Dear Dr. Brian,
I have an issue that I hope you can help me
with. I’ve tried a number of different ways to deal with the problem, including
doing Internet research, attending seminars, speaking to a spiritual adviser,
and abusing prescription drugs and alcohol. But nothing has helped. Please help
me understand. Why are those Tea Party people so amazingly and mind-numbingly
stupid? Thank you for your time.
Love,
Ayn Rand
Dear Ms. Rand,
Thank you for contacting me from beyond the
grave. This indicates an incredible dedication to sorting out the truth in this
matter. Luckily for you, (and me, I suppose, since you still have to pay me
even though I don’t have to actually do any research), I recently returned from
a seminar in Milan concerning this very topic. I was just discussing the
scholastic experience with my office manager Lanae (who didn’t really care one
whit about my discoveries, she was just relieved that she didn’t have to answer
the office phones for a few minutes) and I happened to still have the brochure
discussing the workshops at the seminar right here on my desk when I opened
your email.
Let’s review
those workshop topics, shall we? And of course I’ll add some personal
commentary, which is a service I always try to provide to my clients.
“The Tea Bagger and His Tea”
First of all,
it’s home-brewed. You don’t get that steeped in self-absorption unless you
don’t get out of the house all that often, nor did your parents. This is a
fundamental warning sign when attempting to diagnose the neurosis of a patient.
If the subject has never really travelled to other parts of the country,
experienced other cultures, or even had a meaningful conversation with someone
who isn’t similarly white, supposedly straight, and stupid, there’s not much of
an opportunity for personal growth. Or wisdom.
Secondly, the tea
is obviously bitter. Otherwise, why would these people be constantly running
around with such a sour expression and a clenched attitude? Maybe if they would
wash the pot out every once in a while, and quit buying the same brand of tea
every time, they might actually discover some new flavors that they find out
are not half bad. Life is a buffet, people. If you head right to the corn
fritters every time you aren’t getting the full experience.
“The Tea Bagger and His Baggage”
And those bags
are some overstuffed, extra-fee-on-airlines kind of bags. A tea bagger is angry
with the world because their personal
bags are so full. They’re tired of carrying those bags around, so they take out
their frustration on people who have managed to free themselves of baggage and
live their lives in a manner that makes them happy. The tea bagger doesn’t
believe other people should be happy if they themselves can’t be, so they spend
their own lives denigrating others. Instead of doing the smart thing, which
would be to unpack those damn bags and move on. And maybe read a book or two.
Speaking of the
packing, let’s full-circle it back to the parents of that bitchy, unsatisfied
person. You birth-givers helped pack a lot of that bag. Granted, there are rare
occasions when you can be the sweetest thing on earth but still manage to shoot
something out of your loins that turns into a hate-mongering sociopath,
regardless of how much you try to bathe them in love and understanding and warm
cookies. But most of the time? You
put the ingredients into the cookie that made Junior what he is today. Proper
child-rearing is a lifetime commitment. You can’t throw your hands up and quit
the first time Junior knocks somebody down on the playground.
But still, the
ultimate responsibility lies with the person carrying the baggage. Many of us
have had parents who didn’t win any awards for sainthood, warmth, or semblance
of decency, but we still managed to take a deep breath (sometime hundreds of
them) and claw our way to a place of relative peace. The avenues of your life
are completely chosen by you. If you have unjustified
hatred for another human being, that hatred was sowed in your own soul. You’re
the farmer. Take care of it. Tend to your own crops. Plant something better.
“The Tea Bagger
and His Pot”
Ah, and here we
get to the cornerstone of the teabag-manufacturing industry: The Church. Now, before I launch along this angle, let me
preface my words by saying that not all houses of worship cook their products
the same way, and many of them never make anything that boils. In fact, I’m
sure the original houses of worship had a much different method of creation
compared to the massive production lines that take place today. Back in the day,
the teaching ingredients were simple: love thy neighbor, assist those who need
help, don’t do things you really shouldn’t do, and make sure you have enough goats for the impending marriages of female
offspring.
But as time went
by, some people began to bicker about having to follow ALL the rules, because
bickering and a dislike for doing the right thing is simply part of the nature
of some humans, especially folks who may qualify as humans biologically but not
necessarily socially or morally. The bickering units splintered off and formed
their own churches, where they could worship just the parts of the founding
documents that justified the activities they found more interesting and enjoyable
to perform. And, of course, because bickering is a constant with the
dissatisfied, the splintering became exponential over the centuries. Now we have
thousands of denominational flavors, going by increasingly bizarre names
because all of the really good URLs have already been taken on the Internet.
And even within
the mainstream denominations, we have a considerable variance in teaching, because
once you start allowing folks to selectively interpret what they will, mix in
the powerful but often misused “right to free speech”, things begin to fracture
all over the place. So you have one person in Denomination A who believes in a
complete set of principles, and another person in that same denomination who
believes in the abridged, edited, rearranged set of principles that bears
little resemblance to what scribers had in mind back when they were fiddling
with sea scrolls and sitting on the shore of the Dead Sea, in a nice café that
had an excellent brunch.
