black dog, sort of poodle-ish, very friendly and well-mannered, and he thought it might be the same dog as was being advertised on a flyer attached to various mailboxes and light-posts. At this very moment, his wife was feeding the dog, but they absolutely had to hit the road in the next few minutes – could we keep the dog, and call the number on the flyer, and see to returning this nice little dog to it’s owner? Well – it’s not like we haven’t done that before. Sometimes I have thought that Blondie and I are magnets for every lost dog in our neighborhood, and beyond. On particular memorable weekend, there were four of them returned to owners; we have gotten particularly experienced at this. It’s almost a routine; check for tags, call the clinic which issued them, call the local clinics, call the various voluntary groups. If it’s a weekday, take the dog to the nearest service for a chip-check, put an ad in the paper, and walk around the neighborhood with the animal, asking everyone we know if they recognize it . . . this works, it really does. We have kept stray dogs in the back yard, and in the house, never for more than a few days, before finding the owner – usually people who have been frantically searching for their pet. There is something about a dog which is cherished, and beloved; they behave themselves, they gratefully eat the kibble in the bowl, make friends with our dogs, tolerate the cats and generally . . . behave like dogs who have people who are missing them, and ransacking the neighborhood.

Blondie came home, just as the neighbor was going down the walk – he was relieved no end to be able to pass off this project on us, for he couldn’t leave a strange dog alone in their house with their own dogs, unsupervised over the weekend, and what if the owners were going away for the holiday weekend? So Blondie took the telephone number from the poster, and called, leaving a message which was returned in a few minutes. Yes, they had been looking for their little black schnauzer, he was ten years old, neatly groomed, but no collar, neutered and with unclipped ears – they would come immediately and look at the dog which seemed to match their description. We had cheerfully put amongst our menagerie. He was very sweet and well-mannered; he sat obediently for a dog-treat and allowed the cats to dubiously sniff at him.

He had been missing for five days, as it turned out – and his owners’ family was frantic. This was sentimental movie material, when the husband and older daughter walked into the living-room, and he scampered up to them; of course he was theirs. And how wonderful to get him back safely on Christmas Eve, although where he had been for five days was anyone’s guess. It had rained on Wednesday night, and then been bitterly cold, and he was a sheltered indoor dog, for the most part. The owners said, they had posted a reward, for whoever returned him – would we accept it. We’ve only been offered a reward once – and the first time, we were very noble and turned it down. This time, I admitted that, well – Blondie’s a student, and I’m an erratically employed writer, so, yes, we would accept a reward. We truly expected it to be in the range of 25$ or so. When consulted, the neighbor who had left the situation in our hands didn’t want a share. Although we really hadn’t done all that much in this case, we had taken an awful lot of trouble on previous occasions, with all the other strays. We could consider this our cumulative reward, for all we had done for other dogs, and feel all right with accepting it. The husband thanked us again, and said they would be back in a bit.

Which they were, this time with the wife, who has been papering the other side of our neighborhood with flyers; the dog was her particular pet. They all teared up again, thanked us profusely, admired our own dogs, told us how worried they had been, and how desperately they had been searching . . . and to get him back again on Christmas Eve. They left us with a Christmas card, which contained a check for an absolutely stunning amount . . . so, yes, we were enabled to have a very pleasant Christmas, knowing that our casually-accepted good deed would help us pay a couple of bills, too.

It’s just that last year, outside my own personal situation – everything seemed more hopeful. We could cross our fingers and hope that B. Obama, once inaugurated, could grow into the job of president, that maybe having come out of the Chicago political machine would not be so much of a bad omen. After all, he did seem intelligent, politically adroit, reasonable and well-spoken – or at least the people in his proposed administration seemed to be. All the political experts, media personalities, and big intellectual authorities kept assuring us so Harry Truman came out of another such big-city machine, and he turned out OK. We could hope a little. Last year at this time, I had never heard of a Tea Party, save in the history books, would never have considered being party of a protest, carrying a sign, or sending a message to my congressman. And now . . . here we are, not yet on the edge of an abyss, but fearing that one will open up at our feet, any moment now. I am now haunted by a line a year-end roundup by Wretchard at Belmont Club, enjoy the champagne, this year – for by this time next year, we will be eating the glass.

Feel the Love

17. December 2009 · Comments Off on Feel the Love · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Tea Time, That's Entertainment!

. . . As well as the jaw-dropping, industrial-strength, armor-plated ignorance displayed in the comments appended to this story. Quite honestly, I ought to have become used to this, since the usual tools used to have about the same misconceptions – and probably still do – about military. All of this industrial-grade bigotry on open display, without ever actually coming anywhere near the military, a military base, or any members of the military. So, I very likely am right that the most virulently hostile of the commenters here quoted, and which I have seen in other internet venues have never actually come to a Tea party rally, or personally know anyone involved with a local Tea Party. And of course, the most ironical part is that these people very likely take a great deal of pride in how open-minded and tolerant they are.

Just a sample, for your delectation:

I DESPISE the fascist tea-party movement. If they get into office, this country is going the way of the Nazi party, in essence. No thank you. They are the most dangerous and evil movement in the United States since the John Birch Society, which they very much resemble. – Susan in Redmond, WA

Didn’t the Nazi party start kind of like this? Desperation is scary to say the least. – Dash Riprock

A bunch of bible banging – racist – right wing domestic terrorists – running around with tea bags stapled to their foreheads? – Feisty Redhead Roselle

And then, of course, I realized that a lot of them must be fans of the recent seasons of Law & Order, which explains quite a lot.

Clouds of Illusion

14. September 2009 · Comments Off on Clouds of Illusion · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Rant, Tea Time, That's Entertainment!

I am amused to note a lot of amusing new and old media fall-out, after the massive Tea-party inspired rally on the Mall on Saturday – which, depending on which media outlet and which political orientation you read – may have been as many as two million people or just one or two of them walking a million times around the Capitol Building. They were all carrying Nazi symbols, and Confederate banners and getting their hate on, according to some of the more … ahem … outspoken commentators, such as this one, whose illustration for his post takes the absolute cake for condescension and arrogance … although apparently, the Tea Partiers did pick up the trash when they were done, for which I think they ought to get some credit. And no, I didn’t read much past the ‘teabagger’ reference in the linked column. That’s according to my new principle of considering that as akin to the n-word. This Daggatt person is supposed to be “a meticulous political blogger” according to David Brin’s blog at Open Salon, and offer a “ a truly excellent appraisal.” Yeah, that David Brin. Guess he doesn’t get out all that much.

Quite honestly, I am left shaking my head in weary disbelief, reading the picture that is painted of the Tea Party and conservatives/libertarians in general on the leftist blogs and media – in a similar way that I used to be shaking my head at the portrayal of the military, in similar venues. People would write the most astonishing things, insist that every word was true, and the most horrible things were going on in the military – and couldn’t accept that what they were saying wasn’t anything like the military that I actually lived in. You’d think that a military veteran and someone active in the Tea Party would have some credibility with them, for … you know, actually being there, and being able to speak with authority regarding their particular concern … but no. Their minds were already made up – and who should I believe, them or my lying eyes?

Coincidentally, there is another ruckus brewing – fortunately this involves Hollywood and it’s not Kanye West, so it’s fairly minor, rating only a long and amusing thread at John Scalzi’s Whatever. Apparently the pearls are being clutched, over the inability of this film to find an American distributor because – get this! Those fundamentalist American yahoos are just so anti-the-teaching-of evolution that no one will touch a costume drama about Charles Darwin with a ten-foot pole. Oh, spare me the attack of the vapors, people – the grownups in this country who eschew Michael Bay and all his works and his ways eat up this high-toned, historical costume-drama Merchant Ivory stuff as if it were a quart of Ben and Jerry’s Chunky Monkey, and don’t you even try telling me otherwise.

See, both these parties appear to have something in common – besides a stratospherically high estimation of their own superiority – and that is, they think they know something, and everything they read, hear on TV, and at cocktail party chit-chat with their friends all reinforces that thing that they think they know. The producers of “Creation” – or more likely, the marketing guru who they have hired to gin up some controversy, attract some attention, and with luck, snag an American distribution deal, all know that Americans (to quote the acerbic Mr. Scalzi) are knuckle-dragging, mouth-breathing Creationists. All nice, creative, brilliant and witty Brits know this, and they know this because they read it in their newspapers and hear it on the BBC, and all their nice, creative, brilliant and witty friends say so.

