Dante Liberatore
Pizza Hut Express, Holiday Inn Express and Express Lube are organizations I can deal with. Who wouldn’t want a halfway-decent pizza, a comfortable room at a fair price and an engine block that won’t overheat? On the other hand, the Tea Party Express I can do without; primarily for 1) having more messages than Paris Hilton’s voicemail, 2) projecting a level of tackiness my senses cannot deflect, and 3) never knowing if they were using the word ‘freedom’ as a noun, adjective or verb.
The movement intensely annoyed me. One day, when three Tea Party Express busses, courtesy of a conservative billionaire from an unknown locale, trying to change public policy without the pesky nuisance of an election, came barreling into Westchester County. And when the Patriots stepped off their respective busses, the first thing to garner my interest was the clothes they were wearing. Bill O’Reilly ‘No Spin Zone’ baseball caps, Laura Ingraham ‘Former Embryo’ sweatshirts, and Michael Savage ‘Borders, Language & Culture’ scarves were everywhere. I even saw a corpulent woman sporting an official Hannity ‘Take Back America’ frock.
Those who weren’t coutured by Glenn Beck were either dressed for a night out on their front porch (next to their old refrigerator), or wearing the kind of clothes sold in beauty parlors; primary colored blouses and pants littered with rhinestones left me puzzled over whether there were parts of America that still felt the outdated gems was fashionable.
The second item to capture my concern about the Tea Partiers, or better yet, what stuck out like Gore Vidal at a tractor pull, were the picket signs they were poking into the air. They all said too much. The penmanship was horrendous. One poster reading ‘Fugitive Aliens No And Anti-Socialism Support It’ made me wonder if I was looking at a game of Word Jumble. On the other hand, signs about ‘Capitalism’ and the ‘Distribution of Wealth’ made perfect sense. But lower-middle class looking people were parading them, giving them the aura of Uncle Toms for the wealthy. The last few picket signs were simply moronic: ‘Boycott Hollywood Commies’ (in 2014?), ‘Down With Sodomy, Up With Tea Bagging’ (not touching that one) and ‘Don’t Liberalize My Liberty’ (come again?).
The cumulative lunacy of all the picket signs made me think how so many dimwitted people could find each other. Usually, there’s just one, or at the most, two clinical dunces at any gathering of this size. Then I figured it out. All the picket signs the adults were holding were written by the soiled, screaming, and unattended children at the rally between the ages of 4 through 8. That’s it. There could be no other conclusion that would sustain the befuddled gathering.
Later on, as I walked deep into the crowd, my attention was kidnapped by what Tea Partiers were saying amongst themselves. I didn’t come across anything too deep, mind you. Matter of fact, the height of intellectual chatter was reached when I overheard a Christian mom tell a gun nut she could get her daughter’s entire soccer team into her Ford Windstar with enough room left over for a case of Jamba Juice. As I ventured further into the horde, everyone around me looked like they were teleported from a Walmart in the Deep South. If I asked any of them for blue mascara, a Reba McEntire CD, or boiled peanuts, they’d have it.
Then I saw what I expected to see at a Tea Party rally – the militia crowd, garbed in military fatigues to fight a delusional war, down from their upstate compound to ride the media coattails of the Tea Party Express. They, however, were holding up coherent picket signs, all supporting the citizen takeover of the U.S. Government – a cause that always left me wondering why anyone would want to adopt Uncle Sam to begin with. Such anarchy would be a painfully clerical undertaking: millions of social security checks would have to arrive each month like clockwork, tax refunds would have to be calculated and youngsters would have to be reminded of their student loans. And that’s just the tip of the bayonet knife. The spanking-new revolutionaries would also have to get people out of flood waters, regulate scores of industries and make sure airplanes didn’t fall out of the sky. The proper disposal of nuclear waste would be another task. And who was going to do that? A militia group? Please. They’re good at firing up a barbeque in the middle of nowhere, and that’s about it. And besides, even if a disenfranchised cluster of rednecks were to take over the American Government, they’d likely hand it back a day later upon learning their coup d’état meant more than just getting their hands on an Abrams Tank. So ‘Thanks, but no thanks!’ would be their parting words to the indentured politicos in DC. Then the former radicals would go back upstate, to their Military Control and Operations Center, a.k.a. as a patch of dirt that wouldn’t even show up on Google Earth.
The last point to lasso my notice at the rally was a tune blaring from a bullhorn speaker, sophomoric clamor that proved the word ‘Medicare’ should never find its way into a rock ‘n’ roll song. To make matters worse, Ted Nugent was screeching the lyrics, and my guess was the folks at the rally thought ‘The Nuge’ was still a major rock star. The poor things. If they only knew that if it weren’t for them, the Tea Party, an unemployed Ted Nugent would be back in Detroit, living in a trailer park, locked in a drunken fistfight with his meth-head sister-in-law over the remaining half of a three-day old Chick-fil-A sandwich. But that’s not where Ted is today. No sirree. He’s a Tea-Party favorite! And yet, the ‘Motor City Madman’, by insulting everyone from hard-working immigrants to the President, seems to be squandering his undeserved rebirth, proving that “Cat Scratch Fever” can lead to early dementia.
By the time all the Cheese Whiz was gone, all the blunders committed by the Tea Party Express; the first-grade picket signs, the unsavory show-ups and the has-been talent, can all be attributed to Tea Party officials not adequately preparing their political movement for primetime. They got on their busses without making sure a steering wheel was on board, a faux pas that placed them squarely on the road to Buffoonery. And there’s no turning back. All lanes went south. There isn’t even a center median to make an illegal U-turn towards Mainstream. It’s a one-way ticket to oblivion any new political party punches when it doesn’t hire a slick PR team to put them firmly on the road to Success.
Dante Liberatore is a writer/documentary filmmaker residing in Westchester County. He has had several comedic screenplays optioned in Hollywood, and his movies have won numerous awards at film festivals. His current project, “Abbondanza”, a comedic documentary about Little Italy in The Bronx, will premier at the Yonkers Film Festival. Direct email to .
