I am fucking sick and tired of hearing Tea Party nutjobs talking about slavery. It needs to stop, because it is clear that, like so much else, Tea Party rabble-rousers have no concept of history, politics, or reality in general. I saw this ad a while ago and it induced a bit of frothing at the mouth–Abraham Lincoln thinks the federal income tax is akin to slavery? Oh shit right, it’s not like the first federal income tax was approved during the Lincoln presidency oh fucking wait no that is completely wrong, he signed into law the first federal income tax! But hey, why not grandstand and posture? I’m really sure that since the Revenue Act was terminated and then reborn as several other ways of taxing folks before the 16th amendment was approved that just really makes the Tea Party case! Indeed, paying a federal income tax that pays for public services like roads and schools and libraries and stuff is exactly the same thing as when a person of one race is born into a “peculiar institution” that allows him or her to be bought and sold, whipped, raped, worked without compensation, and psychologically abused by a different race! OK! As a white person, that makes real good sense to me!

This kind of bullshit nonsense is why I am frankly baffled when people are all like *shock* omg *shock* when the Tea Party is called on its shit for being a bunch of xenophobic, racist white folks with no ethos other than generalized rage over not getting their way in Washington, and, I dunno, when papers dare to consider not publishing re-runs of “Peanuts.” Lord have mercy on my blood pressure.

Well! Upon further consideration, the whole shock factor is  probably because Tea Party rabble-rousers are also total cowards, given that the article I was just about to link, penned by one Mark Somebody over at MarkTalk.com (it’s not right or left, it’s right or wrong!) was taken down and covered up like a cat burying a particularly odious turd, likely because he realized that penning a fictional letter from the NAACP to Abraham Lincoln about how apparently affirmative action and welfare are measures supported by “colored people” who don’t really want to be free, but who just want the federal government to be “massa” is completely inappropriate and insane! True!

The fact that Mr. Mark took the offending post down shows two things. First, it demonstrates how little Tea Party grandstanders wish to actually induce critical thought in their audiences, but rather get people fightin’ mad and slink away into the self-satisfied darkness of their suburban homes. Also, it demonstrates that Tea Party sorts also just love to miss the point. This paragraph I’ll quote below is genuinely amazing:

I would suggest to those offended by the term “Colored People” (the phrase that made my article so controversial) please contact the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and join me in calling for an end to their use of the racial slur and that Mr. Jealous take me up on my offer to travel with me on the next Tea Party Express so that he may meet all of you in person.  His contact information is below.

First of all, hey! White folks don’t necessarily get to determine what’s a slur and what’s not, or how people of color refer to themselves! Secondly, the article in question wasn’t controversial because of the flippant, ignorant throwing-about of the term “colored people” (that part made it merely gratuitously inappropriate) but were, in reality, offended by his allegation that affirmative action is akin to black folks wanting to be under the protection of a kindly “massa” once more, since apparently in the minds of Tea Party wingnuts. . . slavery was just white folks taking care of black folks? Right, I forgot that Gone With the Wind was a perfectly accurate depiction of slavery in the American south. Gosh, it is just totally real American history that black folks really don’t know nuthin’ ’bout birthin’ no babies!

I will admit that I’m not as familiar with American slavery as slavery in the British West Indies, but damn it, I’m definitely familiar enough with American slavery and and its repercussions to say with all certainty that analogizing slavery to income tax or affirmative action or welfare is just about the most ignorant thing in the world and it needs to stop. And it needs to stop not because I’m some ivory tower liberal trying to silence free speech of salt of the earth Americans, but because it’s stupid and inaccurate.

For many years I’ve been critical of the tactic used in the animal rights movement to analogize industrial animal agriculture to rape. I hate it more than anything, and while I won’t get off topic by addressing my issues with that particular mental exercise, I find the Tea Party lust to imagine themselves enslaved and oppressed to be similarly disturbing and misguided. A terrible thing (or a perceived terrible thing) is not always exactly or even vaguely the same as some different terrible thing, and I think that making crackpot analogies merely serves to draw attention away from the real issues that could perhaps be discussed in rational ways should people wish to do so.

What the fuck am I even saying? Obviously it is better to nonsensically spout off dreck about how being a rich white dude in America these days is like so totally the same as being Big Jim out in the cotton fields. Bread and circuses worked for the Romans for a good long while, so why not?