After the jump, B-Hickz ponders the joke that could make the world never stop crying.

I found a couple passages of the New York Times/CBS News poll into the whole “Racist, but they think speaking in code won’t let anybody figure it out” Party movement rather interesting.

Here they are:

– “The 18 percent of Americans who identify themselves as Tea Party supporters tend to be Republican, white, male, married and older than 45.”

– “They hold more conservative views on a range of issues than Republicans generally.”

– “Tea Party supporters are more likely to classify themselves as angry.”

– “Tea Party supporters’ fierce animosity toward Washington, and the president in particular, is rooted in deep pessimism about the direction of the country and the conviction that the policies of the Obama administration are disproportionately directed at helping the poor rather than the middle class or the rich.”

– “Tea Party supporters over all are more likely than the general public to say their personal financial situation is fairly good or very good.”

– “Nearly 9 in 10 disapprove of the job Mr. Obama is doing over all, and about the same percentage fault his handling of major issues: health care, the economy and the federal budget deficit. Ninety-two percent believe Mr. Obama is moving the country toward socialism, an opinion shared by more than half of the general public.”

– “They are more likely than the general public, and Republicans, to say that too much has been made of the problems facing black people.”

Now here’s my question: Did anybody fucking care what aspiring Klan pledges thought of the day’s issues? Except for maybe the Southern Poverty Law Center, the answer’s no. So why do we care now?

Listen: I’m white, male, married, (at times very) angry and conservative on a few issues that earn me freak-show status in the land of blatant liberalism. But what I’m not is a rube who think me all smarter than them there educated folk for masking my political and sociological leanings behind an Oz-like curtain. You know, to hide the reality that most of these people, to an enraged ruddy-cheeked moron, really think, “The minute there’s a black president, the economy went to shit so now, a wetback does the job granddaddy did. White men are the minority. Where’s my reparations?!”

This isn’t just me going the easy race-card route to call people out for hating on a President I support. (And silly me for thinking our country’s great because we help the weakest among us.) This is just cold reality in the eyes a guy who covered black South Carolina churches getting torched by angry white boys. In 1996. I can still smell the scorched altar and see the pastor sitting on his car’s bumper bawling his fucking eyes out with little faith left in a just world.

If the press doesn’t stop giving equal footing to this circus that shamed them into conducting a poll in the first place – I’m looking at you, Times, CBS News, CNN, Inquirer, etc. – it’s only going to inspire empowered violence from pissed-off hicks who beat off, sometimes circle-jerking, to posters of Ronnie Reagan on horseback.

If you ignore them, maybe they’ll just go back to second-class intellectual status, tearing what little hair they have left out while failing to understand proper grammar and spelling.

This isn’t about equal coverage. It’s about stoking an inferno. And it may very well be too late already. It was fun mocking them for a while, but they don’t grasp the nuances of drawing attention to their misdeeds and general assholery via subtle pokes.

Sure, if things keep going this way, there is a bright side: They’ll so fracture the GOP base that, for attention, Michelle Bachmann will have to hate-fuck Mount Rushmore in all her googlie-eyed glory. (Hell, I’d buy a ticket.) But outweighing the joyous spectacle of such behavior is that pesky bad side: The first body to drop won’t be the last, not by a Poconos shooting-range long-shot.

I’d take more time to flesh this out all thesis-like about how the long-under-wraps white Fear of a Black Planet has been irresponsibly exploited by immoral monsters who whipped up a culture careening toward vehement bring-back-fire-hoses-and-dogs cries. But, I’ve already said more than I want to about something that’s threatening to plunge us back into civil war.

Maybe, after going back and reading all this, I’m just paranoid. Except, after a second read, I realize I’m not. So if you’ll excuse me, it’s time to get back to my manifesto, tentatively titled, “Pale, angry and stupid is no way to go through life, whiteboy.”

– Brian Hickey

Want more Brian Hickey? Get it here: brianphickey.com. And to read earlier editions of As Nasty As I Wanna Be, click here.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 16th, 2010 at 12:18 pm.