And so it is also with our very own dear media and intellectual elite: they just know that the Tea Party folks are ignorant, racist, knuckle-dragging hicks, who are puppets of (pick one or all) Fox TV, the Republican Party, or the insurance industry, because all the very best people say so, and really … the New York Times say so, and so does NPR. Well, there you go. I think that what these people have done is to create a simulacrum in their own minds of what an American is, or a semi-libertarian conservative Constitutionalist is, which has some tiny and almost coincidental resemblance to what they are, really … and for one reason or another, it’s just easier, or more comforting to believe in the simulacrum.

Well, it’s kinder than thinking they are all just nucking futs, which was my first reaction. Hey, I at least did the courtesy of at least trying to be understanding. I live to serve, people.

On the Uses of Certain Epithets

30. August 2009 · Comments Off on On the Uses of Certain Epithets · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Tea Time

So, I’d put it out there that a liberal commenting on the Tea Parties, or hoping to have some sort of dialogue with a member of a Tea Party, and using the derisive term “tea-bagger” is rather like a white racist using the word “ni**er” in reference to a discussion on civil rights.

Discuss.

The Politics of Fear

18. August 2009 · Comments Off on The Politics of Fear · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Tea Time

Still – like da Blogfaddah – tracking the fall-out from the raucous and rancorous town-hall meetings about Obama-care. It kind of restores ones faith in the general good sense of the mostly-silent middle, knowing that not everyone is paying more attention to American Idol or whatever the current mainstream TV fixation is. Not everyone drank deep of the hopey-changy kool-aid last November, or listened to the siren-voices of our legacy media, who were mostly on their knees with their eyes fixed adoringly on the One. My faith in that old saw about fooling some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but not being able to fool all the people all the time is somewhat restored. Yes, indeedy – people are paying attention, getting involved in political matters and speaking up, just as we were always told to do by our high school civics teachers, and the plummy-voiced media plutocrats at NPR.

Except that what ordinary here-to-fore-uninvolved people are saying isn’t what the Administration and it’s acolytes wanted to hear, and good lord – are they screeching about that! Nazis and KKKers and haters, oh my! Nancy Pelosi looks like she bit into a breakfast taco and discovered half a cockroach in it, and the rest of the Democratic Party leadership aren’t looking any happier. Henry Waxman looks about to die of dyspepsia … say, does he sleep during the day in a sealed coffin half-filled with Transylvanian soil? Just asking – even when he smiles, he still gives me the creeps.

And the legacy media piling on, along with the leftish or Kossack side of the blogosphere, all screeching together like a chorus of howler monkeys: all those rude and inappropriately-dressed people showing up, asking disconcerting questions and getting in the face of those poor, well-intentioned overworked, innocent representatives who are selflessly only doing their best, and are too busy with their exhausting schedule to actually read the damned legislation. Of course, all those pushy people just must be racists, and organized by the health insurance companies, or the Republican Party, or Fox news, they just must be repeating the lies that Rush Limbaugh told them … really, it infuriating but mostly sad to read much of this, and to also know that the people saying it will in the next breath be congratulating themselves on being so intelligent, independent, perceptive and non-judgmental.

Like J.Lawson, who commended on my last post – and I have also tried to disabuse certain of our internet acquaintances of this kind of delusion, but to no avail. There’s this hysterical insistence that what they say must be so, and after a certain point one just kind of gives up. It’s almost as if they are angry, too angry to be reasoned with. After thinking it over a little more, and digesting comments on blogs like Belmont Club and Neo-Necon, I am thinking that a lot of this anger can be chalked up to fear.

Fear of having been made a fool of, fear of having anchored yourself with chains to a doomed piece of legislation, and to a hollow man in a good suit, fear of embarrassment at having to admit that you made a mistake, and even a good chunk of embarrassment at being outflanked by thousands of ordinary citizens using your own tactics against you. There is also fear of being made to apologize to people you have insulted and demeaned, or of having the dirty tricks you used against others being used against you and yours. And what might be the biggest fear of all, with elected officials and the legacy media who do their bidding, especially when it touches on the Tea Parties: that there is no real leader, that the Tea Party is some huge political amoeba, moving at its own pace and in it’s own time. Imagine that – no leader, to be isolated and cut down with ridicule, no central authority to be corrupted or interdicted. There is no one person or power with a collar and a choke-chain exerting control, as if anyone could control a swarm of bees! While some of us made a hobby out of being local gadflies on some issue or other, most Tea Party volunteers weren’t on anyone’s political radar – so here is this large group of people who came out of apparently nowhere, controlled by no one, and accountable only to our own conscience and set of beliefs. That has got to be as scary as hell to politicians and the commentariat who love them.

Myself, I’m having two scoops of schaudenfreude, with a sprinkling of toasted almonds, some whipped cream and a maraschino cherry on top.

All the News

18. July 2009 · Comments Off on All the News · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Media Matters Not, Politics, Rant, Tea Time

… that’s fit to ignore in the desperate hope that it will go away. So here there was a big Tea Party push on yesterday, to have moderate numbers of Tea Party protesters show up in the street at the local offices of every elected federal official in the land at around midday. Not an inconsiderable effort, considering that it was nationwide, in the middle of a working day, and that most of the people making that effort – at least those of us in San Antonio – have day jobs. Perhaps the hours are flexible, or maybe not – but we all have day jobs. And there were no less than five offices in Greater San Antonio to cover, but we had enough people to send to every one, no need to make a progressive protest from one to one to another. Me, I went to Charlie Gonzalez’ office, in the Federal Building on Durango; it’s my second protest there. At this rate, the policemen routinely on duty there are getting to be old pals with the Tea Partiers. I met about thirty other people there, nice assortment of ages, good mixture of Anglo and Hispanic, including one lady who came with her sister, visiting from out of town who wanted to get in on the Party, and her school-aged daughter. She abominates Charlie Gonzalez, by the way – she has communicated quite often with his office, and received nothing for her pains but mealy-mouthed evasion in print.

So, gather with the flags and signs, stay on the sidewalk and in the shade as much as possible, the guy who organized it had thought to bring a cooler with ice and individual water bottles, and five of us went in to present our petition and a list of questions to the staff in his office. The good Congress-critter was not there, of course. I have to say that although his staff really couldn’t answer any of the questions – the office-manager elected to deal with us had that barely-veiled panicky expression of someone without any real authority or guidance shoved out in front to deal with an unexpected development, and kept referring us to his Washington staff for answers. They were at least courteous and polite. We were not received as the Tea Partiers in St. Louis, where Senator Claire McCaskill’s office staff rolled down the blinds, locked the doors and called the cops — way to treat constituents, people.

(I guaran-damn-tee that every one of those people, their family members, friends and neighbors will remember how they were treated, when election time rolls around, Senator. Word to the wise, and better have a nice sit-down come-to-Jesus talk with your office staff, too)

We fielded about the same numbers to the other federally elected official’s offices in San Antonio– that of John Cornyn, Kay Bailey Hutchison, Ciro Rogriguez and Henry Cuellar. From a quick scan of reports and updates on Da Blogfaddah, that looks about par, for protests all across the countryside; mainstream big media news is absent – bizarrely so, considering the cumulative numbers of people, and the numbers of events. Last night, elements of the SA Tea Party was burning up the e-mail, trying to figure out why there was no coverage; not at any one of our events. Nada, zip, zilch, although I had sent out three different releases over the three days before the protest: I know that they were received, and I know that we have gotten coverage before; I had a call from the Spanish-language channel, Univision almost immediately, and someone from KENS 5 called on Thursday morning, who didn’t leave a message and never called back. Perhaps this reporter – about the only newspaper reporter I could find through the miracle of google might have the right explanation of this curious turn of events.

Or, on the other hand, it could be one of those untouchable things like the l’affaire Swiftboat, of the 2004 Presidential campaign, when John Kerry’s wartime Navy comrades all emerged, almost to a man portraying him as the Frank Burns/Eddie Haskell of the Vietnam era Navy Swiftboat service. That was all over the internet, all over the milblogs, and a matter of most lively discussion, barely a word of which emerged into the mainstream print and broadcast media for months.

Still – exasperating to contemplate: simultaneous grass-roots rallies of ordinary and normally non-activist citizens, all across the country – and nary a word in the traditional media. But let ACORN or Moveon.org belch heavily … and like a cheap plaid suit, the camera crews are all over them instanter.

Texas Tea Party

06. July 2009 · Comments Off on Texas Tea Party · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local, Tea Time

Well, I can’t use the “meanwhile, back at the ranch” line, since I used it for the last post – but the 4th of July Tea party at the Rio Cibolo Ranch went pretty well. We had a crowd of 5,000 turn out, in hundred-degree plus heat, to sit under the trees and in the main pavilion, listening to the bands and to our speakers … oh, dear, it was a long program, and having the opening ceremonies start in the late afternoon – when the heat is at the absolute worst – was not such a bright idea. But we had a lot to go through, and the bands played sets in between times, to break up the solid walls of talk, and everyone sat around drinking cool drinks. The kids played in the shade and ran around doing those kid games, with Frisbees and rode in a tractor-pulled wagon sitting on bales of hay … I think every time I looked beyond the edge of the crowd it was to see that wagon go past, full of kids. I imagine they were taking the kids down to the meadow where a herd of longhorns are pastured … that and the buffalo. Yes, the ranch has a buffalo – and darned as if it doesn’t stand exactly in the same pose as the buffalo on their logo.

