I know this outside my usual sports purview posting here, but re-reading Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn for my American novel class this quarter, I was struck by how one character seemed to resonate with the contemporary Tea Party phenomenon. I refer to Pap Finn, one of American literature’s great scurvy drunks.
For those of you who’ve forgotten: in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Huck and Tom end up with $6,000 each—a huge sum of money for the 1830s. Early in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck tells us that his money is with Judge Thatcher, put out at interest, and one appealing part of Huck’s character is that he doesn’t seem to understand money at all. But his father, the town drunk who’s been gone for a year or more, does, and he reappears, trying to claim the cash—since Huck is a minor, his father would legally own him (one of the interesting angles for discussion of slavery in the novel) and his money. Pap kidnaps Huck, and is working with a lawyer to sue for what he thinks of as his rights, and he’s not at all happy about how slowly it’s going.
Pap warn’t in a good humor — so he was his natural self. He said he was down town, and everything was going wrong.
Hmm. Everything going wrong—that’s the Tea Party’s main line of resentment politics. In the novel, everything’s going wrong with Pap’s lawsuit, but what but what really gets to him is not this purported injustice, which leaves him ill-clad and living in poverty.
“The law takes a man worth six thousand dollars and up’ards, and jams him into an old trap of a cabin like this, and lets him go round in clothes that ain’t fitten for a hog. They call that govment! A man can’t get his rights in a govment like this.”
Hmmm. Hatred of the government. But just as with the Tea Partiers and Obama, it’s not about reforming the government, it’s really about race. Back to Pap:
“Oh, yes, this is a wonderful govment, wonderful. Why, looky here. There was a free nigger there from Ohio — a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane — the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think? They said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote when he was at home. Well, that let me out. Thinks I, what is the country a-coming to? It was ‘lection day, and I was just about to go and vote myself if I warn’t too drunk to get there; but when they told me there was a State in this country where they’d let that nigger vote, I drawed out. I says I’ll never vote agin. Them’s the very words I said; they all heard me; and the country may rot for all me — I’ll never vote agin as long as I live. And to see the cool way of that nigger — why, he wouldn’t a give me the road if I hadn’t shoved him out o’ the way. I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold? — that’s what I want to know. And what do you reckon they said? Why, they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months, and he hadn’t been there that long yet. There, now — that’s a specimen. They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months. Here’s a govment that calls itself a govment, and lets on to be a govment, and thinks it is a govment, and yet’s got to set stock-still for six whole months before it can take a hold of a prowling, thieving, infernal, white-shirted free nigger . . “
Hmm. No indication that this Free Negro College Professor was actually a thief, and the implied violence of Pap shoving him out of the road. . . . Just as the Tea Party is fueled by white panic and fear of a black President, Pap Finn’s anger is about a perception that a black man can be better than him.
No new arguments ever come up in American culture, just old ones in new clothes.
“No new arguments ever come up in American culture, just old ones in new clothes.”
Excellent, but sad.
Morning News. Scientific discoveries happen a lot. Go to nature.com I’d guess, or something else. Fascinating stories of amphibians, the earth and wildlife are all over. It doesn’t sell though. People respond to the main topics, sex (dan) drugs (dom) and political rockin and rollin. Congrats to the Hawks, nailbitin finish, but @2 Morn News i disagree, it could, but wouldn’t be hilarious.
Absurd stretch here. Imagining your thought process.
“I’m reading a book. How can I let the people of Slog know I’m reading a book and thinking critically about it? Of course! Bash the Tea Party. They hate the Tea Party. They like me. They really like me!”
I dunno @2. They are the party that keeps screeching that this country is more divided than its ever been, due to President Obama. Yet President Obama really hasn’t done anything to divide our country…well, other than be half-black.
So, yeah, I think there is a point to be made here.
“I’m reading a post on Slog. How can I let the people of Slog know I’m reading this post and thinking critically about it? Of course! Bash the author. They hate the author. They like me. They really like me!”
