Eating the Teacup

“I’d rather live free than die with health care,” the sign said.

Last Thursday, shortly before noon, I was on Capitol Hill chatting with two little old ladies. We’ll call the LOL1 and LOL2. They’d been struggling to take pictures of the podium, and I’d offered them the benefit of my height advantage; they were very grateful, and we chatted amiably about the relative merits of being unusually tall vs. unusually short. They wore American-flag visors, and had come up from Virginia on the Metro. We talked about the weather, and about whether their digital camera was the best kind for taking pictures; LOL1 thought so, LOL2 thought perhaps not.

Then ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again’ stopped playing, the first speaker approached the mic, and it was time for me to unroll my sign. I’ll be the first to admit, it wasn’t the most impressive sign anybody ever made – just marker on poster paper – and the message I’d written was hardly earth-shattering. Last month, the Washington Post and ABC conducted a poll, and my sign highlighted one of that survey’s findings: that roughly 23% of Americans oppose the creation of any type of public health insurance program.

LOL1 looked at my sign, looked up at me, and told me that somebody should kill me. LOL 2 said I wasn’t worth it, and led her friend off to another part of the crowd.

By the time Congresswoman Michele Bachmann’s rally was over, my sign had accumulated a pretty fair collection of reactions from my fellow citizens. I was jostled, shoved, elbowed and poked. Somebody threw a wad of chewing gum, which adhered to the first ‘I’ in the phrase “NOISY MINORITY.” I was called a commie, a traitor, and a “gay apricot” – at least, I think that’s what the gentleman said. A woman in a green sweater patted me on the back and said that she liked my sign; fortunately, the adhesive on the anti-health care reform bumper sticker she’d affixed to my jacket was not strong.

Other people with signs moved to stand in front of me and behind me, blocking me out. I sidestepped, they followed suit. I raised my arms as high as I could (as I mentioned, I’m unusually tall) – they jumped up and down, and called over other demonstrators with signs on poles. I congratulated them on their American spirit. They called me a faggot. Eventually the event ended, all the signs came down, and everybody went home.

Let me be clear: at no point did I ever feel that my life or bodily safety were in danger. The fight that the folks who gathered for the ‘High Noon’ demonstration on 11/5 wanted to start was not with me, or even with supporters of health care reform in general. To some HCR seemed almost an afterthought (no doubt it’s hard to focus on the minutiae of regulatory policy when your president is a stupid Kenyan impostor who’s trying to socialize abortions).

I will coin a term for this kind of political ecumenicalism. I will call it ‘eating the teacup’.

There was an astonishing amount of teacup-eating going on last Thursday. The tea being drunk at this party was a complex brew indeed, a mixture of many different and largely unrelated causes. The demonstrators drank it with gusto, cheering equally for school prayer, congressional filibusters, the Pledge of Allegiance, anti-abortion legislation, accusations of socialism, and anything else that the various speakers stirred into the murky ideological sludge they were offering. They drank it all, and then ate the cup. That’s what happens when you’re so determined to fight you cease to care about what you’re fighting for.

“I’d rather live free than die with health care,” the sign said. I think that just about sums it up. To one whose goal is war the battlefield is immaterial, and these warriors honestly don’t care whether or not all their slogans make sense. They are the Noisy Minority, a movement without a meaningful direction. They are a very interesting phenomenon, emotion without substance, and in the coming weeks I will be putting together a playbook for taking the wind out of their sails. In the meantime, I just wanted to deliver a report from the trenches. It’s getting ugly out there.