This is something I’ve been thinking about, watching the kneejerk hatred being expressed by the left for Tea Party folks. I agree with Chomsky that the movement is fairly suicidal for working class people, but the rage and betrayal I see expressed for government, as well as the commitment to fundamental change and Constitutional principle, don’t look contemptible to me at all.
I also find it interesting that so much of the left has chosen to focus on the Tea Party movement instead of, say, Obama’s two wars, his unwavering support for Israel, and his continuation of George Bush’s civil rights policies. It’s nice that the left is so concerned with protecting Obama from protest, but one has to wonder . . . why?
Anyway, Noam Chomsky in In These Times, writing about the Tea Party movement and Joe Stack.
On Feb. 18, Joe Stack, a 53-year-old computer engineer, crashed his small plane into a building in Austin, Texas, hitting an IRS office, committing suicide, killing one other person and injuring others.
Stack left an anti-government manifesto explaining his actions. The story begins when he was a teenager living on a pittance in Harrisburg, Pa., near the heart of what was once a great industrial center.
His neighbor, in her ’80s and surviving on cat food, was the “widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement.
