Thursday, April 15, 2010

The Mighty Brent Wades into the Tea Party




Well, the Tea Party gathered in Naples today, waving their signs and pretending that the corner of the North Trail and Pine Ridge Road was Independence Hall, circa the late 18th century, when men were men and fathers were founding or some such.
Right into the midst of the fruitcakes stomped that intrepid gatherer of low-hanging fruit, Brent Batten. He's the only columnist the Naples Daily News has, if you don't count the assorted quasi-celebrities, real-estate hucksters and others willing to pen some dribble to keep their names in front of a public that might need what they're selling. (I don't include Ben Bova among that number, by the way. To even things up, I'll count Don Farmer twice.) That means his opinions should be especially cogent, analytical, precise and reasoned. I'm sure he thinks they are.
Anyway, ol' Brent just waded into that melee, right past the lady shrieking at the top of her lungs -- or maybe it was the bird on her shoulder -- and right past the fat guy in flip-flops and baggies who wanted the government to spread his work ethic, not his wealth. A couple of little kids were decked out with signs linking Obama to "bin Lyin," whoever that is, and calling for "ObamaCare" to be flushed. The little boy's sign had a picture of a toilet on it. Cute. Almost everybody wanted to protect the Constitution, although nobody seemed to be bothered by that back when George Bush was paying private companies to gather data on Americans because it would have been illegal for the government to do the gathering itself.
Brent was there because he'd read an Associated Press story about a fellow who planned to organize infiltrations of Tea Party protests across the country. The plan was to have people engage Tea Party types in discussions about their signs and slogans. The predictable result, this fellow told the AP, was that many of the Tea Party arguments would be exposed as silly, ill-conceived, impractical, or just so much blowing off without benefit of facts or logic to argue a case.
Brent wanted to see if there were any of those infiltrators in Collier County. Almost anyone who knows anything about the demographics of Collier County could have told him there probably weren't. But since Brent's only been a columnist for the Naples Daily News for about umpteen years, he couldn't have known that. Brent came and saw and concluded that "They just don't make infiltrators like they used to." Pithy, huh? A regular Mencken, that boy.
Brent also wanted to assure people that there weren't any nasty people among the Tea Party crowd. There were no racists. No homophobes. No "general meanness," whatever that means.
Brent neglected to mention the overwhelming support of Sarah Palin by the Tea Party, and the "general meanness" if not downright snarkiness that exudes from her every time someone turns on a camera. And we wouldn't expect him to recognize racism, since he himself achieved fame for a particularly insensitive column several years back that attempted to communicate a black music event in a dialogue that he fooled himself into thinking was a) clever and b) urban cool. All he did was inflame nearly every black person who heard about it. It did get him, and his newspaper's owners, quite a bit of publicity, though.
Beyond that, Elnuestros has trouble suggesting any possible point at all to the column. 
Was Brent surprised that in Collier County there was no noticeable infiltration of the protesters? He picks a quote out of a national wire story, finds its general message inapplicable in a specific situation and thus finds it false? There's a word for that kind of faulty logic,, but I'm not going to go over Brent's head by speaking Latin.
The New York Times yesterday devoted a huge chunk of its front page to a story summarizing a fairly ambitious poll of Tea Party members. While all polls have a margin of error, was it Brent's intention to suggest that his personal -- and anecdotal -- account trumps the insights into that group's constituency the poll provides? Is that logical? Is that good journalism?
Brent is a knee-jerk reactionary who blew like a hayseed out of Hillbilly Heaven, Ohio, and landed in the closest thing to a haystack his meager talents likely will ever help him acquire. He plays the part perfectly, telling all the wealthy retired Midwesterners who share his taste for goofy humor and meat loaf that they truly are superior to those who think differently, or at all.
His reactions are instinctively protective of the specious success he and his faithful following have achieved, and worthless as anything but a reflection of his limited world view. He's so proud of them he's bundled them into a book with a title that vaingloriously suggests he's never struck out. Most readers know better.
You're still battin' a thousand, boy. Keep swinging.

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