Speaking as a scurvy drunk (who’s already into the beer and Jager, I might add), any comparison between Tea Partiers and scurvy drunks is offensive.
i’d rather you posted bum outs like this after noon, and not on mondays.
@4: how is complaining that obama isn’t really american, and is actually a muslim from kenya, NOT having a problem with him being african-american?
Meh. Painting the tea-partiers as a bunch of racists is just as retarded as calling all democrats socialist. It’s the height of intellectual laziness.
Funny that a guy as smart as Chicago Fan can’t really see how utterly stupid/childish his argument is.
@7 – Exactly.
@4 – Of course the Tea Party isn’t “officially” racist. They’re not “officially” much of anything, lest they be held accountable for their positions, but to ignore the racist rhetoric that comes from within the tea party movement takes a formidable pair of blinders.
@anyone – Is anyone else reading Mark Twain these days? I’m reading as much as I can before November when the autobiography is released.
The greatest failure of American society is the inability of the news media and politicians to reliably and with evidence call “Bullshit” on others. The news media won’t go after the news media, pols won’t (Grayson aside) go after other pols.
It gives millions of assholes carte blanche to be assholes. I predict the moment the news media and a simple majority of pols are willing to repeatedly and endless call bullshit, we’ll see the quite literal end of the Republican party.
@9 I just want to read the auto-bio. I know Twain’s a bit long-winded for my tastes, but if it is as bitter as it seems it will be, it ought to be delightfully trashy and sour.
@10:
So, can you name, off the top of your head, one white Muslim and one white Kenyan?
@13 Ummm…the Leakey family, and Cat Stevens. That was pretty easy actually.
I see the tea party simply as republicans who are ashamed of GWB, so they don’t want to call themselves republicans (even though that’s how they’ll vote 100% of the time) and are just pissed in general that the democrats have full power in the executive and legislative branches. Some are racist, but not all. Some are stupid, but not all. But all their complaints about how the country is divided or failing or whatever is simply their anger and frustration that the majority of Americans have had enough of them and aren’t buying their bullshit anymore.
The tea party = republicans, in every way that matters.
Mmm. . . . Don’t have a seven-figure annual income? You’re not a Republican. And never will be.
@10 that’s the most incredible evidence I’ve seen used for a very weak argument in quite a long time. No one’s saying everybody in the Tea Party movement is racist. Is Chicago Fan really saying that? But can you seriously believe that racism toward Obama is not at least a sub-text to the whole thing?
That a majority of Muslims are brown-skinned and that the Nation of Islam is a black organization in the US and the insidious meme that he’s a secret Muslim (What is the predominant demographic susceptible to this belief–poor, uneducated whites? I think so!).
Conservative media manipulators: for example, Obama goes street
The list goes on.
How do we know they’re racist? We don’t. Is it possible that some, perhaps many people who self-identify as Tea Partiers have some racist inclinations? Of course. But what’s happening now is a lot of assumption backed with little actual evidence. It ain’t helping the cause of rational people in this country.
If you want to try and define Teabaggers, just stick to what we do know: they’re pissed at everything, have very little understanding of how government works and why it works the way it does, and they have nothing in the way of tangible, plausible solutions to the problems you always hear them crowing about. That’s what the Tea Party has shown us. That’s what we know.
@14 yes double tsk, tsk on all our racial assumptions while you pretend to take on some supposed higher ground by calling people racists. Just from Wiki (not completely reliable, I know) — % of non-Africans in Kenya is 1%.
Also, you’ve used a quite a spurious red herring in your argument. People are arguing Obama is secretly Kenyan because, get this, his father was Kenyan! Holy shit, it has nothing to do with other ethnicities in Kenya, a minority whose visibility is near nil.
@14 JF your a fucking idiot. how many of the white presidents of the past have had their citizenship and their loyalty to the country questioned based on their name and skin color? i think it’s less than the number of white people in kenya. challenging someone’s patriotism on the sole basis of their race IS racism.
aside from that i don’t think chicago fan is drawing a literal parallel between the racism of pap finn and the tea party so much as he’s drawing a comparison between the latent anger of both and the general motivation behind that anger. they’re both irrationally and hysterically disgruntled, and their reasoning is much the same. at least that’s what i took from this post.
