red

Holliwell finished his packing alone. When his bag was locked and standing by the front door, he went into the kitchen and made himself a strong bloody mary. He drank it by the living-room window, looking out at the front yard where his magnolia hung snowbound and his mountain ash stood tortured and skeletal in an envelope of ice.

He finished the first drink and then had another, not bothering with breakfast. By the time he put his suitcase in the back of the Volvo, he was high enough to stop at the smoke shop in town and buy his first pack of cig-arettes in a month. Driving to the turnpike, he smoked one cigarette after another.

After the turnpike entrance, he hit the radio and in a mile or two WWVA eased down from space, selling lucky crosses and Christian good fortune. Holliwell tuned it in carefully and between commercials heard a singular musical recitation, delivered in up-country dialect, about a young football player.

The youth on the record was his high school’s star quarterback; it was the Big Game against the school in the next hollow and at half-time the home team was a couple of touchdowns behind. During the half-time break, the boy disappeared from the locker room and he was late returning for the third quarter.

“Where in the hell you been?” demanded the anxious hometown coach, who was decent but hard. He swore at the boy and shoved him toward the line of scrimmage. There then commenced an astonishing display of unforgettable schoolboy ball. The kid played like a young man possessed, and the fans in the little country-and-western town had never seen the like of him. The opposition was devastated, the coach awestruck and penitent. Amid the jubilation outside the showers, he drew the young quarterback quietly aside.

“Coach,” the youth explained, “my father was blind.”

The boy’s father had been blind and for a week had lain upon his deathbed. The boy had been phoning the hospital regularly and during half-time had learned of his father’s death.

The coach cleared his throat. How then to explain the spectacle only just witnessed—the sixty-yard touchdown passes, the seventy-yard scoring runs?

“You see, coach,” the boy said quietly, “it’s the first time he’s ever seen me play.”

By the time WWVA faded out, Holliwell was aware of the tears streaming down his face, staining his tie, wetting his moustache and the stub of his cigarette. He eased the Volvo into the next turnoff, and sat, with the motor running, staring through the windshield at a row of green refuse cans until he had stopped sobbing.

So much for morning drinking.

—Robert Stone, A Flag For Sunrise

Those ignoranti known as the teabaggers, motivated as they are by Fear Of The Black Man, cannot really be expected to think coherently. Not learned, not bright, all that they are proceeds from delusion, from a racist certainty that, as Jill Lepore puts it The Whites Of Their Eyes, “everything about Barack Obama and his administration [is] somehow alarming, as if his election had ripped a tear in the fabric of time.”

The teabaggers’ minders shrewdly wrapped them in the mantle of the American Revolution, because “nothing trumps the Revolution,” and this “conferred upon a scattered, diffuse, and confused movement a degree of legitimacy and the appearance, almost, of coherence.”

But the Revolution as perceived and play-acted by the teabaggers bears no relation to any that ever actually existed in discernible space-time. As Lepore notes, ”[w]hat is curious about the Tea Party’s Revolution, though, is that it isn’t just kooky history, it is antihistory.” It is, in a word, fundamentalism: “‘the founding’ is ageless and sacred and to be worshipped; certain historical texts—’the founding documents’—are to be read in the same spirit with which religious fundamentalists read, for instance, the Ten Commandments; the Founding Fathers were divinely inspired; the academic study of history is a conspiracy and, furthermore, blasphemy; political arguments grounded in appeals to the founding documents, as sacred texts, and to the Founding Fathers, as prophets, are therefore incontrovertible.”

All of what the teabaggers are about flows against actual history. The “Founding Fathers,” for instance, were never considered as such, under such a name,until the 1921 inaugural address of Warren G. Harding, who on that occasion also became the first person to pronounce them—falsely—divinely inspired. This in a speech described by H. L Mencken as follows: “It reminds me of a string of wet sponges. It reminds me of tattered washing on the line; it reminds me of stale bean soup, of college yells, of dogs barking idiotically through endless nights. It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it.” Harding himself a president so bad he was commonly proclaimed history’s worst, until the electorate began elevating Bushes. Harding is best remembered as the Bill Clinton of his time (“it is a good thing I am not a woman,” he once confessed, “as I would always be pregnant, for I cannot say no”), a man who was once memorably denounced by journalist William White as a “he-harlot,” and who while president frequently smuggled into the White House Nan Britton, who first conceived an attraction for Harding when she was 12, and who gave birth to his daughter Elizabeth Ann in 1919, the year before Harding entered the White House. Harding and Britton most often engaged in sexual congress in a darkened coat closet off the Oval Office: then he would send her away, stocking-tops stuffed with money; she gathered in additional coin via an office job proffered by Harding’s friends at US Steel.

None of these inconvenient truths rattle around the brainpans of the teabaggers. Just as there is no room in their noggins for the historical truth that such teabagging termagants as Sarah Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Christine O’Kooky, and Sharron Angle would never have been allowed to utter word one, back there in the late 1700s, when first the tea fell into the harbor. Because these people are women. And as Lepore puts it: “In eighteenth-century America, I wouldn’t have been able to vote. I wouldn’t have been able to own property, either. I’d very likely have been unable to write, and, if I survived childhood, chances are that I’d have died in childbirth. And, no matter how long or short my life, I’d almost certainly have died without having once ventured a political opinion preserved in any historical record.”

Finally, when the teabaggers proclaim, as they so like to do, there during their clan hoedowns, that “the founders are here among us,” that “they’re all around us,” the baggers neglect to note that if this were actually true, odds are those founders would be reeling around dead drunk. Because the United States, from 1770 through 1830, was “one of the world’s great drinking countries”—and not just for that time, but in all of history. “Party Like It’s 1773″ read one placard at an Atlanta teabagging revival, hosted by Sean Klannity, attended by 15,000 people, and opened by a white-wigged would-be eighteenth-century minister, who bloviated from in front of a giant US Constitution: “I am Thomas Paine.” Except Paine, in 1806, observed by a neighbor in a New York tavern, was “so drunk and disoriented and unwashed and unkempt that his toenails had grown over his toes.”

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