TV Forecast: Good and getting better

When I started working at the senior citizen newspaper after we moved from SoCal to Christmas Island in ’01, my first assignment was to photograph that week’s cover story guy. A nice, casually well-dressed older gentleman, I forget why we were featuring him… somehow talk came around to politics and his reputation for being a big-time Conservative.

I couldn’t help myself. I couldn’t not be me. I had to needle him. And he said something to me that I remember to this day. He said, “Well, Fang, in order to be a Conservative, first you gotta have something to conserve.” And I suddenly got the non-Dark Side of Conservatism. This guy had taken a lifetime to accrue himself a comfortable lifestyle and now he wanted to hang onto it.

He really opened my eyes. It suddenly made sense to me why most of my cousins—whose parents enjoyed considerably more financial success than my parents—are largely Republicans, and why two of my three sibs and I are progressives. Our cousins were brought up well-off, and being smart kids all, liked it and grew up to be adults who wanted to preserve/conserve the lifestyle to which they had become accustomed. They became Conservatives.

The lesson my sibs and I took from our parents’ relative financial misfortune was that it sucks to be the underdog, and if we ever got out of our own mess, we were gonna try to give a hand up to other people who were taking an ass-kicking from life. We became Liberals.

Back to the photo shoot: Even though I had almost nothing at the time but comic books and tour t-shirts, I could still imagine wanting to hang on to a whole bunch of cash if I happened to come into any. It would be really nice to not have to worry about lack of money-related issues all the time. I could see myself becoming quite invested in the pursuit of ridding myself of that particular stress. If it fell into my lap.

But like most people who are lazy by nature and not particularly motivated to improve my lot in life if it’s even remotely tolerable as-is, my financial affairs have never come to much of anything. I’ve just never been able to summon up the requisite interest in chasing success at the expense of, say, watching that thing I taped on HBO last night.

It reminds me of the old Steve Martin joke about how to be millionaire and never pay taxes. “First, get a million dollars…”

So, I get it. Or I used to.

But the people driving the Conservative movement these days are no longer big city deep-thinkers like my cover-model friend. They’re not even corporate droogs like the current Weeper of the House (sorry, couldn’t resist. I’ve seen firmer intestinal fortitude from Chicken Little and Henny Penny).

Nope. Right now it’s the Tea Party extremists (it’s not uncivil to call them, without hyperbole, what they are) who have the GOP in an LAPD choke hold. At the moment all is sweetness and light between the Establishment and the newly-elected Fringies in Congress; could it be because all their first efforts have been focused on pushing through pointless Tea Party agenda items like the DOA repeal of “Obamacare?”

(Man, I wish I had a better phrase for it than “Obamacare,” but I don’t. Once again, the GOP has talked circles around us. Even non-rocket scientists like Sarah Palin have us parroting her talking points verbatim. They’re setting the vernacular, which is half the battle. Somebody remind me, what is it exactly that’s supposed to make us the “Elites?”)

Back to my point... What happens when the debt-ceiling vote comes up, the otherwise pro-forma legislation the Tea Partiers happen to be so vehemently opposed to? One side has got to cave, either the long-time pols so very deeply in debt to their special-interest groups, or the idealistic new arrivals from the Tea Party; folks who are acutely aware they need the same single-cockamamie-issue constituents to vote for them again in just two years. The House doesn’t leave a legislator with much room for anything but political calculation. Any single unpopular vote they make could sink their re-election chances.

And they know how venomous the Tea Party rhetoric (and iconography) can be, it’s what brought many of them to Washington in the first place.

I predict fireworks. I predict Keith Olbermann surfacing elsewhere in time to be a very loud, if unintentionally unhelpful voice in the 2012 election. I predict Sarah Palin will surprise nobody by doing something that seems crazy till it starts to work.

And in the end, I think Obama will crush a fractured opposition. All he has to do is not fuck up and enjoy the spectacle of the competition turning on itself; when they make the inevitable movie-of-the-week about the 2012 Republican primary season, they’ll have to run it on the same network that airs “Spartacus, Blood and Sand.”

No question about it, I see good TV on the horizon.