@21
What you said.
@9 You’re on to something here. It’s the code words now being used that betray the bigotry in the Tea Party. Granted, many of these people are so fucking stupid as to be completely unaware of how bigoted they truly are, but their words are easily parsed.
Communist, Socialist, Fascist, Marxist, Progressive: These are all terms for the scary “other” people who live among us. None of these are significant factors in US policy. When you hear people using these terms about Obama, you know that that have no legitimate understanding of political science. “Marxist” just sounds better than “boogeyman”.
States Rights, 10th & 2nd Ammendments: These are terms for what used to be called “Nullification”, which was a 19th century concept that held that individual states could choose which federal laws to obey and which ones to ignore. This was primarily about slavery and laws to protect the social order of white supremecy. A little of it was about tariffs, but we should all know that only mattered to the big money men, not to the average citizen. Today, these terms are codes for ignoring the Civil Rights Acts, ADA, and any other federal law that is aimed at equality. These are the NIMBY phrases, that are all about being allowed to discriminate based on race & culture.
Traditional Family Values: This is simple code for anti-gay laws.
Tax Reform: Simple code for “I don’t want to pay for the welfare of all these minorities.” Conveniently forgetting, like Clit Diddler, that they may very well be receiving some welfare themselves.
And for the handful of non-whites you might see at a Tea Party rally . . . Bishop Eddie Long proves that self-hate is always in style!
Black males make up less than 3% of Seattle’s population but over half of all murders in Seattle are committed by black males.
@17,
True. But the teabaggers have convinced themselves that “one day, they too will be rich, old, white men.” If only they work hard and stop guv’mint from stealing their money and giving it to the poor.
Of course, practically none of them will ever make anywhere near a seven figure salary, but they’ve been brainwashed into thinking they will… because anything is possible in America! right?
Yeah, and those Obama as witch doctor posters certainly had no racial context.
Listen JF, you can quibble, wiggle and squirm your way out of saying what is completely obvious, but it doesn’t make it untrue: A whole lot of Tea Party supporters are fucking racist.
When liberals run out of arguments they call you racist. It’s the same Bush tactics that we have seen before “are you with terrorists are are you with us?”
Sorry, you can’t just keep bending the truth. The Tea Party is about fiscal responsibility and freedom. You keep on making it about race, but it’s not.
You find one crazy person hanging around a Tea Party and zoom squarely on that. That’s the way to make news nowadays – sensationalism over substance.
For all the rest of you: I encourage you to check out a Tea Party demonstration. You will be pleasantly surprised.
The best thing about it is that the Tea Party doesn’t want to coerce you into doing anything. The members just want to be left alone and will leave you alone in turn. Isn’t that what freedom all about?
Aren’t black people of color just awesome!!!! I’m a stereotypical naive white Seattle libtard, and I piss all over myself with excitement at letting everyone know how enlightened my progressive attitudes are about black people of color!!!! If only those evil racist white teabaggers didn’t force black people of color to murder each other so much!
http://tinyurl.com/no5knk
Extrapolated from the article “List of 2008 homicides in Seattle” from the Seattle PI
selected from the list of the 28 Seattle homicides in 2008….
Allen Joplin, Jan. 4 — black killed by black
De’Che Morrison, Jan. 10 — black killed by black
Maurice “Moe” Allen Jr., Jan. 26 — black killed by black
Degene Barecha, Jan. 30 — black killed by black
Perry Henderson, Feb. 6 — black killed by black
Stephan Dwaine Stewart, April 2 — black killed by black
Eldora Earlycutt, July 4 — black killed by black
James Paroline, July 10 — white killed by black
Troy Peters, July 22 — black killed by black
Pierre Lapoint, Aug. 5 — black killed by black
Jane Kariuki, Oct. 16 — woman of unknown race killed by black man named Christel D. Murphy
Quincy S. Coleman, Oct. 31 — black killed by black
Edward McMichael, the “Tuba Man”, Nov. 3 — white killed by multiple blacks
Nathaniel Lee Thomas, Nov. 23 — black killed by black
So by my count blacks (8% of Seattle) were the killers in at least half (that’s at least 50%) of the murders in the Seattle area in 2008. At least five of the other murderers were latinos.