I had sort of a press rendezvous point, behind one of the small banquet-halls, with a terrace cantilevered out over the edge of Cibolo Creek, which is fairly deep and looks like pale green jade, at that point. There was a nice breeze, which came just often enough to take the edge off the heat. I spent some of the first part of the party there, with my blog-pal, The Fat Guy, and a crew from Univision – a cameraman and a newscaster, a slender young woman who was the only woman I saw during the whole day with the courage to wear high heels. Otherwise, it was sandals, crocks and tennis. TFG posted his report here, and his pictures here, so you can pretty much get the idea of what the main venue looked like for much of the day. There were three other TV stations there also – the local affiliates of ABC, CBS and Fox, and a writer and cameraman from the Express News – the cameraman took a lovely series of photos –much nicer than anything I could have taken (Link here

Of course, the biggest element in the program was Governor Perry signing off on our “Contract with the Constitution” – a statement of principles, which we would like to present to every elected politician or prospective politician. If they sign off on it – good and well; if not … well, then, that says something. And if they sign off on it, and then don’t keep to it … that says something else. Up until the last minutes, we were under the impression that he would just zoom right in, introduce Marcus Luttrell, sign off on the Contract and zoom out again. He actually stayed for about three hours, some of it in rustic little banquet hall where the VIP dinner was being held, and the rest in the backstage area. When the VIP dinner was over and a lot of the guests were scattering to their seats in front of the stage, Blondie and I went and bought plates of chopped brisket on a bun from the food vendor, and brought them in to eat in the relative coolness of the hall. We sat next to the elderly lady known to us all as Matt’s Mom; Matt is the webmaster for the Tea Party Committee. His Mom comes to all the meetings and events with him. On Matt’s Mom’s other side was Other Matt, the husband of another Committee member who was wearing his 82nd Airborne baseball cap. After a bit, Governor Perry came over, and pulled up a chair opposite and began ragging on Other Matt, the old paratrooper for jumping out of perfectly good airplanes; the Governor had been an Air Force transport pilot, it transpired. So we had quite a frivolous and merry conversation, with Blondie ragging back at him, when he confessed that he had broken a collarbone lately in a bike accident – but not a motorcycle, a mountain bike, and I recommended that he give up on the VIP chicken dinner, and try some of the brisket from the vendor outside. Not quite sure why he glommed on to us, out of the people left in the hall – possibly because we didn’t want to talk politics or ask for a picture.

Anyway, eventually we went outside to the back stage, with bottles and bottles of ice water, and waited everyone’s turn to make their speeches, and the Governor to sign off on the contract. … It turns out that Senator Jeff Wentworth was also there, and also signed off on the Contract, only I was too busy taking pictures. Blondie took a good picture of Evan Sayet, and I took a very nice one of Steve Vaus, with his guitar in hand, waiting to go on at the very last. (With luck, they will be up on the Tea Party website soon.) And then after that, there were fireworks, quite spectacular and very close, appearing just over the top of the main pavilion, and neatly framed by a pair of trees. It was near to a full moon; after sundown the heat slackened until it was just comfortably warm. All in all, I think most people had a wonderful time at the party – the news coverage was good, and the Rio Cibolo people were very pleased. It would be nice to come back every year and do a 4th of July party there; but maybe start later in the day. The heat was so bad, and we both spent so much time running around in it, we were still exhausted on Sunday.

Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch

02. July 2009 · Comments Off on Meanwhile, Back at the Ranch · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun and Games, General, Local, Tea Time, That's Entertainment!

Plans for the 4th of July Tea Party proceed apace, although mercifully for all concerned, this will not be anything like the Tax Day Tea Party. It won’t be downtown in Alamo Plaza for one, and it won’t be 15-20,000 people, all crammed together in front of a historical building on a warm spring afternoon …. No, no, no no – doing all that again on a Texas July afternoon would be like an open-air Black Hole of Calcutta, as much as that sounds like a contradiction in terms. I was trying to wriggle through the packed crowd in front of the entrance to the Hyatt at about 5:30 on that day. There was no way you could have passed a piece of paper in between the people massed in front of that stage … so just as well that the 4th of July Tea Party will be out in the country. Yes, it will be hot. It’s July in South Texas, it’ll be hot, just like it’s cold in January at the North Pole. Some things just ought not to need saying; they just are.

But the Rio Cibolo Ranch is out in the gentle-rolling country, a little east of that ring-road that marks the farthest outer boundary of San Antonio. In April the meadows around the various venues were green – the Cibolo is a little more of a creek, more like a baby river- and the groves of pecan and oak trees around were thick and shady. There are small gardens all around the two smaller buildings, a horseshoe pitch and an area to play Frisbee golf. The biggest building is a huge pavilion with a stage at one end – we will have a couple of local bands, and Evan Sayet to MC the evening’s speeches: Marcus Luttrell is one of them, and so is Joe The Plumber, he who once was a private citizen who had the temerity to ask The One an impertinent question during a campaign photo-op. He’s been a mini-celebrity ever since; the volunteer who has been organizing the event and who has been talking to him now and again says he is a really amusing person, and does great on the radio.

Doesn’t have quite the eye-ball attraction quotient of Glenn Beck and the Nuge, though – which might be a blessing, since we don’t know where we would have put all the fans and their cars, out among the fields and cows; it’s also proved to be a bit more of a chore, attracting the fickle attention of the big media outlets – such as they are, in San Antonio: most of said attention will come in the last couple of days. The local big-city paper, the Express News is still oohing and ahhing over our new mayor’s intentions to be in the Gay Pride Parade, which will be around midday on the 4th. We have formally invited Hizzonor to the Tea Party, and await his response with considerable anticipation. If he attends, or sends regrets only – it will be amusing for us, either way. I am getting ready to face the media hoards, one more time – so blogging over the weekend will be as light as it has been this week. Sorry – have to save the country, you know. Or the cheerleader, or something like that.

Later PS: Just been informed that Gov. Perry of Texas is coming to our modest little tea party event … so ummm … I may not be able to come up for a breath for the next two days…

The News Making Machinery

10. June 2009 · Comments Off on The News Making Machinery · Categories: Domestic, Fun and Games, General, Local, Politics, Tea Time

I am reminded this morning of the old axiom about law and sausage – if you are fond of either one of them you’d best not watch either one being made This also applies to news; if you are a consumer of it, you just don’t want to watch it being made. And also of the other understanding, so often noted by bloggers recently: that would be the one about how one can be intimately involved in an event, or even just present at it – but the way that brief snippets are presented afterward by the news media present something so different from what you experienced.

All righty, then – yesterday, elements of the San Antonio Tea Party had a protest in front of Senator John Cornyn’s office in downtown San Antonio: basically, our aim was to encourage him to step up to the plate when it came to reviewing Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s fitness for the Supreme Court.

This was how the story played on one local news channel which covered it:

And the local Fox affiliate (which doesn’t have the video portion of the story in easily linkeable format wrote it up this way, on their website:

“The confirmation hearing for supreme court justice nominee. Sonya Sotomayor is now set for July 13th. Here in San Antonio, those in favor and against her nomination confronted each other in front of Senator John Cornyn’s office. As Yami Virgin shows us. The exchange got so heated police had to get involved.”

Yep – for about ten minutes we had a dueling bullhorn thing going on, between our group and about three pro-Sotomayor partisans; one of whom was, so one of the policemen told me, a professional protester of long-experience and an even longer arrest record. And yes, they did step in and tell us all very firmly to stop it with the bullhorns. Not that it stopped the protest in the least, for despite how the news channels framed it – the protest went on for another hour or so, albeit at a lower decibel level.

And where, you ask, was your fearless media rep, Sgt. Mom, in all of this? Oh, yes – I was there too, not that there is much evidence on the final edited video coverage on either of the news reports, and yes, I did look for any evidence that I was. I’m not completely without vanity, you know, and I had dressed up a bit. I did spend a good few minutes in front of their cameras. Efficiently, both camera crews taped me, side by side; which was nice, as I didn’t have to repeat myself. I was speaking in quiet and reasonable tones, outlining the various reasons that we had for doing this, our very real reservations about Justice Sotomayer’s ability to be fair and impartial, given her record in various cases, and her associations and assorted public statements. And yes, Senator Cornyn is theoretically one of the good guys, but we wished to remind him of who he worked for, that we were constituents with issues that we wanted to see addressed, and apparently the only way to get the attention of Washington insiders these days – as well as that of the legacy news media – was to make a fuss on the sidewalk.

