The Last Straw. (And the only appropriate icon.)

[pantryslut]

As I am chronically behind on the news (for both time and sanity-maintenance reasons), I just this morning learned that one of the Tea Party heads thinks that we should restrict voting rights to property owners.

Look. I am a lifelong member of the lefty fringe. The form and flavor of my fringiness has changed over time and these days is kind of hard to describe in a nutshell, but let's just say that terms like 'commodity fetishism' have been in my vocabulary since before I left home.

But as it has also always been a priority to get people to listen to what I have to say (hi, I am a writer, nice to meetcha) -- and OK, also because I value coalition building, but put that aside for a moment -- I have spent my entire adult life carefully choosing my terms and modulating my rhetoric and passing for merely a bleeding heart. So that people don't have an excuse to dismiss me from the first sentence.* In other words, I am a stealth radical. (Well, sort of. I mean, it's not a secret or deep cover, either, but I bet only a handful of you have a really good idea of the ruddy underpinnings of my political philosophy.) I blame my practical Midwestern "do the work" streak, probably just as significant to my politics as the rest, 'cuz I ain't sayin' that everyone should work this way, just that it's what I've chosen for a couple decades running now.

And now these yahoos show up and get airtime for wack-ass bullshit like this? Well, fuck me.



* (Yeah, I know.)

Comments

[manomano.livejournal.com]

Sounds totally wacked. Do you have a link for this?

[manomano.livejournal.com]

NM, found it. Wow, how fucking frighting. This is a natural extension of the Libertarian bullshit that the fundamental human right is the right to property.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

Yup.

[srl.livejournal.com]

one of the Tea Party heads thinks that we should restrict voting rights to property owners.

The last time we did that, it excluded a good percentage of white men from voting too, by design. I can't decide whether that means that the Tea Partisans in question know their history too well or that they don't know it well enough.

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I think this one knows too well and is counting on the rest of us not to.

[abostick59.livejournal.com]

The Tea Party seems to be all about pulling the Overton Window to the right as much as humanly possible, in order to make what were hitherto outrageous ideas seem moderate and reasonable.

Maybe being a stealth radical isn't what these times call for; perhaps people who care about keeping politics sane should be giving the Overton Window some good, hard yanks to the left. If we can inject confiscation and redistribution of privately owned land, for example, into the public discourse, then maybe keeping Social Security going won't seem such a bad idea.

[innerdoggie.livejournal.com]

well, that will make for some fun negative campaign ads and voter registration drives.

They foreclosed on your house. Now they want to deprive you of the right to vote! [and so forth]

[pantryslut.livejournal.com]

I was thinking along similar lines, in fact.