The sum of its parts

LITTLE ROCK — I went to a Tea Party meeting once, which was plenty.

This was in Conway in the winter of 2010. The meeting was conducted in a city recreational center.

I found the location interesting. Here was an anti-government group meeting in a government facility where they played socialized racquetball.

Two local married couples who were founders of the county’s Tea Party chapter invited me. They honored me, in fact, by deeming me fair minded-by trusting that I would be amenable to, if not necessarily persuaded by, their sincerity and logic.

They seemed to be perfectly nice and normal people, dedicated to one understandable view and to one superficially misguided one.

The understandable view was that the federal government was spending way too much money. The superficially misguided view was that the then-recent surge in spending represented unconstitutionally creeping socialism introduced by President Barack Obama.

Actually, Obama simply was doing his best to deal with a cratered economy, an exploded deficit and a public bailout of the private financial sector, all of which he had inherited from his Republican predecessor.

These salt-of-the-earth folks in Conway saw new or accelerated socialism in a country that, in fact, had long ago created a kind of semi-socialist safety net with Social Security and Medicare.

The federal government had long since extended its authority by the equal protection and interstate commerce clauses of the U.S. Constitution. And it had long before embraced the Keynesian concept of increasing public spending during a recession.

These four people were, while hard-right in beliefs, hardly extremist in manner. If there was any racism in the timing of their activism, coming as it did early in the presidency of our first black president-and I’m not saying there was-then it was so subtle as to be undetectable by me and perhaps even by them.

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But then the actual meeting took place. It was then that the Tea Party movement began to be revealed for what it inevitably would become.

That would be the sum of its parts, including parts loony, extremist or evil.

The featured speaker that evening -invited because of conservative recoiling over illegal immigration-was an alarmist named Jeannie Burlsworth. She headed a group called Secure Arkansas that sought to end state services to illegal immigrants.

In her remarks she implicated Gov. Mike Beebe, Attorney General Dustin McDaniel and North Little Rock Mayor Patrick Henry Hays in a global conspiracy to deliver Arkansas to a one-world communist fascist order under the guise of trying to achieve some supposed “green” objective called “sustainable growth.”

Later, people in the audience got to talking about how they didn’t want to answer questions from the U.S. Census Bureau. Under the cloak of taking a head count, the government was invading personal privacy by wanting to know ages, genders and income levels, some said.

Afterward, one of my inviting founders sought me out to explain that the Tea Party welcomes any and all persons and is committed to free expression.

So, meanwhile, we have no basis to accuse the Tea Party of being racist-other than to jump to conclusions that are overly broad, wholly circumstantial and now, in one case, briefly anecdotal.

Briefly anecdotal?

Yes.

Last week there was a big rally in Mountain Home of the Ozark Tea Party. A speaker, a woman said to be a local Tea Party steering-committee member, got up and told a blatantly racist joke.

The unfunny essence was that white people work at jobs to make money that the government takes to give to black people who don’t work, and white people are called racists if they are bugged by the arrangement. The joke’s telling had a black child talking to a black mother in some kind of presumably derisive dialect.

An audio tape of the moment available on the Internet reveals hearty laughter. The local Baxter Bulletin newspaper reports that no one speaking publicly at the meeting denounced the joke-until, that is, after the meeting, when the paper asked around for someone who might denounce it.

That does not mean the Tea Party is racist or that all members are racist. Likewise, the Conway incident does not mean that the Tea Party is paranoid and delusional or that all members are paranoid and delusional.

The Tea Party in America is hundreds of different entities in hundreds of different places.

But it does mean that, in these two case studies, no one has been publicly challenged in a Tea Party meeting, much less called down, either for racism or for paranoid-delusional nonsense.

That seems to indicate that the Tea Party, while perhaps not fatally diseased, is insufficiently attentive, even indifferent, to localized infections.

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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.