All of this, as I said – in quiet, respectful and measured tones… none of which wound up being included in the finished broadcast stories. Of course; passion and raised voices draw the eyeballs, shedding lots of heat and not much light on the subject.

I have better hopes for serious consideration from the two guys with the cable access show, who spent some serious time with everyone – even taping a long dialog between one of our members and one of the Sotomayor partisans, a conversation which was conducted with decorum and which will probably turn out to be much more informative, all the way around.

Oh, and we did present a petition with a great many signatures to one of Senator Cornyn’s assistants – a young man who seemed to be acquainted with the concept of ‘mau mauing the flack catchers’ if not the actual literary reference , so it wasn’t all a wasted effort.

Things Happening Too Fast to Count

05. June 2009 · Comments Off on Things Happening Too Fast to Count · Categories: Ain't That America?, Fun With Islam, General, Local, Media Matters Not, Politics, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs, Working In A Salt Mine...

Well, that’s me – life in the fast lane, as it is, what with fifteen hours a week of soul-numbing drudgery at the call center, or as I refer to it “the Hellhole” (all apologies to anyone who now has the earworm from This Is Spinal Tap now firmly stuck in their consciousness for the rest of the day. No really, I live to serve.)

BTW, I can’t see my way to quitting, just yet. As horrendous as working there is – it’s reliable. Unless and until the monthly royalty checks for the Adelsverein Trilogy and Truckee about double and do so on a reliable, month to month basis. I can’t afford to slice up my nasty plastic employee badge and walk away – as tempting as the thought might be. With the economy apparently circling the drain and certain large corporations getting ready to tank worse than the Titanic … well, a regular job, however unpleasant, is not to be sneezed at. And as I keep reminding myself – it’s only fifteen hours a week.

But it’s fifteen hours away from time I can work on Watercress Press stuff – I have a horrendously complicated memoir, two huge binders full of not-very-well-organized pages (typewritten, mercifully) to work on … and now and again I have a mad wish to squeeze out another couple of hours to continue on the next book, or to market the current lot a little more vigorously. I have a book-club meeting in Beeville on Monday, and a pair of events in July in Fredericksburg … but I can’t even begin to think about that because of the most horrendously looming project…

Tea Party Hearty.

The San Antonio 4th of July Tea Party is going to be at the Rio Cibolo Ranch, a little east of town on IH-10 … and all of us who worked on the Tea Party on Tax Day, have been looking around in the last couple of weeks to try and figure out – well, not how could we top it, but at least equal it. Or come close to equaling it, and yes, we have spent hours and evenings in meetings working on this; how to re-organize the website, how to re-do our media efforts, how to reach out to the local media (and grab them by the short-n-curlies), and how to even begin to keep level of events and the proposed legislation that looks to be fair raining down upon us. It looks to be, sometimes, as if there is a sort of legislative hailstorm of laws approaching us – laws considered at every level, laws now in committee, under consideration, or proposed, each one more potentially damaging than the other, each one seemingly carefully crafted to favor someone involved, to the detriment of someone else, each of them with an apparently harmless intent, but with a vicious sting buried within it’s heart. Like that ghastly CPSIA law… where to start? I had the feeling three or four years ago that there was something malign lurking, some deadly danger, but I didn’t think it would be our republic being nibbled to death by ducks, or at least, some ghastly, self-serving political class of elected aristocrats, out to better themselves at the expense of the nation.

Oh, yeah – and the US is not a Muslim nation. Just thought I’d throw that in. Jeese, who is writing and fact-checking the Obaminator’s speeches these days? What desperately awful institute of learning did they pass through – and I use the word in the sense of fecal matter passing through an intestine. Like I am going to sit by and watch my country turned into something like Argentina under Juan Peron, while the old-line media establishment ooohs and ahhhs. Have a nice weekend – think of the musical that will be made of this in a couple of decades.

Monday Morning Doldrums

01. June 2009 · Comments Off on Monday Morning Doldrums · Categories: General, Home Front, Tea Time, Working In A Salt Mine...

Still recovering from a bad allergy cough that sounded as if I were bringing up a lung – the very sound of which made people edge nervously out of range and ask, with deep concern, if I was all right. I had to beg off working the usual Saturday evening at the hell-hole telephone bank, taking reservations because – it sounds bad to the prospective guests when the reservations agent is hacking away like Camille dying of tuberculosis, and besides, I could barely talk above a whisper. So home and to bed very early, loaded up with over-the-counter stuff which is supposed to help … and this morning was the first time in a week I opened my eyes and felt something close to normal.

Which is all to the good, because I have a book club meeting in Beeville next Monday – this sort of thing is meat and drink to writers, a room full of people who have actually read the book and have serious questions. I got some lovely ideas for the next round of writing about early Texas from the last book-club meeting – so, we’ll see how it goes. Also putting together an IAG-All-Texas writers event for a bookstore in Fredericksburg late in July, the very day after another event for me at the Pioneer Museum. The owners at Berkman Books were all very keen on the idea, so here’s hoping for the best. Hard to tell, how it will all go town, with the economy apparently on the verge of tanking like the Titanic. I’m kind of worried about the other independent bookstore that carries my book, the Twig in Alamo Heights. I managed to scrape far enough ahead of the bills that I could use my royalties to buy copies of the Trilogy for consignment sales, but the Twig management only wanted one of each. When we stopped by to drop them off last week, Blondie noticed that – although there were no gaps in the shelves, they didn’t have much in the way of the other knick-knacks and little non-book items that they usually had in stock before.

I put some more work into on-line marketing, though – Amazon.com has set aside Author pages for a wider array of scribblers than formerly, so I’ve been spending some time this morning uploading the necessary files to expedite the “search inside” feature. Yea on many moons ago, I had uploaded “To Truckee’s Trail” as a Kindle book, and had such an awful time doing it and no appreciable uptick in sales, that I had written off doing so as wasted effort. This was just after Amazon had launched the Kindle Reader Mark One, so I guess the bugs in their system were to be expected. I didn’t upload the Trilogy as a Kindle book until January, when some of the other IAG authors began discussing it; lo-and-behold! Uploading them, and adding the necessary links to the paperback version suddenly was a lot less fraught. I’ve actually had a good few sales of all four books, ever since. Don’t know how or why someone suddenly added Tabasco sauce to Amazon.com’s wheaties, but I’ll play, as long as they’re in a helpful mood.

Ordinarily, my vision of Amazon is that of a huge, cavernous underground warehouse, piled highe with books and other goods, sort of like that in the final scene of the first Indiana Jones movie. Up in the dim ceiling overhead, there is some kind of vast, clanking machine, with tracks and pulleys and long arms which reach down and pick up something, and carry it away. I visualize those items being dropped into a huge hopper, and eventually they emerge on the other end – which is an anonymous UPS drop-box on an anonymous street in a featureless urban warehouse development. The point is, there don’t ever seem to be any humans involved, save for someone in a long gray cloak that slips around the corner and runs away, immediately you catch sight of them … or the whole place may be run by rubbery-tentacled aliens, like the Thermians in Galaxy Quest. In any case, interaction with a real human at Amazon is just about impossible.

Oh, and you’ll never know it, if you get your news from major media outlets, but the San Antonio Tea Party is perking along, planning our big 4th of July bash. It’ll be at the Rio Cibolo Ranch, just east of town, with live music, and speakers and singers, and games, and consciousness-raising, and hay-rides and a herd of long-horns … everything but the kitchen sink. Think of it as a conservative Woodstock. But that’s a month away, and ever so much more to do for it… sigh, back to work.

Quick Before They Pull This

22. May 2009 · Comments Off on Quick Before They Pull This · Categories: General, Politics, sarcasm, Tea Time, World

Very apt little parody — enjoy, while you still can! OBAMA MAN!

Miscellaneous Thoughts and Wanderings

09. May 2009 · Comments Off on Miscellaneous Thoughts and Wanderings · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Media Matters Not, Military, sarcasm, Tea Time, Working In A Salt Mine...

The SA Tea Party made the final decision on a venue for our 4th of July bash – the lovely destination ranch, the Rio Cibolo Ranch, which a group of us went to visit last Saturday. I just hope the fields are still as green and lovely in July as they are right now. Well, the property is bounded on two sides by a fairly deep waterway, so I don’t suppose the water bill is as much of a challenge. There is a huge pavilion with a stage, a small arena with stadium seats, and we will probably have a larger stage put up out in the open for our main events. We’ll have live music, games, hayrides… the reading of the Declaration of Independence, and fireworks and all.

