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.