Now let’s take a look at 2009!
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/413827_ho…
http://tinyurl.com/26v7dzk
The link above is to the Seattle PI’s article on homicides in Seattle in 2009.
By my count at least twelve of the 21 murders in Seattle in 2009 were committed by blacks, only 8% of Seattle.
Of the 27 officers that were shot and killed by criminals in the last 20 years in King and Pierce county, 21 of them were shot by black men, even though black men make up less than 3% of the population.
————————–
How about San Francisco, the enlightened liberal progressive paradise?
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg…
http://tinyurl.com/2aqedt3
Dirty secret of black-on-Asian violence is out
C.W. Nevius
San Francisco Gate / San Francisco Chronicle
Sunday, May 2, 2010
“”In 85 percent of the physical assault crimes, the victims were Asian and the perpetrators were African American”.
To help put these numbers in the proper perspective, keep in mind that blacks make up only about 4% of San Francisco.
========================
How about New York City?
http://projects.nytimes.com/crime/homici…
http://tinyurl.com/2cuevua
New York Times – New York City Interactive Homicide Map:
Blacks = 60% of the killers, 60% of the victims
Whites = 7% of the killers, 8% of the victims
Blacks = 26% of NYC population
Whites = 35% of NYC population
———–
What about blackety black Atlanta compared to whitey white Portland?
According to cityrating.com Atlanta’s population is 431,043. There are about 149 murders per year in Atlanta (4.5 times the national average).
Let’s check out Portland, OR with a population of 545,271. Portland, with a population over 100,000 more than Atlanta, has about 27 murders.
Portland = 76% white, only about 7% black
Atlanta = 31% white, 61% black.
(Isn’t it FUNNY how the most liberal cities in the USA are also the WHITEST cities?)
So what do we surmise with these stats? Answer: More black people equals more murders.
Where do “stereotypes” come from? I’m just a naive white Seattle Slog college edjumacated progressive liberal dipshit, and I can’t seem to figure it out!
The cool thing about how the stranger no longer automatically shows anonymous comments is that the trolls have been required to register.
You still read my comment, bitch
The one good thing about racists is that, when they find themselves in a hole, that absolutely can not resist the urge to keep digging.
Please keep posting, JF. You are doing a better job of discrediting the Tea Party than the entire liberal establishment.
Mike @28: I’d believe you, but you and your teabagger compadres are conveying your messages using the very tubes that were developed, bought and paid for by the gummint. Drive on any roads lately? Visit a doctor and receive treatment researched using Federal gov’t dollars? Oh, and going by your avatar, I’d guess you’re military or wannabe anyway. Guess who pays your salary?
@29 – Okay, you just lost all credibility with this comment. You think depicting Obama with a bone through his nose has nothing to do with the color of his skin?
I suppose if they depicted him hanging from a tree, you’d make some argument about whites committing suicide, or say it’s as racially neutral as burning in effigy.
@34 limited government is not the absence of government. Stop using extremes to validate your invalid points. No one in the Tea Party proposes anarchy, what we propose is:
1) balanced budget
2) less government intervention
Democrats with their heavy handed approach have been trying to “fix” the economy for two years now. This is the party of lawyers and unions – the only place where those guys innovate is their tax returns. Do you really expect them to grow the economy? Give me a break.
As for my avatar I suggest you lighten up and see some good movies: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0942385/
@36 move back to Somalia or Russia and stop trying to enslave Americans to your ideology.
The Tea Party is actually the official party of kooky costumes. Best damn entertainment ever!
@MacCrocodile: Actually , the Tea Party is the official party of kooky and zany costumes. Zowie! Best damn entertainment value in America.