I remember being very puzzled at the idea that these people
were somehow "conservatives". My home town was intensely
conservative, in the straightforward sense of being much
attached to existing institutions and ways of life. But
the Teabaggers of 1965 were quite deracinated -- they
had nearly all come to SoCal from somewhere else, and
really had no stable matrix of social relations, apart
from the office, and no established folkways, apart
from driving in cars a lot. Their "conservatism" wasn't
a matter of clinging to what they knew and liked; it
seemed largely a matter of resenting what other people
were doing elsewhere -- a heavily mediatized engagement
with the great social spectacle as seen on TV.It struck me then and strikes me now as a chimaera bombinans
in vacuo -- a sort of maelstrom of furious mental energy
expending itself without effect in railing at phantoms -- a titanomachia
taking place almost entirely in the memesphere.
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