The more I read about the Tea Party movement, the more these guys scare the shit out of me.
Today, I posted a review on Whisperin’ & Hollerin’ for an album by a late-blooming American folk singer named Chip Murray. On first hearing, the album, called Wide Awake, sounds like a straightforward mix of songs about personal growth and political protest.
It is that but digging into the background of the artist reveals he is part of an online group aligned to the Tea Party with the sinister name – Big Dawg Music Mafia (“Where ‘conservative’ is cool“).
This group of musicians, authors and poets see themselves as ‘cultural warriors’ redefining ‘pop culture’ from a right-wing perspective. One of their prominent members is a woman named Lisa Rei Norton who has posted a video of her singing a dire song called Enemy Number One which taunts those who dare to accuse Tea Party goers of being racists, rednecks, reactionaries etc. She sings, by way of defence that “We are proud, God-fearing Americans, Who cling to our faith and our guns”. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t find this reassuring.
The blind faith in the goodness of God and the implicit message that the divine being favours Americans above all other nationalities leads to Christian rock bands like Casting Crowns whose “message-driven songs” praising the glory of the Lord get a huge following on You Tube.
One of their songs ‘Praise You In This Storm’ is about standing firm when the going gets tough with the suggestion that even natural disasters are God’s way of sending a message (thanks for that!). One of the comments to this video says “don’t tell your God how big the storm is, tell the storm how big your God is”.
The Tea Party looks to me to signify a dangerous storm on the horizon. When intelligent guys like Chip Murray, who is a decent song writer, feel motivated to lend their voices to this cause it indicates to me that we need to do more than simply batten down the hatches but challenge their narrow-minded views head on – WITHOUT GUNS.