At this point, the SA Tea Party is sort of catching their collective breath, still; everything was so focused on the Tax Day event, then with sorting things out for the long hard long-distance pull. And there will be a long, hard pull: there are just too many people that are unhappy with the current administration. We make sick jokes about who the FBI infiltrator is among all the people who come to the open meetings, and wonder how many of us are now on the Homeland Security watchlist … although our security specialist (a retired LAPD officer, with his own consulting firm) has pointed out, with some humor that mostly, the working agents tend to be rather straight-laced conservatives, whose natural sympathies are with us anyway. And a lot of us are military veterans also – so it kind of boggles the mind, thinking of us all being painted as dangerous political activists and radicals. Seriously, if worse came to worse – who would come and arrest us all? Ourselves?

Note to the alphabet networks – I am looking at you, CNN – not many people outside a certain milieu were familiar with the term “tea-bagging” three weeks ago. Look, if you are going to insult and denigrate a wide swath of your public, it would help to use a term of abuse that people didn’t have to go look up a definition for. Oh, and I found this little gem courtesy of a google-search at Huffington Post

Oh, my – what delicate little flowers they are, at the Huff-Po – was that truly the worst they could find? When I think of some of the signs referencing GWB that were featured here and there at Huff-Po approved protests, I can’t help shaking my head. Poor babies – it must have been a considerable shock, finding out that so very many of the unwashed are somewhat less than totally enamored of the One. Who was the blogger who used the tag line “Did I hurt your feewings? Good!” – I can’t remember if it was Acidman or Kim du Toit.

Speaking of the One – who else besides me is pretty tired of seeing his face, or Michelle’s face all over every damned magazine on the supermarket check-out stand news-racks? It’s been three months now – are they just doing an Oprah on us? The same face on the cover of every issue. It’s worse than Tiger Beat in the days of the British invasion – it’s like Pravda, with the bright’n’shiny happy face of the Leader and his coterie on the front page and on all the covers, and in the newsreels, while the kulaks are being ground down and starved into submission, the workers are taking over the factories and running them into the ground, and the professional middle class are threatened with being gutted and reduced to camping out in a few rooms of their McMansion, cooking over a fire of sticks in the middle of the room. And I am sitting here, in front of my computer, saying “Well, gosh-darn it, you knew he was a product of Chicago machine politics for chrissakes – what the frack else did you expect?”

Oh, and I still hate my call-center job, by the way. Still can’t count on the income stream from the books to the point where I can quit it, though.

Riding the Wave – Tax Day Tea Party Wrap Up

03. May 2009 · Comments Off on Riding the Wave – Tax Day Tea Party Wrap Up · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Tea Time

Those of us on the Tea Party planning committee knew it was going to be huge, even if attendance at it only met the minimum SWAG (semi-scientific wild-ass guess) – which early on, we set at four or five thousand, if it didn’t rain and with no celebrities. We had an RSVP meter on our website, which eventually topped out at nine thousand planning to attend. At the final executive meeting, Easter Saturday, we agreed to go ahead and secure an overflow site on Hemisfair Plaza. At some point, to be left to the SAPD on-scene, we would start directing partiers there. We had made arrangements for portapotties and a jumbotron or two, but pretty much forgot about it in the press of everything happening in Alamo Plaza. Our bad – when we compared notes afterwards, none of us had been able to make our way over there; I sure as heck didn’t have the time on Tea Party Day.

Monday and Tuesday, after Easter was just flat-out insane; I think I did a call-in to most of the radio morning shows, with updates about what was happening. I did venture over to the public radio station where I used to work, otherwise it was phone-in. And three print media interviews… and it’s all a bit of a blurr now, but on one day I had three stand-ups for local news – for which they were all so eager that they hied over to the house to do a stand-up in the garden. Well, too of them did, KENS-5 set up in the street; the neighbors were curious, I am sure, but too well-mannered to come over and ask what the heck. And one of the cats yacked up on KSAT-12’s extension cord. (At least, I hope it was cat vomit, and not from the other end…)

There were so many more things that we could have organized, so many more people we might have brought into it – but it happened so fast, especially over the last four days that we had barely enough time to make an immediate decision and move on to the next three or four items screaming for attention. I still have a list of things screaming for attention at a slightly lesser decibel level, such as a pair of very apt cartoons, done up as posters, which we used for the media center, and for which I still owe a thank-you email… it just never stops. Apparently I am a political activist now. Or as Robin and the others keep pointing out – community organizers.

I knew it was going to be a long day when we headed downtown, and heard an update on the Tea Party on the car radio… which brings me neatly back to where I started this epic, with a walk-through of Alamo Plaza, and helping to assemble the media badges, at desk in the Menger Hotel lobby. I walked back to the Emily Morgan with a thick handful of them, held by their elastic leashes, set up to hand them out at 2 PM to the anticipated descending media hordes. It was about noon by the time I finished with that, so I went with one of the photogs to grab a hot sandwich and fries at a funky little restaurant on the Plaza, just across from the Menger where all the important celebs, VIPs and members of the committee were probably eating something a lot more higher end, culinary-speaking. Back to the Emily after we were finished – the Plaza was even more crowded, and I could hear amplified music, an electric guitar and wild applause. It seemed that they were testing the sound system, with Ted Nugent’s assistance – he was out there, goofing around, even though it was still only mid-day, the streets weren’t even blocked off. It was getting crowded, too – one hour to go until the media people came to pick up their passes, two to the press conference, three until the start of Glenn Beck’s broadcast, five until our own event.

There was a crowded room for the presser – just Robin, and Eric G. and I on one side of the table, and a room full of press, cameras and laptops on the other. I think we may have run out of chairs, for the first five minutes or so, until the major TV media reps got the couple of seconds they needed, folded up their tripods, bagged up their gear and left. No surprises among the questions, pretty much what we had expected. Robin expounded on the almost-by-now-standard accusation that the Tea Parties are astro-turf; a false front for some shady corporate or political party. No, calmly and rationally, one more time – none of us were ever politically active before, all of us have day jobs, and we were brought to participate in the Tea Party for various reasons, but the insanity of a cripplingly large stimulus package passed by legislators who hardly bothered to read the darned thing proved to be the final straw.

One hurdle safely over – I thought I would go upstairs to a room at the Emily taken by a friend of ours and put up my feet for a while. Blondie and I had a key-card for it, so we could leave our purses there. The room had a view of the Alamo grounds and the Plaza, from eleven floors up, and even with the windows sealed I could hear the cheering from down below. Reconsider original impulse – I would circulate, and take some pictures for myself, with Blondie’s digital camera, and get a sense for myself of how it was all coming together. I meandered through the Alamo Gardens, across the famous front of it, and into a long pergola, behind an arcade that lines the Plaza; a fair number of people, not terribly crowded. I came out of the Alamo Gardens across the street from the Menger Hotel.

Not being an aficionado of protests and political action projects I have nothing much by way of comparison, but it felt rather like a rather jolly block party – but with signs and banners. Everyone seemed to be polite, and having a wonderful time, discovering how many other citizens felt just they same way they did. There was one strange man with a bible in one hand and a sign of the “Repent or you are DOOMED!” variety in the other, shouting a blood and thunder sermon at the top of his lungs. Everyone seemed to be ignoring him, and I overheard someone in the crowd say that he was a regular; anyway, his voice gave out after fifteen minutes. A number of people noticed my committee badge and thanked me and the other organizers for having thrown such a nice party

The crowd became thicker, the closer to Glenn Beck’s stage that I got. I gave it up, by the entrance into the Hyatt. There was just no going any farther; people were standing so close together that it was impossible, not unless I wanted to push and shove. One of the photogs later said he was stuck for half an hour in the dense crowd there. I went back the way that I came, towards Ripley’s and the bandstand in front of the Menger. About halfway there I found three guys, one with an Obama shirt having a shouting match with another Tea Partier. For all that we were worried about agent provocateurs picking fights with other Tea Partiers, filming the results and winding up on YouTube as brutal reactionary racist KKK thugs beating up on some innocent counterprotester; these three were the only ones. Sigh; well, here I was, one of the committee members – better look like I had some authority over all this, in my best Catholic high-school principal style. It hardly seemed necessary to remind the people standing around that well… the Obamanauts were trying to provoke a reaction. Just about everyone seemed to know that already. Politely pointed out to the shouting Obamanaut that he could perhaps win over more agreement with his views if he stopped shouting, actually read the Constitution, and engaged in calm and rational discourse… and could everyone please recall the manners that their mama’s taught them? They did appear to have a confederate in the crowd with a video camera; another committee member said that I did show up on a brief and thankfully boring YouTube video. Other reports have them giving up and going away shortly afterward. Ah well – just recall, dissent is patriotic.

