(Arizona Cardinals helmet, you limey fucks)

Super quick half-ass lesson on what’s going on over here, for the British:

Ever since Barack Obama was elected president over here, the opposition has gone a little, how do you say, off the fucking rails? One of the political movements that arose in response to his supposed grab bag of contradictions (he’s both a communist and fascist, a Muslim and a radical Christian) is called The Tea Party. It’s a reference to this totally epic fuck you move during the American Revolution (or whatever you guys call it over there) called the Boston Tea Party, during which a bunch of colonists dumped a few shiploads of tea from Britain into the harbor. Their point was “No taxation without representation.”

So what does that have to do with the contemporary political movement? It’s basically still just a bunch of white people who are complaining about their taxes. Same shit, different century.

This Tea Party though, they’ve got a special brand of crazy going on. Or maybe they’re just patriots standing up for what they believe in? It could be that. (It’s not.) And while they didn’t win as many seats in the Senate and the House this month during our recent election, the Democrats and Obama got their balls handed to them anyway. So the good news is, we can expect all sorts of insane, reactionary, far right wing behavior in the months to come when the right, and some of the Tea Party figureheads, like Rand Paul of Kentucky and Mark Rubio of Florida, start trying to turn this goddamn car around and head straight home like an angry dad on a bad vacation.

Paul and his cohort mix a blend of libertarianism with conservatism that basically wants to eliminate any sort of federal “hand outs” to the citizens, like health care, for example. People shouldn’t get sick if they can’t pay for it, I suppose. Deadbeats.

Smaller government with less wasteful spending is the right wing’s rallying cry in America. (Why do these types perpetually rallying against big government always want a job in it, by the way?) That’s a simplified version, but you probably get the idea.

“We’ve come to take our government back,” said Paul, whose daddy is also in the House of Representatives, so he must be very proud of his boy. Take it back where? And from whom? Your guess is as good as mine, provided that you guessed  ‘a hundred years in time’ and ‘from the black gay women jew commies’.

So, if you’ve been following any of that from afar, you’ve probably thought to yourself, just how stupid can this whole Tea Party thing get? Americans are by and large reasonable, right? Few bad apples making everyone look bad isn’t it? Short answer: no. Long answer: also no. Allow me to introduce you to Arizona, whose Tea Party is already getting the ball rolling. They were off of their tits well before Obama came alone though, so it’s not like they’re just trend-followers. Dudes can roll down there when it comes to reactionary conservatism.

Arizona is like the fuck-up cousin of America that everyone else tolerates at holidays because he’s family, but you’re relieved when he finally leaves after skeeving everyone out all night talking about his half-assed get rich schemes (like that fuck-up cousin, Arizona also knows a thing or two about meth). Or, to put it another way, in the grand Seinfeldian episode about nothing that is the American experiment, Arizona is the Kramer of states: you can always rely on them to say exactly what’s on their minds, no matter how offensive or absurd.

Remember that bit where the gang needed to let a friend know her hairstyle was bad, so Jerry and Elaine introduced her to Kramer, knowing he’d blurt out the first thing that came to his mind? That’s how politics in America works with Arizona. If there’s something weird on the minds of our citizens, we just wait for Arizonans to bring it up. Also, like the actor who played Kramer, you wouldn’t exactly be shocked to see Arizona flying off the handle ranting about “niggers.”

Or “spics,” to be more up to date with the current situation. While the Grand Canyon State has had its share of racist controversies in its relatively short 100 year history as part of the United States, you probably heard about its most recent boner, when they tried to propose a law last year that empowered law enforcement to pull people over for driving while brown. OK, that’s a gross simplification of the scenario, and reasonable people can argue that the law was never intended to be implemented as institutionalized racial profiling, but there’s no place for reason when you’re trying to make a broad point like this. What’s the point? That’s racist, yo, that’s the point.

Maybe rational people, knowing how heated the fuels of anti-immigration sentiment were running throughout the country, particularly in border states –  wouldn’t have freaked out over it if Arizona didn’t have such a deliriously stupefying track record of bullshit. I should probably point out here that there are indeed some cool pockets of Arizona, like in Tempe for example, and that plenty of people there are justifiably pissed off about how they’re represented nationally by a few oversize buffoons. Also, they gave us Jimmy Eat World. Then again they also produced The Gin Blossoms, so…. tough call. Now that I’ve gotten that out of the way, let’s get back to stereotyping…

I wrote about this a while back in a piece that considered how the proposed immigration bill would have affected musicians and entertainers traveling to the state. This ‘graph is a quick shorthand for how they do down there:

When it comes to race relations, Arizona has historically been one of the most contentious battlegrounds in the country. During the Civil War, it was one of the only territories in the West to fight alongside the Confederacy, and the state didn’t recognize Martin Luther King Jr. Day until 1992–nearly a decade after it became a federal holiday. (In 1987, governor Evan Mecham rescinded the holiday as his first act in office.) During the next several years, widespread boycotts of the state stirred the controversy, most notably with the NFL relocating the site of that year’s Super Bowl out of Arizona. Public Enemy commentated on the state in “By The Time I Get To Arizona” on 1991′s Apocalypse 91… The Enemy Strikes Black: “What’s a smiling face when the whole state’s racist? The cracker over there, he try to keep it yesteryear, the good ol’ days the same ol’ ways that kept us dyin’.”

