The Tea Party extravaganza now going on at downtown Richmond’s tax-payer built convention center. I went yesterday and was very impressed.
The confab seemed to have everything. There were Patrick Henry Re-enactors ringing their Liberty Bells. Slogan-covered gun nuts toting .45 cal. ACPs in holsters. Opponents of eminent domain. Bumper stickers toting Sarah Palin and the Confederate Flag. Our very own Jim Bacon munched a barbecue sandwich as he had some success hawking “Boomergeddon” books from a table in the main hallway.
Imagine my pride when I woke up this morning and found that the Richmond Times-Dispatch had spent part of its lead editorial castigating something I wrote in The Washington Post and on this blog. I cited a commentary by Style Weekly Arts Editor Don Harrison, a colleague of mine, who had the temerity to note that the event is being held in buildings built at extraordinary taxpayer expense. Here’s what the TD wrote:
“The Tea Party’s back in town, and a few commentators have suggested there’s something hugely hypocritical about the fact that they’re meeting in the Richmond convention center. The convention center, you see, was built with tax money and — as one wiseacre put it — the Tea Party movement ‘is vigorously anti-tax and anti-government.” So there!
This is almost painfully stupid. The Tea Partiers support limited government — not anarchy. As one analyst noted recently, enactment of their proposals would dial back federal spending from about 24 percent of GDP to about 18 percent.”
Well, this wiseacre couldn’t be happier. I haven’t talked with Don yet today, but I am sure that wiseacre is happy, too. The words “vigorously anti-tax and anti-government” are mine. The original article was Don’s. Another blogger, Norm Leahy, a principled conservative who not only talks the talk but walks the walk, picked up as well on Don’s original piece.
Imagine my pride at being singled out by a newspaper that for decades has had one of the most retrograde editorial pages in the U.S. that tried, however eloquently, to support such racist and hateful movements as Massive Resistance in the 1950s. The TD is still apologizing for that one.
The problem is that the TD represents the entrenched interests of Richmond’s economic elite and little more. This cabal likes to dub itself “leaders’ and has promoted using other people’s money to develop the Broad Street corridor. The convention center was built with a special tax levied on hotel operators. Center Stage, replacing the Carpenter Center, was another tax payer blow out and however welcome it may be, it tends to present entertainment more attune to the richer whites living in the burbs and people actually living in the city.
The idea, you see, is to get them back downtown even though the living settlement pattern and highway development plans of the very same elite some years back pushed those folks out of the city and to the burbs. They spent tax money for Interstate 95 through historically African-American Jackson Ward, which in its day grew organically and without public financial help to become one of the premiere jazz spots on the East Coast. Chopped up by bulldozers, Jackson Ward died. The elite also spent tax money or floated bonds for other superhighways to get white folks out of town such as the Powhite Parkway and Route 288 connecting a white suburban area of Brandermill with a white suburban area of Short Pump.
As in many newspapers, the TD’s Chinese Walls originally intended to maintain some level of integrity are quickly dissolving away. The newspaper’s publisher is chairman of the Greater Richmond Chamber of Commerce. Rather than encourage true investigative reporting, he is the point man for the local business elite’s marketing “vision” of what the city is and should be whether it is or not.
Congressman Eric Cantor is much loved by the TD. His wife serves on the board of Media General, which owns the newspaper. The TD has probably never printed a negative word about Cantor who is part of the club.
The TD editorial page, however, is not as foul as it was during the days of rug-biter Ross MacKenzie. Sometimes it is reasonable, even if it wanders off into effete stories about how Chablis goes well with oysters or how breathtakingly lovely services can be at the Episcopal Church. Even their choice of the word “wiseacre” shows how out of touch they are. My father, who died at 88 in 2004, didn’t use that description for me because it seemed of an earlier generation. He used other ones.
The problem for the TD with the Tea Party is that it is part of the Republican establishment that, truth be known, is utterly terrified of such movement. To their credit, the Tea Partiers blame George W. Bush for a bit of the budget deficit. Fair-haired boy-wonder Cantor voted lockstep with whatever Bush wanted and they know that, too.
The TD and the Republican Establishment are control freaks. They want to be kingmakers and, while playing the role of high-minded Southern gentility, want to select the goals for us lower class and dumber folk. They can’t do that with the Tea Party, as nutty as some of its elements can be.
So, t
he TD, just like Gov. Bob McDonnell and Lt. Gov Bill Bolling, are running to catch up with and lead a parade that started long ago. McDonnell and Bolling got cheers when they held a panel discussion on streamlining government. But I didn’t hear anything meaty other than a truly scary idea of an amendment that lets states discard federal laws don’t like.
he TD, just like Gov. Bob McDonnell and Lt. Gov Bill Bolling, are running to catch up with and lead a parade that started long ago. McDonnell and Bolling got cheers when they held a panel discussion on streamlining government. But I didn’t hear anything meaty other than a truly scary idea of an amendment that lets states discard federal laws don’t like.
Imagine if this awful concept had been around in the 1950s. We’d still have segregation. Massive Resistance would still be the law of the Commonwealth. We’d be stuck otherwise 60 years ago while the world has moved away. Virginia would be like a left-behind South Africa.
Anyway, TD editors, I bow to your small compliment and hope my future work pleases you.
Peter Galuszka