And the
mini-sized packages of religion are most often served up in those colossal
mega-churches that cause traffic jams in the surrounding area for the entirety
of Sundays. If you want to keep the attention of your fifth set of 20,000
worshippers whilst standing on your rock-star pulpit stage, you can only hit
one or two stirring points or you’re going to start losing people to the
concession stands. One or two points, that’s it, forget the rest of the things that
moral people should mull if they want to be rounded and grounded. And
personally, I don’t see how you can see a spiritual path to God if you can’t
even see your own pastor except when he’s flashing on the giant video monitors
manufactured in a country where you go to jail if speak your own mind.
The most
spiritual people that I have ever met haven’t stepped foot in a physical church
in years, or at least only sparingly. They do their research on their own,
rather than being directed to certain passages by people with an agenda, and
they read everything they can. Unlike the rock-star preachers and right-wing
politicians who haven’t even cracked open the flashy Bibles they like to wave
about during photo opportunities.
“Excuse me,” said
Lanae, reading my email over my shoulder whilst sucking the jelly from a donut
right in my left ear, “may I interject?”
I leaned back in
my chair, partly to ease the tension in my back and partly to get away from the
pornographic soundtrack in that left ear. “Certainly.”
Lanae swallowed. “Okay,
you’re getting a bit long-winded here, like Michael Moore when he notices a
camera pointing at him. Let’s move on from the rise and fall of Christianity.”
I was perplexed. “But
I’m just trying to present the religious angle. It’s one of the factors that is
being warped in the Tea Party and I’m only assisting my client with-“
Lanae pressed a
sticky index finger against my startled lips, something that both unsettled me
and made me suddenly crave a fruit-filled scone. “Shush. Another angle with the
Tea Party and the Republicans is that they consider women to be secondary,
sub-human, and unable to make decisions about their own body. Just like they
treat gays and lesbians. And really, anybody that isn’t a white male. The fact
that there are women and gays who are Republicans astounds me. But now I’m having a Michael Moore moment. To the
point: You’re not even religious yourself, this blog post is starting to run a
little long, and people are going to stop reading it and might go to a
mega-church out of boredom.”
She unstuck her
finger from my lips. “I’ll be at my desk if you need me. I’m not going to make
any more coffee, because you’ve clearly had your share, but I will prep a
bottle of merlot and see if we have any of those weird crackers you like with
the olive bits in them.” She marched forth, mission-based.
I sighed. She was
right. Next topic.
“The Tea Plant and
the Planting”
You don’t get a new variety of tea without
careful cultivating and experimentation. In the case of the Tea Party-flavored
tea, the agricultural process is slightly complex, but effective. First you
have to find a promising plot that will produce what you desire. The soil must
contain plenty of self-created, improperly-based and unreleased anger. The
mineral composition should include an inability to take responsibility for one’s
own failures and the need to find a scapegoat who had nothing to do with those
failures. And you need to leave all the weeds in the field, the weeds of hate,
the weeds of misogyny, the weeds of racism and the weeds of absolute and utter
gullibility.
But the big win
here is the fertilizer. And there are two kinds. The primary fertilizer is
produced by a company known as “News Corporation”, and the particular product
is known as “Fox News”. (Interestingly enough, neither of these names has anything
to do with what a rational person would consider “news”.) This fertilizer must
be spread daily, preferably via a television set that is left on continuously
so that the half-truths and outright lies can seep into the soil at a steady
rate. The soil must become so dependent on the Fox News drippings, that if the
TV is ever turned off, the soil would have no idea what to do with its life or
how to think.
The secondary
fertilizer is known as “right-wing talk radio”. This is also something that must
be applied every day, non-stop. This fertilizer contains the fundamentalist
elements of bogus statistics, distortions of any semblance of actual reality,
show hosts that have failed miserably in any endeavors to be of any worth to
society, and a constant repetition of the fundamental mantra: “Hate anything
and everything that is different from you.” Except for monetary donations to
right-wing candidates. You love and worship those. Send some today! Even if you
really don’t have any spare cash because the very people you have been farmed
to support are actively working to destroy your livelihood and keep you a slave
to their cause.
And that’s the
scoop, dearest Ayn Rand, the writer who was briefly celebrated by the Tea Party
until they read the uh-oh bits about your atheism and your statement that “embryos
have no rights”, then they tried to dump you despite declaring a national
holiday in your honor just a few days before. (This is standard practice with
the Tea Party. They don’t investigate anything, they jump on the current
bandwagon directive from Rupert Murdoch or Karl Rove or somebody invoking
Ronald Reagan, even though it’s very clear that Ronald, despite some
questionable things he did, would be horribly ashamed of what the Republican
Party has become with their tea farms and idiots with a microphone. Then they
blindly jump off the abandoned bandwagon and land wherever they are told to
land, still clutching their hate.)
So, my
prescription for you? Give up and let go. There is no possible way to have any
compassion for what the Tea Party is trying to do to our country. They are not
nationalists, they are certainly not patriots, they have no concept of the true
intentions of our founding fathers (separation of church and state, it’s all
right there if you could actually read and spell), and they clearly have no
compassion for you. Click unfriend.
Enjoy the rest of
your day. In an existential way, of course.
Dr. Brian
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