Just before six, Blondie and I and some of the other speakers – the non-celeb ones and some committee members and their families- assembled in the lobby of the Emily Morgan, to be taken from there through the crowd to the backstage area. We did have a law-enforcement escort, an off-duty county sheriff who looked for all the world like a huge concrete car-bomb protection bollard dressed up in a black suit and cowboy hat. We threaded through a couple of barriers, across a raised planting made bumpy with tree-roots and into an area behind the stage, which was only a little less crowded than the area outside of it. No place to sit, except on some leftover staging. Someone brought us bottles of ice-cold water – and there we waited and talked, and looked nervously at the stage from the back. Someone pointed out Janine Turner, with her middle-school-aged daughter, sitting with Matt Perdue on the staging along with the rest of us. It turned out that she was a last-minute addition to the program – eh, what the heck. She had a draft speech, which Robin asked me to check out. Otherwise, it was something like the military; sit around and wait. She is a very pleasant and unpretentious person, by the way; also physically very tiny. I had never known she was from Texas – Matt and I talked about books, and the weird coincidence that I had written about his great-grandfather in Book 2 of Adelsverein.

The seriously celeb speakers – Glenn Beck and Ted Nugent – came in through another passage-way through the crowd, from the Menger, practically swamped with security… that is, large, tough-looking gentlemen with earphones, speaking quietly into their sleeves. They were delivered to the back-stage a few minutes before their appearances, and lingered a little bit afterward. I had the feeling that we were all just sort of a blur of faces, passing in front of Glenn Beck. He was hurried away by his bodyguards, but Ted Nugent hung around for a bit longer. It seems very odd to say that he has charisma, but he has, and also the gift – when he is with other people – of seeming to be very intensely focused on that individual. Blondie and I talked about this, and with some of the other committee members who also talked with them both, and they all agreed. When he talked with anyone, even briefly as he scribbled an autograph – he was just overwhelmingly interested in you. On-stage in front of an audience he was just magnetic; he seemed to draw in the energy of the crowd and feed it back to them, amplified up to the max – and that this was something that he lived to do. In a strange way, it was the class clown, grown up; Oh, there is a crowd! I must get in front of people, entertain them, excite them, make them cheer! It was actually kind of endearing – and he did get rather carried away, and uncorked some pretty uncensored language, permanently bollixing any of our claims to be a strictly family-friendly event. But even the most strait-laced members of the committee seemed prepared to be indulgent about this – I guess they felt the endearing-class-clown vibe as well. Curiously, one of our non-celebrity speakers, Katherine Moreno seemed to feed on the audience in the same dynamic way.

Ah well – it took me almost longer to write about it, than it did to happen, from start to finish. My feet hurt so much that night, from walking around in boots – next time, I swear, it’s running shoes for me.

And there will be a next time. We are finalizing our location – a destination ranch, in a loop of the Cibolo, with a grove of trees, some ready-built stage venues and a herd of longhorns. Think of it as Woodstock, Texas-style. The April 15th party was just the opening shot across the bows.

A Rose By Any Other Name

03. May 2009 · Comments Off on A Rose By Any Other Name · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, sarcasm, Tea Time

So, there we were, a good part of the SA Tea Party executive committee, sitting at a picnic table under a shady tree, at a site which we were touring with an eye towards making it the venue for our great 4th of July San Antonio Tea party Blow-out, when one of the other members had a story to tell.

She was at a bar the other night with a friend of hers – (what? You thought we were all a bunch of prudes and blue-noses? Honey, this is Texas; Football Friday night, bar Saturday night, church Sunday morning. Life is a wonderful thing, you have to live it in the right proportions!)

– Anyway, she and her friend were stragegizing about the event, discussing who we could get to come and speak, and who else might come and entertain – not without mentioning a lot of big names – and all the while, there was a guy sitting next to them at the bar, eavesdropping like mad. Finally, he couldn’t stand it any more; he said,

“Hey, what are you – some kind of political activist?!”

And she turned right around and answered …

(wait for it)

“No – I’m a community organizer!”

Party Hearty in San Antonio, Part the Third

26. April 2009 · Comments Off on Party Hearty in San Antonio, Part the Third · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Local, Politics, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs

We had basically concluded that Alamo Plaza would be impossible to get as a venue site; perhaps Fox would be able to gain permission to broadcast from there, but our Tea Party would probably be best held nearby, perhaps at Alamo Stadium. We were checking out other urban venues as well, but when Robin announced this and explained some of the difficulties in securing the Plaza, an attendee at the open meeting leaped up and challenged him; Hadn’t we even tried? Who had we talked to, in securing permits – didn’t we even KNOW anyone? This was Matthew P., who insisted forcefully that it was quite possible, and that he could do it. Matthew looks a bit like General Grant on one of his dyspeptic days. But he has all of Grant’s iron stubborness; he was all for the Tea Party, and all for having it on Alamo Plaza, and he knew just the people to talk too. So we kept his name and telephone number, and Robin told him to go for it, and to coordinate with another key volunteer, Eric G., the lawyer better known among us as The Other Eric. In the mean time, Eric A., the video producer had another stroke of genius – as many of the volunteers on the committee would meet him on Alamo Plaza Monday morning, and he would do a quick guerrilla shoot of us inviting Glenn Beck to come to our Tea Party – it turned out that this was not needed at all, as it appeared that Glenn Beck committed himself that morning to coming to San Antonio.

And by Friday, April 3rd, we got the word from Matthew P. and Eric G. that the miracle was done; we had secured the Plaza – with about a week and a half to go until the Tea Party. Matthew P. would coordinate between the City of San Antonio and the Fox people, Eric G. would handle all the considerable legal stuff … and Dee M. and Jerry H. would manage fund-raising. Keep it in mind that most of us only met face to face for the first time around the last of March and the beginning of February.

We had barely enough time to take in this news – ten days to sort out all the logistics, which were enormous, and to raise the funds to pay for the necessities. I think it was that Friday morning that I spent about an hour on the phone with a woman who had organized many such events downtown. She couldn’t be involved to any extent in the Tea Party, because of her own full-time job, but she expounded forcefully on several aspects that we had never considered until that moment: barricades, and security, crowd control, securing places to park jumbotrons, which would mean another permit, of security badges for our personnel, of me as the media representative being constantly available to the minions of the press. I took notes, lots of notes, and went to Robin over the weekend with them; we needed someone dedicated to event-planning, someone who had done massive events. I had only done one, years before, and in the military at that, and with six months to pull it off. I’d be out of my depth on that and knew it.

But among us, we already had a volunteer, Diane E. who had set up a sign-painting party that very weekend – she’s a local realtor and by good fortune, had done some big golfing events… which involved the media, set-up, security, crowds – the whole ball o’wax. So Diane was in play as the overall event organizer, working with Matthew. We had a couple of epic telephone conference calls during that week, which clocked in at well over two hours, and another set of meetings on Palm Sunday, which also went on for hours; who to have as master of ceremonies, who to have as speakers besides Glenn Beck… absolutely no politicians, we had agreed from the start. Not even as VIPs attending, although they were welcome to come and attend, and listen like everyone else.

The financial crunch was alleviated somewhat, by Glenn Beck offering to host a fund-raising luncheon for us at the Menger Hotel on the day of the Tea Party. He had already withdrawn as keynote speaker for our event – which, upon consideration was probably a good thing. This was supposed to be about us, not about celebrities. He would open the event, and then give over to our program of local speakers – and this was when Ted Nugent got into the picture; coming to perform the National Anthem. Just how cool was that going to be? In that case we could handle another celebrity, but the line on politicians was set in cement, no matter how much they asked. By this time, we had all begin to sense that we were riding a wave – best not to look down, just keep going forward.

At the Palm Sunday meeting, we gained another key volunteer – to oversee security. Early on, we had a pair of volunteers who worked in law enforcement, but the way that this event was growing, we knew very well that we would need someone with command experience, and more than that – command experience at large events … and out of the blue, another volunteer, Dennis O., who was an acquaintance of Robin’s. Dennis spent some time talking to me after the meeting, Robin being tied up talking to other people. After my educational lecture from the experienced organizer-of-events, someone like Dennis seemed to have the right skill set; retired LAPD at a fairly high level. He was brought in, just in the nick of time, for a final executive meeting on Easter Saturday.