Say what you will about Chuck D, but dude had the righteous fury on lock down back when. Oh, also Arizona gave the world John McCain, who was one grey pube away from nuking the world back into the stone age (When he was born, am I right?!) before losing to Obama. And their governor, Jan Brewer, is literally the worst person you could imagine. For real, try to think of a more harrowing zombie of outmoded politics and obliviousness who wields the power of bootstrap-earned and god-given entitlement better than this mess. (Strap on your helmets for this vid, because you’re about to get concussed with the stupid.)

I’ll wait here till you get back with some ideas…

Didn’t think so. She also kicked up quite a stir when she claimed that the poors from down south were running around chopping all the white people’s heads off. “Our law enforcement agencies have found bodies in the desert either buried or just lying out there that have been beheaded,” she said on a local AZ television station. Turns out she was exaggerating on that one, crime is actually down along the border. But as far as political strategies go, telling people they’re going to fucking die in a ditch if you don’t keep the barbarians at the gate has a pretty decent track record (see every fascist regime ever).

Brewer just won reelection, incidentally, despite literally disappearing into another dimension of space/time for minutes during the debates. Maybe she was just talking to her biggest supporter: “God has placed me in this powerful position,” she once said. Thanks for fucking that up too, big guy. I wonder what god had to say about her throwing 47,000 low income children off the state’s insurance plan?  Or rolling back insurance for hundreds of thousands of old people? I’m starting to think that pro-life doesn’t really mean what I’ve always assumed it meant.

Oh, woops, I almost forgot to mention Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the badass best known for running his country’s prison system like a post-apocalyptic warlord, only without all the laughs that implies. Tell me you wouldn’t be surprised to find out this guy had a sorority’s worth of co-eds on meathooks in his cannibal dungeon.

He’s famous for setting up tent gulags out in the desert for convicts to work in, and for making them wear pink (Because pink is gay, I guess?). If you saw a character like this in some awful sci-fi b-movie where the bad guy was a southern red neck fascist that ended up getting torn apart my a horde of zombies, you think it was too broad a stereotype. Except this is for real.

So it’s pretty bad over there, right? Well, the good news is, they can’t get any stupider, can they?

Of course they can. OK, but how about petty? Can they do petty down there as well as they do racist?

You don’t know the half of it. Remember how that health care legislation we passed over here empowered Obama to barge into people’s houses with his Black Panther goons and steal all of the money under the mattress so brown people could get illegal cold medicine and homosexual weapons imported directly from North Korea? This proposal in Arizona to set up a centralized curbside trash pickup service is exactly like that. Only, somehow — and I didn’t think this was possible — even scarier.

Let’s be honest, I’m probably not going to be able to use my powers of snark to make this whole thing sound any more ridiculous than it already is on its face, so I’m just gonna cut to the chase and skip ahead to the block quote from AZCentral.com:

A decision by the Fountain Hills Town Council to hire a single trash hauler and begin a curbside recycling program has been met with angry protests from residents who accuse town leaders of overstepping their bounds and taking a leap toward socialism.

Some even likened it to “Obamacare” for garbage, calling it “trashcare.”

Fountain Hills, the article points out, has two of their very own — you’re never gonna believe this –  Tea Party groups.  One is called the Fountain Hills Tea Party and the other is the Fountain Hills Tea Party Patriots, and just trying to imagine what sort of trivial differences in bullshit-creation necessitates a town of this size having two separate wings of their fear-factory in operation is blowing my mind.

Probably no surprise that the Bolshevik agent who proposed this act of sedition -the Revolution happens gradually from within you see- is a Democrat.

Councilwoman Ginny Dickey, who also supported the measure, said she felt that her motivations were especially questioned because she is the only Democratic council member and worked for seven years at the Arizona Department of Environmental Quality.

“It seems counterintuitive, but in order for this proposal to pass, I believe I had to downplay the benefits of recycling,” she said. “When ideology prevents rational discussion of a really pretty mundane topic, trash, there is no perspective. Everything is suspect, which paralyzes us.”

So that’s how bad things are starting to get, and we haven’t even ushered in the new Congress yet. Can you imagine what sort of miniscule whining and Chicken Little wing-flapping these patriots are gonna cook up once they get the real shit-steamer rolling down hill?

How’s the old saying go? First they came to provide me with affordable health care and I didn’t speak up, because I wasn’t a petty, ideological simpleton. Then they came to pick up my trash, and I was like, yeah, but as long as you’re not picking it up, in, you know that way [limp wrist motion]. Then I had a heart attack from all this bottled up fear of The Other and I didn’t go to heaven because it doesn’t exist. Welcome to America.