The Modern Virtue of Treason

Once, when confronted with sedition in the ranks, George Washington broke the rebels into two groups, one of the leaders and another of the followers. After gathering all the mutineers together, the followers were organized into a firing squad which then executed their own leaders. The Continental Army was underfed, underpaid, and vastly under-powered in the face of its British and Hessian opponents. Without the help of Western European minor nobles inspired by freedom (Casimir Pulaski) and wrecking the British on two continents (the Marquise de Lafayette), our Continental Army would've needed quotation marks to go around using the word "army". Our rough assortment of riflemen, stolen artillery, and decked-out merchant vessels probably looked like an bunch of Amazonian tribesman going up against Seal Team Six.

And yet...

We won. Yes, we won. With training from military professionals, Washington and his commanders organized farmers, trappers, British deserters, and assorted scum into a force that defeated the world's most powerful navy and one of its most powerful infantry forces. Looking back, we admire the minutemen for their sacrifices in the name of liberty. We adore George Washington for his ability to command (and in some instances, compel) his men on to victory against a superior force. We idolize the Colonial Congress for their courage in not only cutting the ties between them and their oppressive English overlords, but also for inspiring like-minded individuals across the world.

And yet...

If the Tea Party puppet masters are to be believed, their hordes of astro-turfed, alarmist xenophobes are the modern-day inheritors of the Continental Army's legacy. For the average TV viewer, the tri-cornered hats and 18th Century garb might lend credence to the Tea Party's assertion. However, the average TV viewer who assumed this would be wrong. Rather than being the brave minutemen that sent themselves to the front with only a dream that they would return to house and home, the Tea Party more closely resembles the sorry chaps I mentioned earlier. You know, the ones that a less patient commander-in-chief lined up in the forest.

First off, the Declaration of Independence was most assuredly treason. This is not debatable. What is debatable is whether or not the Tea Party and their representatives in Congress resemble the colonial patriots in slightest. The answer is "only just", in that they were born here (except for John Sununu, who was born in Cuba). Now, I'm not going to do the expected thing and go through the lengthy list of grievances against the British Crown as contained in the Declaration. Why, you ask? Because that won't convince anybody. Trust me; the Teabaggers have pre-fab arguments for virtually every contingency that the rest of us can throw at them, not to mention that their base foments an unholy distrust against any and all sources information that don't specifically kow-tow to their leadership.

What I will do is take a look at their national and state Congressional records. Let's see... Abortion bills, obstruction on a $35 billion jobs bill for teachers and emergency personnel, arcane anti-gay bills, more obstruction on equal pay for women, a budget proposal that brings the word "Dickensian" back into the vernacular, and a presidential ticket that would make that budget a reality, complete with gangs of impoverished child thieves. After the Department of Education gets gutted, crime is all they'll have left.


You see, the colonial patriots fought to free themselves and their posterity from the fascist theocracy that was England. The king was officially acknowledged by church and government as God's advocate on Earth, only without all that papist claptrap like celibacy oaths and transubstantiation. King Henry VIII even kept the title "Defender of the Faith" as a holdover from the good old days, when Bible translators and rabble-rousers could be burned after either being strangled to death or even after being dead for 44 years.


In a previous post, I pontificated (ha, it's a pun because we discussed Catholicism!) on the separation of church and state. We don't need to get into the nitty-gritty here, only that it exists to protect religion from government and government from religion. That being said, I chuckle wryly every time I hear some Teabagger come on TV and squawk about being repressed. If anything, we should see from the kinds of things these guys do once they get a little bit of power that they have no intention of extending rights to all; rather, they're willing to go to any lengths necessary to keep their own "rights" at the expense of others. If we're looking for a historical American analogue of the modern religious Teabagger, we should look to the Puritans instead of the minutemen. Sure, they came to America for religious freedom, but they only came for their own religious freedom. Objectors were exiled into the forest to start their own colonies.

This brings us to the subject of treason and why it has become a virtue for the Tea Party movement. A Texas judge cries wolf over an imminent invasion by UN troops and warns of civil war as retribution. Hank Williams Jr, the brain-damaged substance abuser that he is, claims that President Obama is a Muslim "who hates farming, hates the military, [and] hates the U.S." and is greeted by applause instead of a firing squad composed of his treasonous comrades. Rush Limbaugh even blames tropical storm warnings on a Democratic conspiracy to disrupt the RNC in Tampa. Need I go on?

What we have now is a very clever breed of fascist theocrat, one that tries to muddy the waters of public sentiment by accusing the other side of materializing their very own darkest desires. We have a large group of people in this country that commands an ever-growing wing of the GOP that exists for the sole purpose of deposing the democratically-elected president of the United States, in some cases "by bullet or by ballot". In another time, a less-patient commander-in-chief lined up the traitors and forced them to execute their own leaders. Will that time ever come? I sincerely hope not. I hope that we will never again see civil war or secession or mutiny within the ranks of our armed forces.

But if that ever happens, I know which side I'll be standing on.

Do you?