I was a featured speaker, along with Congressman Bob Filner, at a “Coffee Party” event held Sunday in North Park. In the event that you are unaware, The Coffee Party is a liberal response to “The Tea Party”, of course minus the yahoos, cretins, imbeciles, and bigots that comprise the tea baggers. It was a nice group of folks, actually, if anything, too nice, at least in my opinion.
Naturally a couple of baggers showed up to protest the protesters and one of them actually had a bullhorn and one of those signs that I’ve only seen on television, you know, the one that has a picture of Obama and Hitler side-by-side. (Apparently while I was looking elsewhere, Obama has gone from a commie to a fascist almost overnight.) Local Fox TV news was on hand as well. Anway, while Filner was being interviewed on the sidewalk in front of the venue, bullhorn boy (here he is after a brief , but annoying ad) was shouting from 6 feet away “Filner is afraid to meet the voters!!” ( odd when you consider that, well, Filner was in fact meeting the voters. )
While this sideshow was getting most of the attention, there was another tea bagger, sans bullhorn, who was patiently explaining to an attentive lib how being spat upon by hippies upon returning from ‘Nam was what awakened his political activism. If true, his was possibly the only real authentic case of spat-upon-vets yet to surface.
And, of course, that’s the problem with these dolts: they just make shit up and pass it along as divine truth: Obama’s a Muslim, Obama’s not an American citizen, Obama’s gonna take your gun away, Sarah Palin is “a breath of fresh air”, a dirty hippie spit on me, Newt Gingrich is “brilliant”, Dick Cheney is not a blood-sucking war criminal, etc., etc., ad nauseum.
Meanwhile, the nice guys, the coffee partiers, were actually passing around “civility pledges” inside the venue, vowing to treat with respect even those lie-spewing fear mongers who were littering the sidewalk out front. WTF? Why treat respectfully the very people that already think you’re a bunch of limp-wristed pansies? If you’ve ever tried to reason with an attacking Doberman, you get my point. The baggers apparently have no qualms about stifling respectful dialogue, given that their holy tome is a crayon-scrawled screed called “Arguing with Idiots” written by the odious Glenn Beck.
Anyway, what do I know? Maybe the play-nice tactic will eventually work. It’s certainly worth a try. The next time some tea bagger accosts you on the street, screaming bogus “truths” in your face, try just sticking a flower in the barrel of his bullhorn.
Posted in 
Yo, yo…I was at the meeting and enjoyed your talk! I believe the Coffee Party message is to lead by example and act like adults even when we disagree; bring back civility to political discourse. With great respect to you I have to make an observation that your post is giving a lot of ‘airtime’ to the idiots. Perhaps if we give less attention to the ‘idiots’ and more attention to rational adults looking for solutions we may actually get some solutions.
Just my opinion and again very much enjoyed your talk.
Signed,
Dude at the door!
You are right, Stacy, civility is not a good way to deal with liars, bullies, or dangerous, evil propagandists. History, if not common everyday experience, makes that painfully clear.
Good people want to believe that responding with civility can defeat lies and ugliness in the end, but it never has! Recently some cable media pundits opined that Obama shouldn’t have mentioned Beck and Limbaugh by name, during a CBS interview about the level of hatred among Obama’s self-made enemies. They analysis was that “a leader shouldn’t swing low.” I disagree totally: the propagandistic power of national broadcasts has taken political enmity to a new low level. The currency of this enmity is the lie, the daily distortion of fact and reality. We can’t ignore the lies: they have to be addressed, because they are the basis for the growing hatred. We all need to swing low, every day, and knock out the lowlifes.
I have to agree with Daniel (Dude at the door!) on this one.
The most noticeable aspect to this rant is the extreme lack of adult content. I can easily see the child in those ‘adults’ that like to refer to their supposed ‘opposition’ in the derogatory. What I see as the problem on both sides is shear laziness and myopic perspectives. It’s oh so easy to see where one disagrees, but these days it seem like a insurmountable task to see similarities.
I say; look at where you agree first, then work out the details. Just because it is “what other people do” is no reason not to strive for a higher standard. Conflict is caused by the limitation of both sides to see a broader perspective resulting in impatient child like reactions.
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I have to disagree with Shpshftr…what are you talking about? Who rants? “Supposed opposition”???? Supposed???
Just talk about it???
We’ll talk calmly while the dude with the bullhorn screams epithets??
The insurmountable task? The Tea Baggers ande Republicans don’t want to see any similarities, don’t want to strive for bipartisandship, don’t intend to do anything but obstruct. They agree with no one with a D after their name, on nothing!
Haven’t you noticed?
Beck doesn’t talk similarities. Limbaugh doesn’t. They post and present lies and craziness. You don’t deal with crazy haters by making nice.
Like I said…Because they do, you do… It’s insurmountable because neither side sees commonality. Impasse is the “theme” to both loud sides… Where have the adults gone? You know, adults are those strange creatures that find common ground regardless. There are other sides. Yelling louder is sort of primitive isn’t it?
I stopped listening to Limbaugh over 10 years ago, I never did listen to Beck. Radio talkers are there for the conflict and the “News Making” aspect of it. Solutions? Ha! You deal with people that present lies and craziness by ignoring them…by yelling back you just give them power. Is it really that hard to see?
If any talk-show host was serious about solutions, they would quit radio and start teaching ECONOMICS… Or teach economics on the radio because until that subject is fully understood…it’s going to be one uniformed side ranting at the other uniformed side. lol Fix the economics and you render the opposition moot because they will have nothing more to rant about.
You don’t really think yelling at the “opposition” will get them to change their mind do you?
Stacy, a few days ago I was listening to POTUS on XM. The discussion was about monetary policy. The terms they were using to describe the policies they discussed were: left, right, liberal, conservative, democrat and republican. I called to ask why they were using these terms while discussing monetary policy. The host said that my question was good but wanted something about monetary policy. My retort was that you all are discussing monetary policy in these terms not me. I hung up and continued to listen, they stopped using the labels and started to talk about ideas. I think we all need to drop all labels and focus on the ideas, tru dat yo?
Ideas are what need be analyzed, but the troubling dilemma is that processes of analysis that make a two-party Democracy lucid are exactly what is rejected by a seeming majority of those Republicans now desiring to regain political control. They refuse to participate.
In an interesting NYTimes “Opinionator” piece,
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/does-reason-know-what-it-is-missing/#more-45857
Stanley Fish discusses Habermas’ discourses on the secular vs. the religious, reducing “secular” to “the Liberal state.” In the current political reality, the self-appointed enemies of “the Liberal state,” the most vocal antagonists to and opponents of Democratic analysis and discourse are usually self-professed members of and participants in various religious groups. As Fish wrote:
“Religions resist becoming happy participants in a companionable pluralism and insist on the rightness, for everyone, of their doctrines. Liberal rationality is committed to pluralism and cannot affirm the absolute rightness of anything….”
So how to deal with this? What is needed in liberal rationality is to at least affirm the absolute wrongness of lies, propaganda, and distortions, when those are proffered and repeated by Senators, Representatives, and mass media broadcasters. In so affirming, it is difficult to avoid all labels. And it is most important for leaders at the highest level to point out where the lies and propaganda originate, using recognizable labels.