The Elephant And The Tea Party
A long time ago, (September 12, 2010, to be exact) I wrote this piece for straightlinelogic.com. Here's an excerpt; the full piece can be accessed by clicking the link above.
The Republicans are trying to make room in their big tent for the Tea Partiers, but they can’t evade those hard, principles-based questions, and not just about the income tax, the welfare state and funny money. Why are we spending over $40 billion a year on a drug war that’s turned Mexico and our border into a war zone, put over a million people in prisons that are finishing schools for gangs, and hasn’t moved the market price of marijuana, cocaine, and other street drugs a penny? Why do people who flee the public school system have to fund it? Why do we have troops stationed in over 100 countries? How do you fight a war against terrorism, which is a tactic, not an entity? Will we ever know if we’ve won or lost, or does this expensive and bloody war just go on forever? If the Tea Party gets the usual Republican mumbles it will exit the big tent and take more of the GOP base with it. Desperate times demand hard questions, hard choices, a return to first principles and big changes. The electorate is out in front of the politicians on all this. If the Republicans don’t catch up they will sink into a deserved, perhaps fatal, decline. This election [2010] will be a watershed, but it will turn out far different than what the Republicans have in mind if all they do is help perpetuate a corrupt and bankrupt status quo. If the country continues on its present course, Tea Partiers will continue to roil the waters, and eventually we’ll get political turmoil that makes the Tea Party look like . . . a tea party.
The Republicans are trying to make room in their big tent for the Tea Partiers, but they can’t evade those hard, principles-based questions, and not just about the income tax, the welfare state and funny money. Why are we spending over $40 billion a year on a drug war that’s turned Mexico and our border into a war zone, put over a million people in prisons that are finishing schools for gangs, and hasn’t moved the market price of marijuana, cocaine, and other street drugs a penny? Why do people who flee the public school system have to fund it? Why do we have troops stationed in over 100 countries? How do you fight a war against terrorism, which is a tactic, not an entity? Will we ever know if we’ve won or lost, or does this expensive and bloody war just go on forever? If the Tea Party gets the usual Republican mumbles it will exit the big tent and take more of the GOP base with it. Desperate times demand hard questions, hard choices, a return to first principles and big changes. The electorate is out in front of the politicians on all this. If the Republicans don’t catch up they will sink into a deserved, perhaps fatal, decline. This election [2010] will be a watershed, but it will turn out far different than what the Republicans have in mind if all they do is help perpetuate a corrupt and bankrupt status quo. If the country continues on its present course, Tea Partiers will continue to roil the waters, and eventually we’ll get political turmoil that makes the Tea Party look like . . . a tea party.
I'll dig it up later to cite it, but one of my favorite SF stories is, "Second Contact".
It takes place 20 years or so after "first contact". the alien equivalent of a tramp steamer visits us for repairs. And they acted about the same as turn of the 20th century sailors would. They viewed us as primitive, gave equal interest to a fortune teller as to an astronomer, and basically talked down to us.
Eventually a nuclear war broke out between the Soviets and US, because each thought the other was collaborating with the aliens.
The aliens shot down all the missiles, and thanked us for letting them test their meteor defense.
They had a non-lethal weapon, a "zapper". If you get hit with the zapper, it's the ultimate orgasm; you generally pass out from ecstasy.
Eventually, there were people who turned into "chasers"; they'd chase the aliens around and try to provoke the aliens into zapping them.
Colonel Washington led his troops on an assault that finally drove them back to their ship, and got them to leave. He was zapped in the process.
Society collapsed.
One place, a republic, is rebuilding. It's facing a barbarian, anti-technology tribe that worships the aliens. They're just starting to get ahead of the game... and here come the aliens.
So now they have to deal with the aliens and the barbarians. The protagonist is a member of the legislature, and the aliens come and watch him work from time to time. These aliens are academics, not sailors. Another legislator, who lost her family in the collapse, hates them with a passion, "...what are you here for? To publish another paper, 'What It's Like To Have Aliens Bugger Your World?'"
The protagonist has a problem; one of his constituents is having his cats shot with a .22. He investigates, finds the child at fault, and notifies the constituent so the child can be punished.
The alien academic can't understand why this is important, or why they want to "brutalize" the child. He has to explain the importance of "ratters", and why the child has to learn not to do such things.
Colonel Washington is now in charge of this republic's army. He was unaffected by the zap. The protagonist finds out that Washington had escaped from a mental hospital to lead troops against the aliens. He was put there because, as his truck was heading out from Nicaragua (back when we were fighting there), an 11 year old boy tried to toss a grenade in the truck. When the military found out he'd shot the kid, they concluded he was crazy.
So now the barbarians are trying to get the aliens to zap him again, turn him into a "chaser", to cripple the republic before the upcoming war.
A group of barbarians try to frighten the alien into pulling its zapper. When it does, the protagonist steps in front of colonel Washington and is zapped...
And wakes up a few days later with absolutely no desire to "chase".
When talking with Dzazz (the alien academic) later, they get into an argument about the zappers being addictive. Dzazz is adamant that the zapper effect cannot be addictive to a member of a healthy society.
So, the protagonist challenges the barbarian leader to a fight; instead of killing him, he gets him down then kicks him in the butt. While his followers are cowed, the protagonist gets them to agree to attend a meeting in town, with the aliens.
What happens is, the protagonist has figured out why the academics have come to visit, and how the tramp steamer was NOT responsible for our collapse.
It turns out that our society *wasn't* healthy, full of socialist mumbo-jumbo, we were heading for a collapse anyway. The academics came to study the republic because it is rebuilding incredibly fast, in their experience. And this is vital information... because the alien's society is collapsing, too. The aliens' attitude about the boy shooting cats, the attitude of the sailors, who did misbehave (at one point one alien got a zapper, another a gun, and took turns shooting chasers, to see if any would run away...)
The vital part of this whole story, though, his why the protagonist wasn't zapped. It's because he had a wife, and kid, and a job that meant something to him, and a society that meant something to him. Sure, the zapper felt great, but it was degrading, and he had more rewarding stimulations in his real life.
I'm going to have to read it again, it really hammers the case home about culture and drug abuse.
Jan
"Go along to get along" ceased to be relevant long ago.
Too bad we have raised a generation or two of voters who hold to that very governing thought process.
Example: drugs. The "war on drugs" is a band-aid. As long as people feel like they have to disconnect from reality to deal with reality, they will resort to any number of things - including drugs. You deal with drugs by teaching and demonstrating the principle of personal accountability.
Public schooling is another ruse. It is an effort by the government to remove the instruction and training of children as a responsibility from Parents. Then they double-down and support public schooling and administration that restrict parental rights with respect to their own children. You deal with this by returning the responsibility of education to the parents - not the state.
Terrorism is the result of an ideology that feeds on the desire to control others. The principle that defeats it is to clearly label these ideologies as EVIL, ie contradictory to society. You don't beat about the bush. You don't cater or pander to these ideologies. You don't accept them in legal rulings. You decry them for exactly what they are: destructive to society.
The problem with the establishment Republican party is that they have lost sight of the conservative principles that most Republican voters want to vote for and which distinguishes them from the Democrats.