Tea and Terrorists

Tea-sers

I guess at this point the Tea Parties have Been Done, blog- and column-wise.  Townhall, NRO, and the usual crowd have weighed in.  I do have one major observation worth developing, and that is how peaceable, non-radical, and, well, mainstream the Tea Party crowds seemed to be, on the whole.

A passage in Mark Steyn’s inimitable Tea Party column at NRO put this in perspective for me.  (Other than in the sense that, after Steyn’s piece, there is no point in saying much else.)  The passage in question reads:

Amid his scattershot pronouncements on everything from global nuclear disarmament to high-speed rail, President Obama said something almost interesting the other day. Decrying a “monstrous tax code that is far too complicated for most Americans to understand,” the Tax-Collector-in-Chief pledged: “I want every American to know that we will rewrite the tax code so that it puts your interests over any special interests.”

That shouldn’t be hard. A tax code that put my interests over any special interests would read: “How much did you earn last year? [Insert number here] thousand dollars? Hey, feel free to keep it. You know your interests better than we do!”

Okay, to be less absolutist about it, my interests include finding a road at the end of my drive every morning, and modern equipment for the (volunteer) fire department, and a functioning military to deter the many predators out there, and maybe one or two other things…

The poignancy of these musings lies in their law-abiding orderliness, and absence of any hint of radicalism.  Three hundred thousand Americans took to the streets on 15 April, and they would probably almost all agree with the tradition-respecting tenor of Steyn’s sentiments.  Steyn asks no hard questions here – particularly not the one I would ask, which is why the tax code has any business knowing what each of us earned last year.

What is the real purpose of everyone having to report his income to the government?  Is it really true that knowing people’s incomes is essential to a properly functioning public revenue system?  If you think you need to know how much other people are making, can you provide justification for that?  Do you understand that things like not reporting tip income, or income from garage sales, are only crimes because our tax code says they are? – not because, in any universal moral sense, they actually are?

Many, many of the Tea Party ralliers were declared proponents of the “Fair Tax” on consumption – but I wonder how many of them would articulate a principled objection to the government demanding that we all report our incomes to it.  A very sound case can be made that government insisting on knowing our incomes inevitably encourages government to have opinions about our incomes; and that that is an overstepping of the boundaries imposed, on our federal government, at least, by the Constitution.

But no thoughts so “radical” as these permeated the Tea Parties on Wednesday.  The Tea Parties were demonstrations by the obedient and non-radicalized mainstream middle class, whose concerns were not so much with fundamental philosophical questions as with the trend of federal spending, and the enormous and growing federal deficit that no short-term growth spurt can possibly redress.  The Tea Partiers did not dispute significant structural issues like the one I have raised.  I suspect they are willing to continue reporting all their income to the federal and state governments that tax them; what they want, in that context – unrebelled-against – is for spending to come down from its present lunatic heights, and for their taxes to not be raised.

Asking the government to stop speculative, theoretical experiments with public debt is about the least radical thing a crowd can do.  Not having been at a Tea Party, I have only the video coverage and the on-scene reporting of others to go by, but it does seem that the people in the crowds were what you would expect, for demonstrators in favor of, essentially, more prudent handling of the public’s fiscal trust.  (I was reminded of P. J. O’Rourke’s comment on Panamanian protestors against the Noriega regime in the 1980s:  “It’s like watching your mom and dad riot at the mall.”*)

The ones who dressed like 18^th-century colonists to tip tea into local bodies of water looked like weekend reenaction enthusiasts, and laughed goofily for the cameras.  There were a lot of parents with children, energetic College Republican types, women with hand-decorated sweatshirts and T-shirts in patriotic themes, men sporting union, veterans’, and sports-related ballcaps.  The usual assortment of body-painted patriots – shirtless college-age guys covered in red, white, and blue – was cheek-by-jowl with old ladies decked out in fanny packs and waving tricorn hats, and toddlers clutching flags (to which no adults were apparently trying to make ironic or “subversive” allusions).  There seemed to be a lot of laughter.

