Anger As Metaphysical Madness

I'm a little slow at getting around to stuff, nonetheless I just finished reading a short opinion piece from J.M. Bernstein from the Times' Opinionater, entitled "The Very Angry Tea Party" from June 13.  As you know the term tea baggers is much more fitting but we'll go with it for now.

It seems Dr. Bernstein sums up quite well the entire nut slapping movement in his first couple sentences.  It's a paragraph I greatly agree with and something I've been saying for quite a while.  Actually it looks like something I have written concerning the tea baggers.  It's so similar with just a tweak of one word and it could be mine.  See for yourself:

Sometimes it is hard to know where politics ends and metaphysics fantasy beings: when, that is, the stakes of a political dispute concern not simply a clash of competing ideas and values but a clash about what is real and what is not, what can be said to exist on its own and what owes its existence to an other.

The seething anger that seems to be an indigenous aspect of the Tea Party movement arises, I think, at the very place politics and metaphysics fantasy meet, where metaphysical fantasy sentiment becomes political belief.

The strikeouts are my own.  Replaced with the word fantasy.  Because metaphysical is just a nice way of saying fantasy.  And that's exactly what the tea bagger movement is.  It's fantasy colliding with reality.

There's nothing that can be done to separate the two.  Tea baggers are bred full of conspiracy theories and outright falsehoods.  When confronted with ardent facts, they simply discard them because it's not possible to exist in the metaphysical knowing full well that it's not real.  So on the way home from their cushy tax payer funded job or cashing their disability, unemployment and/or Social Security checks, or coming from their Medicare-paid doctors visit, Republican tea baggers simply want government not to exist in their reality.

I think Bernstein calls it some sort of love affair with the idea of government not acting as government.  But that's simply skipping over the reality that tea baggers want government interference in their lives to stop.  They think they can do fine on their own without government.  Just don't mess with their fully funded tax payer health care or their fully funded tax payer job, or their social security benefits and everything will be just fine.