Let me just be clear about one thing: Operation
American Spring is idiotic. Okay? It’s a bunch of gun-toting redneck
weirdos with an undefined agenda and a core set of values springing forth from
some peripheral belief systems best described as “wackadoodle.” I have not
conducted any on-the-ground journalism about this, but I’m still confident in
venturing that the only action necessary to completely discredit these people
is to ask them questions and let them talk. It is likely they will, in such a
case with very little prompting, go on to tell you about the President’s forged
birth certificate, or Sandy Hook being an inside job perpetrated by the powerful
liberal elite anti-gun lobby, or the non-existence of evolution. I don’t know
this, I’m just guessing. That’s my guess. My guess is that these people, and
the ways they have come together (or failed to) to express themselves politically, are not to be taken seriously. I couldn’t possibly advocate
their stances or what they’re doing less.
So, now that I’ve gotten that caveat out of
the way, I love these guys. They are absolutely right about everything they’re
saying. According to the above-linked Washington Times post, Operation American
Spring’s goal is the immediate (or eventual) ouster of “Mr. Obama, Mr. Boehner, Attorney General Eric Holder,
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, Sen. Mitch McConnell, House Minority Leader
Nancy Pelosi and Vice President Joseph R. Biden,” because, says ringleader Col. Harry Riley, “They have all abandoned the U.S. Constitution, are
unworthy to be retained in a position that calls for servant status.” My biggest beef with this assertion is that the list of targeted U.S. Constitution-abandoners
does not include the Supreme
Court. The rest are also a bunch of documented NSA-spying, Guantanamo
operating, drone-striking, procedural filibustering, waterboard-approving benders
and breakers of both the spirit and the law of the Constitution who, as its designated
servants, should absolutely be held accountable for the country not running as
well as it should, including, if possible, by such populist means as these Operation
American Spring lunatics claim to represent in absurd abundance.
I felt the same
way about the Occupy Wall Street movement. What a great, pyrrhic, totally
pointless statement. What a great bunch of idiots making totally valid points
in the most easy-to-ignore way possible.
I was put off
then by the general tone of the backlash to the Occupy movement. It seemed like
a bunch of rich white guys in suits, born into privileged social networks and
not understanding how somebody else could not be, hollering “get a job, it’s
not that hard.” I could easily imagine, through overheard whispers, the general
eyeroll sentiment of chuckling exchanges of Wall Street Businessguy “commuter horror
stories” in elite private lounges. I saw the conservative corporate media’s functionally
accurate but irresponsibly incomplete portrayal of the protestors as largely disorganized,
off-message children possibly more devoted to getting laid in tents than to any
stable, consistent, or workable political ideology.
The backlash to
this current outcropping of populist American political crazies rankles just as
much. Yeah, these guys are nutbags. Of course they’re nutbags. You’d have to be
a complete maniac to get up off of the butt you are currently sitting on in
relative comfort and go all the way to some public park in Washington, DC with
the goal of removing the seven or so most powerful operators in your
democratically-elected government because of any reasons. That is a patently
nutbag activity. Crispus Attucks, regardless of his actual level of
participation in political agitation or mob violence, was a nutbag to be
anywhere near where British soldiers were standing with guns. Now he is a famous
dead nutbag instead of an unfamous, still-dead, non-nutbag who saw what was
going down near the state house and said, sensibly, “look at all these angry crowds
gathering in this public square; now is probably a very good time to go grocery
shopping.”
I realize the “American
Patriot” imagery in invoking Attucks is a little on the nose with the self-conception
these Operation American Spring zealots are trying to promote. My point is that
history is written by the winners, and those winners get to turn around and say,
“We were not the nutbags. The other guys were the nutbags. We were just
reacting justifiably to the oppressive nutbaggery of the other guys.” The
constituency of Operation American Spring are not winners in any sense. So we
get to laugh at them. But that doesn’t mean they’re wrong. The current operational
power structure of the U.S. Government runs in many ways (de facto and de jure) directly
counter to many of the precepts set forth by the U.S. Constitution, allowing of course for interpretation.
This is
completely unsurprising, since the Constitution is a document written almost
227 years ago, when there was no such thing as an assault rifle or Nebraska and
it was legal to own a person or beat your wife. The Constitution hasn’t even
been altered since 1992 (the 27th Amendment, which was first
proposed in 1789), which is insane. The world and the country are very
different now compared to 1992. The Constitution is, by design, a not
particularly responsive document, open, by design, to interpretation. To swear
to uphold it is to accept responsibility for a certain amount of latent hypocrisy.
But these
nutbags are right when they say that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try.
Also, who am I
to label these people as nutbags? History is written by the winners, so I must
be a winner if I get to decide who’s a crazyballs crazyman and who’s not. I
must be one of these “liberal elites” they keep railing against, doling out
legitimacy privileges only to whoever I see fit. I must be a part of some
special Knowledge Class who gets to decide what political agendas are valid
based on what I am told in The Atlantic or The Economist. I must be someone who
has access to the “correct” information. If these people are nutbags, and I’m
saying they’re nutbags, and tweeting #LOLnutbags on Twitter, and closing my
shutters on the nutbags outside, then I must have a fairly comfortable life
inside of these shutters. Me and Rachel Maddow both.
Maybe what the
backlash to Operation American Spring is saying isn’t “those guys are borderline
racist (or other example A, B, and C of an instantaneously problematic stance)
wacky radical right wing gun guys” so much as “I’m fine with the way things
are, and I’m not one of those people who isn’t.” And this is how political change
is stymied in the current era. Divisions are reinforced naturally when
resources diminish. Divided population segments are more likely to say “we
deserve whatever resources are left because of (any reason, in the example of
the OAS backlash because we are the smart ones and they are not, in the example
of OAS because we are real true patriotic Americans and they are not)” than to
band together with the other divided segments and demand more resources for
everybody.
(Here I am implying that total U.S. household wealth divided equally among the U.S. population right now is $243,000+ per person, which I don't know about you but I sure don't have that kind of cash, and maybe something in the vein of giving that money to places that are more helpful than the current places it is located might be a helpful way to fix all the problems there are)(I mean $243k PER PERSON, holy shit, holy shit)
So that’s why I’m
not going to denigrate the efforts of Operation American Spring. I’m with them.
I agree with them, fervently, especially with their most basic underlying
assumption. We should not be getting screwed over by the powers that be to the
extent that we currently are. None of us should be. I’m just probably not going
to go out there and join them. They are armed to the teeth, and I don’t trust
them to replace any of the people they’d prefer to remove with anybody better.
Because, yes, they are delusional psychos, and because more importantly they
are not my delusional psychos.