I would guess that at least part of the reason that we came together so quickly is that San Antonio is a small town cunningly disguised as a large city, and so all of us brought our ready-made acquaintance-network into the mix – and in some cases a pretty fair idea of their skill-set. It turned out that a lot of our networks overlapped and intertangled. Robin knew me through blogging, and knew Dennis through his church; Matthew turned out to also know the lady who gave me the quick course in event-planning, who also is acquainted with Diane… and as it turned out I had written about Matthew’s g-g-g-grandfather in Book Two of Adelsverein; the Fredericksburg school-master Louis Scheutze, who was murdered by the Hanging Band during the Civil War. Topping that off, the publisher of a local construction newsletter who came to help in the newsroom may be a distant cousin of Matthew’s. I am fairly sure if I asked other members of the planning committee about their own networks, it would turn out that we were pretty thickly connected already, through friends and friends of friends and various civic organizations.

(Next – riding the wave at the San Antonio Tea Party, and why Ted Nugent is so darned popular.)

Party Hearty (Part 2)

20. April 2009 · Comments Off on Party Hearty (Part 2) · Categories: General, Politics, Tea Time

It didn’t start out this way – a national event, with news interest from all over, and Ted Nugent coming out to the stage for an audio check around midday, and goofing around, doing a mini-performance for an appreciative crowd. We were going to have a Tea Party, very much like all the other Tea Parties in the six or seven hundred other cities, suburbs and towns that were planning them. We expected having something like the very first Alamo Plaza tea party, which occurred around the end of February, and seems to have gone pretty much unnoticed in the grand national scheme of things. A lot of the foundation work was done on line in February and early March, on Facebook – which was networking those interested in Tea Party protests in the San Antonio area. The San Antonio Tea Party outgrew Facebook about the middle of March, when an old milblogging compadre (and fan of The Daily Brief) got involved. Robin J. is also retired Air Force – he even got a group of San Antonio-area bloggers together for a picnic in McAllister Park a couple of years ago. The other prime Tea Party instigator wanted to concentrate on the Boerne Tea Party, so she offhandedly asked Robin if he would take over responsibility for San Antonio’s. Robin set up a website, drew in some more interest, including that of another military veteran, Eric A. Eric runs what another SA Blogger, the Fat Guy, would call “a tiny bidness”, producing videos – mostly of weddings. Eric whipped together a quick video promo for a San Antonio Tea Party, launched it on YouTube… and managed to get attention paid to it by Glenn Beck, who hinted that he would love to come and broadcast live from Alamo Plaza, if we were going to hold our Tea Party there.

I would like to point out that since I do not watch Fox (or listen to Rush Limbaugh, either) I had managed to not know a single solitary thing about him. The first couple of times his name was mentioned, I had him mixed up with Jeff Beck and I thought in passing that it was rather cool that there was another outspoken conservative rock musician other than Ted Nugent. As someone who will doubtless wind up on Janet Napolitano’s Homeland Security watch-list, I fear I have rather let my credentials as a deranged extremist lapse. I spend as much time as possible in the 19th century, I much prefer classical music and I get most of my news online, through wicked, racist and right-wing sinks of iniquity like Instapundit and Rantburg.

Robin had already emailed me about doing media releases for the Tea Party, and shortly after Eric A. had set off an explosion of interest in a Tea Party in Alamo Plaza – I went to a special meeting of the organizing committee. This would have been on the last Sunday in March. Somehow, I had found myself being the media expert in all of this. This would be the first face-to-face meeting for most of us, having heretofore conducted most of our plotting on line, through emails and telephone calls. There were a couple of gentlemen from the 9-12 Project, who were interested in what we all acknowledged to be a madly optimistic notion to have the Tea Party in Alamo Plaza. I have to confess that we all saw it as a long shot. Fiesta would begin the following day; San Antonio’s massive two-week-long civic blow-out would pretty much scotch any effort to secure the Plaza for a date which was then a little more than two weeks off. There would be permission from the city; the logistics would be a nightmare, Glenn Beck had only hinted at coming to San Antonio – eventually we agreed that realistically, we should look at another venue. We already had secured the use of a small downtown city park, but in the interests of having a larger crowd and somewhat more media interest than we had bargained for, we agreed to consider some other venues; Alamo Stadium and some other places with generous parking and sufficient facilities. Three or four of the attending planning members agreed to check out that availability. There was a public meeting following the organizing committee, on the terrace of a restaurant which was closed on a Sunday afternoon. There were 130 people there – and that was when it all got rather interesting.

(to be continued. I’ll get to the part about Ted Nugent, eventually)

Tea Party Hearty (Part One)

18. April 2009 · Comments Off on Tea Party Hearty (Part One) · Categories: Ain't That America?, Domestic, General, Local, Media Matters Not, Tea Time

About two weeks ago, the other members of the San Antonio Tea Party committee said to me –“You’re the one with a with the broadcasting background, YOU go out in front and interface with the multi-headed and hungry media beast, while the rest of us work our a***s off trying to organize a nationally broadcast tea party rally for upwards of 9,000 people in the middle of downtown San Antonio… check in with us now and again, we’ll let you know if we have anything specific we want you to put out there.” I took it as one of my media relations duties to see what else was going on out there in the wilds of the internet, regarding a potential tea party in San Antonio. I discovered by the miracle of google, a discussion thread appended to a MySA blog, in which one commenter sneeringly remarked that any proposed Tea Party would be a pathetic bust, with maybe four or five looser racist RethugliKKKan freaks in attendance. I don’t know what that commenter does for a living, if anything, but accurate prophecy is not one of his or her gifts. One of the other organizers and I were told by a police officer, as the rally was winding down, that attendance was clocked on the ground as 16,000 people, give or take. (Subsequent analysis of the aerial photo of Alamo Plaza by the San Antonio PD at the peak of the rally showed approximately 20,000 people. Not bad at all, for a work day.)

Blondie and I headed down early, as I was scheduled to do a walk-through the venue with John, a professional photographer who was volunteering his services to document the event, and some other volunteers who were doing the same with video cameras, Matt who had been working out all the necessary permits… well, it turned into a gathering of about half the executive committee, standing in the little ornate Victorian bandstand that stands in front of the Menger Hotel. It was very cool, and pleasant, and the paving stones around the bandstand were wet, as if it had rained the night before, or if the whole area had been washed down. The trees are now all well out in leaf. At nine AM there were already early-bird tourists in the Plaza, and moving across the square of lawn, and through the walled gardens and pergolas that frame the old mission church of the Alamo. Even at that hour, there were people setting up folding chairs and holding up signs, along the barriers set up where the stage for Glenn Beck’s Fox broadcast would be.

I wasn’t needed for much of the walk-through, so I talked with John and some of the other committee members, before I walked over to the Emily Morgan Hotel with Robin – the guy who wound up being the Chairman of the Tea Party, very much to his surprise. One of my ‘oh, duh – we probably need to arrange for this’ moments in the last week before the party came when I realized we would have to arrange for a place to park the descending media – the large, the small, the bloggers and all. And several days after that revelation, that we ought to have some kind of press conference, too… and the Menger Hotel was already the site for Glenn Beck’s luncheon. We were already setting up a command post there; best to have the press room elsewhere; the Menger was already maxed-out. It seemed throughout all this, that helpful volunteers popped out of the woodwork, offering extraordinary skills, or contacts, or facilities just at the exact moment when those skills, contacts or facilities were most needed. The volunteer who took over as security coordinator appeared in just that very way, a retired career LAPD officer, with command experience, just when it appeared that we would have need someone with skills in juggling major event venues, large crowds and celebrities. So it was with this; a helpful lady called on the very morning that I realized we would need a space, scoped out the Emily Morgan, and procured for us the use of a conference room. She even put it on her credit card, until the committee could reimburse her; a nice-sized room, with a series of narrow tables, all arranged class-room style. We also used it for our data entry volunteers to work in, and at the end of the day we had a plan to assemble our non-celeb speakers. It was actually quite refreshing, as the afternoon wore on, to have a quiet place to sit, and as a fallback place to stash things for a while; video equipment, boxes of tee-shirts. I was only grateful that they found another place for the canoe. Wrestling that into the freight elevator would have been a bit much for the poor bell staffers. Look over the conference room, set up a table in front to do the press conference from; Barbara, the events manager checked in with us and had her staff bring in a podium, which was very much appreciated.

