Jonathan Raban
“‘Seattle–you got a lot of liberals there,'” Jonathan Raban says the man checking him in for the Nashville Tea Party Convention said. “I accepted his condolences.”
Raban’s Tea Party piece in The New York Review of Books is delightful reading not just for the chutzpah employed in sending an Englishman to a Tea Party, but also because Raban resists the urge to add one wingnut lump or two: his Tea Party survey explores the way all sorts of people with inflamed passions have gathered together, only to discover that the hobbyhorses that brought them don’t necessarily like the close quarters.
For Raban, author of Surveillance, a libertarian lean against government intrusion into private life was calling card enough that he could chat sociably with the gamut of Tea Partyers he met: the ones who vacationed in Amalfi and Tuscany, the ones with the second home in Torquay, the red-headed, sixtyish Virginian with two special-needs adopted daughters.
Only one man went public, even in a presumably “friendly” crowd, with overt racism. A table of Tea Partyers was recounting the public’s hoodwinking by the Obama campaign.
Obama was an unknown quantity when he was elected. He had no record, no experience; he was an empty suit about whom we knew nothing.
“Well,” said the alpha male, producing his ace of trumps, “we knew he was black.”
Later, one of Raban’s fellow conventioneers would tell him that “being here has made me realize that I am a liberal conservative.”
After all the invective heaped on Tea Party heads–and the attention focused on those mugging for TV coverage–it’s a relief to have at least one reporter not succumb to the temptation to caricature poorly, but to do it with Rabelaisian naturalism and zest. Diminishment is what creates a Tea Party in the first place.