I don’t know how much of a harbinger these demonstrations were of future political activity.  Some commentators – Hannity, Beck – expressed certainty that they have meaningful, long-term implications.  We will see, I think:  another principal impression I had was that these people have jobs, and are not going to be able to rally for Tea Parties as often as politics might demand.  They were dissatisfied enough to show up for a day, but I am not sure that their dissatisfactions run deep enough to put in the hard, slogging work necessary to “throw the bums out” in the 2010 midterm election.  The very fact that their grievances do not require radical redress, but instead would be assuaged by a retreat from the fiscal radicalism Obama has embarked on, may give them – and all of us on the right – too little to rally around for effective reform.   “Spend less than Obama and the 111^th Congress!” may be a winning rallying cry for 2010, but that remains to be seen.  “Less of same” has not typically been the principle around which hearty, effective political movements coalesce.

An Anniversary

In that context, it is fascinating to recall that today marks the fourteenth anniversary of the Murrah Federal Building bombing in Oklahoma City.  At 9:02 AM on this day in 1995, the rented Ryder truck driven up to the federal building exploded, claiming 168 victims, and representing the biggest death toll to that date from a terrorist attack on Americans.

Conservative commentators correctly, this past week, decried an atrociously baseless and speculative “report” issued by the Department of Homeland Security, which essentially theorized that people who hold the views of many of the Tea Party demonstrators might be showing signs of turning into Timothy McVeigh.  Never mind that McVeigh’s imagined beef with the federal government was not, as far as anyone knows, related to government spending or taxes, or, as the DHS document suggests, “abortion” or “immigration.”  (McVeigh’s avowed concern was with federal intervention in the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, and further back, the shooting of survivalists by federal agents in the standoff at Ruby Ridge, Arkansas.)  Forget that McVeigh was known, by his few long-term acquaintances, to be a peculiar and troubled individual – the opposite of a gregarious, family- and community-oriented person who attends political rallies to hear speeches, dance to live music, wave placards, and have fun.

The casual, groundless – “drive-by” – association of conservative views on the issues with a propensity for terrorism and insurrection ought frankly to be a basis for professional discipline of the perpetrators of the DHS report.  At the very least, if taken seriously, the implications of this report will waste and de-focus a lot of valuable law enforcement time.  At worst, they offer a pretext for demonizing – and criminalizing – political thought.

But only a deluded mind could have watched the people demonstrating at the Tea Parties on 15 April and imagined them to be McVeighs-in-waiting.  As chroniclers of the Oklahoma City bombing** have shown, McVeigh and his indicted accomplice, Terry Nichols, were weird and scary before 19 April 1995, and the FBI actually knew quite a lot about some very strange associates of theirs prior to the bombing.  Even those who do not accept independent reports of participation by Middle Eastern men in the planning of the Murrah building bombing still recognize that McVeigh’s prior association with cultists in northeastern Oklahoma, and Nichols’ with Islamic terrorists in the Philippines, put them in a very unusual category.  No one who simply opposes abortion, or wishes to see government’s scope and spending curtailed, fits the profile of McVeigh and Nichols.

Today is a good day to reflect on the differences between a dark and tormented soul like Timothy McVeigh, and the hundreds of thousands of ordinary, law-abiding, taxpaying conservatives who spent 15 April protesting taxes and spending; the millions of military veterans who hold conservative views and take their lifetime loyalty oath to the US Constitution far more seriously than most of our legislators do; the millions of Americans who oppose Supreme Court decisions on abortion, but have varying ideas about how it should be treated in law; and the millions who are united in wanting to see existing immigration laws enforced, but otherwise do not necessarily see eye to eye on the topic of “immigration,” per se.

Reducing the political ideas and motivations of the opposition to simplistic, conveniently demonizable formulae – the execrable methodology of the DHS “report” – is actually much closer to what McVeigh himself did than to either thoughtful political commentary or professional intelligence analysis.  Nothing could highlight that more clearly than the anniversary of McVeigh’s awful attack on the federal building in Oklahoma City, juxtaposed so tellingly with the peaceful good humor of the tax day Tea Parties of 2009.

 

*P.J. O’Rourke, “Panama Banal” (1987), collected in Holidays in Hell (The Atlantic Monthly Press:  New York, 1988), p. 58.

** See, for example, Stephen Jones, Others Unknown (Perseus Books: New York, 1998), and Jayna Davis, The Third Terrorist (WND Books, Thomas Nelson Publishers: Nashville, Tennessee, 2004).  Jones was McVeigh’s defense counsel, and Davis was a reporter with the local NBC affiliate in Oklahoma City at the time of the bombing.