People were already gathering, with folding chairs and signs by ten or eleven of a morning. John the photographer – another one of those volunteers who had appeared out of the woodwork, with vast experience in covering sprawling events like this – had been circulating all morning. He told me there were a lot of people who had come from out of town; from California by plane and a carload by marathon overnight road trip from Missouri. Back to the Menger – the crowd already tripled by the time that I walked back. The lobby was jammed; attendees for the fund-raising luncheon, and a handful of Tea Party volunteers cutting apart the sheets of laminated badges, punching holes in them, and stringing them onto lengths of elastic; numbered badges in different colors for the executive committee members, for VIP guests, for media and our documentation team, to access back-stage areas, for those who were going to be provide roving security and medical services, for venders, for the sign-in tables… more or less serving the purpose of letting everyone know who had authority of one sort or another, and who would be allowed through security barriers. This is one of those things that come up, when what had originally been thought to be a 600-person gathering in a city park suddenly explodes into a national event. The teen-aged daughter of the committee member overseeing all this had stayed up half the night, cutting and knotting lengths of elastic for these badges, and been excused from school for the day for real-life experience of a peaceful civic protest.

(To be continued)

Tea Party: San Antonio

16. April 2009 · Comments Off on Tea Party: San Antonio · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Tea Time, That's Entertainment!, Veteran's Affairs, World

This is the speech that I gave last night at the San Antonio Tea Party rally. I was sort of squeezed in between various celebrities, local and national. My job – to set the scene. I had one of those stupid hand-held mikes, which was very nice for Ted Nugent, doing one of his restless and kinetic rants, but it was a b**ch for me to handle it with one hand and keep my script laid flat with the other, against an intermittent breeze . Quite a lot of people didn’t hear me clearly, I’m afraid. Sorry, all. I thought there was a tech, minding the audio board. Anyway, this is what I said. I have no idea how it all looked – I didn’t dare look towards the jumbotron.

Hullo – and thank you all for coming to our modest little tea party in the heart of San Antonio! (pause for laughter) First of all – are we having a wonderful time? Fiesta San Antonio begins tomorrow, so we have been telling everyone to come for the Tea Party and stay for Fiesta. First though, I would like to thank everyone who took that extra effort, and worked very hard to make this particular place – this very special place – available to us, on very short notice. We would like to thank the ladies and gentlemen of the various departments of the City of San Antonio, and acknowledge the graciousness shown us by the members of the Fiesta Commission! Thank you, City of San Antonio!

Yes, this is a very special and significant place for our Tea Party – although most visitors, upon seeing it for the first time are surprised, because it looks so very small – nothing like the way appears in all the movies. San Antonio de Valero… so called ‘the Alamo’ for the cottonwood trees that grow wherever there is plenty of water in otherwise dry country. And there were cottonwoods nearby then, enough that the soldiers of Spain who set up a garrison in this old mission called it so, after those trees. Imagine – if you can – how this place would have looked, then! Just… imagine.

Close your eyes, and if you can, banish the sight of all these tall modern glass buildings, and those rambling beaux-arts storefronts, while I paint a word-picture for you. Go back… go back a hundred and seventy three years. The actual town of San Antonio is now some little distance away, a huddle of adobe and stucco walls around the tower of San Fernando.
The air smells of wood-smoke and cooking, of sweat and horses, and spent black-power. We are in a sprawling compound of long low buildings, a single room deep, with tiny windows, and thick walls. Some of these have flat rooftops, others with shallow peaked roofs. Many buildings have their inside walls razed – others have been filled with rubble and dirt to make cannon-mounts. The gaps between them are filled by palisades of earth, tight-packed and reinforced with lengths of wood, and tangles made of sharpened tree branches. All of this work has been done painfully, by hand and with axes, picks, shovels and buckets. The chapel – of all of these the tallest, and the strongest – is also roofless. Another earth ramp has been built up, inside; to serve as yet one more cannon-mount. This place has become a fortress, and last defense, surrounded by an overwhelming enemy force, a large army of over two thousand men, outnumbering bare two hundred or so defenders by over 10 to 1. This enemy army…, trained…, hardened and disciplined, is well-equipped with cannon and ammunition, with cavalry and foot-soldiers alike. By the order of the enemy commander, a blood-red flag signifying no quarter to the defenders of this place has been flown from the tower of the San Fernando church.

The story is, that on the day that the last courier left the Alamo – a local man who knew the country well, mounted on a fast horse bearing away final letters and dispatches – one of the Texian commanders called together all his other officers and men. He was a relatively young man – William Barrett Travis, ambitious and to be honest, a bit full of himself. I rather think he might have struck some of his contemporaries as a bit insufferable – but he could write. He could write, write words that leap off the page in letters of fire and blood, which glow in the darkness like a distant bonfire.

He was in charge because of one of those turns which bedevil the plans of men. His co-commander, James Bowie was deathly ill… ironic, because he was the one with a reputation as a fighter and a leader. Bowie was seen by his enemies – of which there were many – as a violent scoundrel, with a reputation for bare-knuckle brawling, for land speculation and shady dealing. And of the third leader – one David Crockett, celebrity frontiersman and former Congressman, he did not claim any rank at all, although he led a party of Tennessee friends and comrades. He had arrived here, almost by accident. Of all of the leadership triad, I think he was perhaps the most amiable, the best and easiest-tempered of company. Of all those others, who had a stark choice put before them on that very last day, that day when it was still possible to leave and live… most of them were ordinary men, citizens of various communities and colonies in Texas, wanderers from farther afield – afterwards, it would become clear that only a bare half-dozen were born in Texas.

It is a vivid picture in my mind, of what happened when a young lawyer turned soldier stepped out in front of his rag-tag crew. Legends have that Colonel Travis drew his sword – that weapon which marked an officer, and marked a line in the dust at his feet and said “Who will follow me, over that line?” It was a stark choice put before them all. Here is the line; swear by stepping over it, that you will hold fast to your comrades and to Texas, all you volunteer amateur soldiers. Make a considered and rational choice – not in the heat of the fray, but in the calm before the siege tightens around these crumbling walls. No crazy-brave impulse in the thick of it, with no time to do anything but react. Stay put, and choose to live, or step over it and choose to go down fighting in the outpost you have claimed for your own.
The legend continues – all but perhaps one crossed the line, James Bowie being so ill that he had to be carried over it by his friends. It was a choice of cold courage, and that is why it stays with us. These men all chose to step across Colonel Travis’ line. Some had decided on their own to come here, others had been tasked by their superiors… and others were present by mere chance. They could have chosen freely to leave. But they all stayed, being convinced that they ought to take a stand … that something ought to be done.

Imagine. Imagine the men who came here, who made that choice, who had the cold courage to step over a line drawn in the dust at their feet.

They were animated by the conviction that they were citizens, that it was their right – and their responsibility to have a say in their own governance. They were not subjects, expected to submit without a murmur to the demands of a remote and arbitrary government. They did not bow to kings, aristocrats, or bureaucrats in fine-tailored coats, looking to impose taxes on this or that, and demanding interference in every aspect of their lives. They were citizens, ordinary people – with muddled and sometimes contradictory motives and causes, fractious and contentious, just as we are. But in the end, they were united in their determination to take a stand – a gallant stand against forces that seemed quite overwhelming.

This evening, we also have come to this place, this very place – as is our right as citizens and taxpayers, to speak of our unhappiness to our government in a voice that cannot be ignored any longer. This is our right. Our duty… and our stand.

(Afterwards, I sat on some of the leftover stage platforms from the Glenn Beck program and talked to Blondie, one of the other executive committee members, and the husband of another. The husband had run a pizza place in New York, and he and Blondie swapped recipes and techniques for making calzones. For a bit, we were also chatting with Janine Turner, and her daughter, who had also come to the Tea Party luncheon with Glenn Beck, and was a last-minute addition to the program. Lest you think I have gone all celebrity ga-ga, I haven’t… it’s just that she was a a very charming and unpretentious person, and it was a crowd of us, waiting our turn to speak, or hanging around in the back-stage area with the spouses and friends, and a bunch of roadies knocking down the Glenn Beck set, and security types with earphones all murmuring into their sleeves, all fenced around with industrial yellow barricades. More to tell in the next installment… like, why I know now how Ted Nugent is so popular. And how a bunch of uninvolved, un-politically connected citizens managed to pull off a huge Tea Party rally in about ten days flat.)

Not Quite Up to This Standard, But It WAS a Heck of a Party

16. April 2009 · Comments Off on Not Quite Up to This Standard, But It WAS a Heck of a Party · Categories: Ain't That America?, General, Politics, Tea Time, Veteran's Affairs



(Thought all the Trek fans out there would appreciate this version… detailed after-action post to follow.)

An Estimated 2500 Show for Boise’s Tea Party

15. April 2009 · Comments Off on An Estimated 2500 Show for Boise’s Tea Party · Categories: Tea Time

News reports here and here.  I don’t think ours was quite a non-partisan as others and the petition to put the bible back in schools seems out of place, but all in all, a LOT more people than I expected.  Boise’s not know for it’s “activism.”  Unless the Feds move in and shoot someone’s dog and then, well, all bets are off.

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