How to Respond to Tea Party Rage

Leslie Marmon SilkoLeslie Marmon Silko 

This week we celebrate both Passover and Easter, and the world, as it was during the original Passover meal and then again when Jesus celebrated it under Roman rule, is still filled with rage. The weekend newspapers were filled with stories of Tea Party anger, which is being directed at the recent health care bill, unemployment, banks, scientists who warn about global warming, liberal elites, an African-American president, and God knows what else. As Frank Rich pointed out in a New York Times column yesterday, the health care bill is not the real culprit:

If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse [John Lewis and Emmanuel Cleaver are members of the Congressional black caucus and were the targets of racial slurs and, in Cleaver’s case, spitting]. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

Fellow columnist Charles Blow, an African American, basically agrees and points out that some demographers are predicting that this year could be “the first year that most children born in the country will be nonwhite.” He concludes,

You may want “your country back,” but you can’t have it. That sound you hear is the relentless, irrepressible march of change. Welcome to America: The Remix.

Putting the rage in an even larger context, I think the world as a whole is going through a version of an identity shake-up, what with globalization and the internet disrupting age-old patterns. Mix that together with a world-wide recession and you have a lethal mixture. Who knew that the dawning of the age of Aquarius would be so unsettled?

Of the various art forms, those that feature narrative (literature, theatre, film) are the most effective for sorting through identity issues. One novelist that provides a good guide for responding to Tea Party anger is a Laguna Pueblo Indian.

In both Ceremony and Almanac of the Dead, Leslie Marmon Silko focuses on the outbreak of destructive anger in the world, which the Pueblos attribute to witches. In Pueblo culture, witches are those forces that delight in destruction. In Ceremony (1977), my favorite of the two novels, witches are associated with white imperialism, environmental devastation, and racism (including Indian prejudice against mixed blood Indians).

The novel is about a young Indian who returns from World War II to confront a set of psychological and cultural crises. In addition to the PDSD and survivor guilt that he has suffered in the war, he sees his community under siege. He has seen his cousin Rocky turning his back on his Indian roots before dying in the war, and he sees fellow war veterans living in perpetual anger at what the whites have done to them. He himself turns to alcohol before finally going to a medicine man for help.

The traditional medicine man of his village, however, is of only moderate help because he lives cocooned in the reservation and doesn’t understand how the world is changing.

Finally Tayo searches out a medicine man who lives on the border between white and Indian land. His name is Betonie and he is willing to adapt traditional ceremonies to help Indians cope with the new world. He devises a ceremony and healing quest for Tayo to undertake, and by the end of the book Tayo has found a sense of inner peace and a way to live in the world.

By arriving at this state, however, he stands as a living reproof to those still caught up in the culture’s sickness. This is how the book is directly useful in helping us respond to Tea Party rage. Tayo’s inner peace is seen as a threat by his vellow vets. Their ringleader Emo, an Indian who carries a bag of teeth taken from Japanese corpses, leads three of his former friends to kill him.

In a climactic scene that takes place near a uranium mine (with all of its associations with cataclysmic destruction), Tayo has a chance to kill Emo. Here is the description of that moment:

He knew he could get to Emo before Pinkie or Leroy could stop him. They were drunk. Emo’s words were thick and slurred. Pinkie had stumbled to his knees beside Leroy, squatting next to the fire.

He visualized the contours of Emo’s skull; the GI haircut exposed thin bone at the temples, bone that would flex slightly before it gave way under the thrust of the steel edge.

Because he resists, however, the forces of rage turn on each other. The Indians begin fighting. Emo, his sunglasses diabolically glittering in the fire, presides:

“You fucking little queer!” Leroy kicked sand in [Pinkie’s] face and Pinkie lunged at him. Emo stood close to them; the fat under his chin was wrinkled with his grinning. The fire’s reflection made two flashing yellow eyes on Emo’s glasses. The wind was moving clouds rapidly across the sky, and as they crossed over the moon, darkness and light rolled back and forth like the men wrestling on the ground. The sand their feet kicked loose made a swirling trail in the wind.”

And then everything is over:

The moon was lost in a cloud bank. He moved back into the boulders. It had been a close call. The witchery had almost ended the story according go its plan; Tayo had almost jammed the screwdriver into Emo’s skull the way the witchery had wanted, savoring the yielding bone and membrane as the steel ruptured the brain. Their deadly ritual for the autumn solstice would have been completed by him. He would have been another victim, a drunk Indian war veteran settling an old feud.

As the scene ends, Tayo reconnects with what is eternal and pure:

He crouched between the boulders and laid his head against the rock to look up at the sky. Big clouds covered the moon, but he could still see the stars. He had arrived at a convergence of patterns; he could see them clearly now. The stars had always been with them, existing beyond memory, and they were all held together there. Under these same stars the people had come down from White House in the north. They had seen mountains shift and rivers change course and even disappear back into the earth; but always there were these stars. Accordingly, the story goes on with these stars of the old war shield; they go on, lasting until the fifth world ends, then maybe beyond. The only thing is: it has never been easy.

The stars for Tayo are what Jahweh’s covenant is for the Jews and Christ’s promise of love is for Christians. Perhaps it is the deep faith that humanists have that people can step into their best selves. When confronted with Tea Party rage, in other words, do not respond in kind. Obama must be strong, leaders of different political persuasions must be strong, we must all be strong. Find your center and resist the urge to lash out in return.


It’s not easy. As Silko points out, it has never been easy. But Silko’s book assures us that our spiritual traditions will help us hold to our higher natures and the rage will turn inward on itself. As she writes in the ceremonial words that conclude her book:

Whirling darkness
started its journey
with its witchery
and
its witchery has returned upon it.

Its witchery
has returned
into belly.

Its own witchery
has returned
all around it.

Whirling darkness
has come back on itself.
It keeps all its witchery
to itself.

It doesn’t open its eyes
with its witchery.

It has stiffened
with the effects of its own witchery.

It is dead for now.
It is dead for now.
It is dead for now.
It is dead for now.

Silko ends the book with a prayer, presenting the book as an offering.  It would be appropriate as well for an Easter Sunday:

Sunrise,
accept this offering
Sunrise.


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