Because I am a Liberal/Leftie who happens to live under the authoritarian whip of fundamentalist Christian hegemony-in-politics, I’ve gotten quite used to being called a Socialist.  It’s practically par for the course, especially if you’re a golfer.  I bet over at the ritzy Dallas Country Club, which is still a whites-only private club complete with a golf course in a quietly simmering hamlet called Highland Park, the word “Socialism” is bandied-about as often as the word, “fore”!

Dallas has always been a hateful place as far as I’m concerned.  I got here in 1963—just in time to see the President of the United States assassinated on live television.  Honestly.  We were so afraid as nine-year-olds that we were in the vacant lot out back, digging trenches and watching the skies for Soviet bombers and missiles. 

Why were we doing that?  Because it was the Cold War.  Two years earlier, in Denver, we’d suffered through the Cuban Missile Crisis.  Even so, my father and mother both were New Deal Liberals.  Socialists?  Not even close. 

As everyone who has already received a robo-call from Mitt Romney knows, the extremist elements of the Republican Party are already no doubt loading their guns and are ready to march over a freaking healthcare bill. 

In case you don’t realize it, the supposedly Socialist Obamacare bill is going to put 50 million people right in the hands of for-profit healthcare racketeers, but because it is now mandated with help from the Supremes, the free market crowd is crowing like crows and calling like a bunch of whiney chickens. 

I was on a mainly Tea Party chat room this morning, listening to the rhetoric.  It was unbelievable.  You mean I played on the “Socialist swingset” at the “Socialist city park” and now I’m in North Korea?  Really?  What’s next?  Marching? 

Apparently so.  The extremists in the Republican Party are especially working hard on the Black community.  I’m really not so certain the extremist element within the Republican Party is really interested in democracy as we know it at all.  Nope.  It’s all “self-ownership”.  That’s the concept, seemingly tailor-made for Blacks who still feel marginalized by the mainly white corporate world, that no one but you owns yourself. 

Ha!  They’ve never worked for Ernst & Young, have they? 

So, over on the Republican Plantation, I’m CPUSA: Communist Party USA.  That’s right.  When I tell those folks that all this discord isn’t good for the union and that discord is only a divide-and-conquer tactic being pushed by God-knows-who, I get called a Commie.  One of the ringleaders over there seems to be a fan of the Chicago Cubs and Chicago Bears. 

Weren’t those the baseball hats Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and Bobby Seal were wearing during the Chicago Seven trial in 1968?

Shoot.  If calling the real drivers of the Republican revolution Communists seems far-fetched at first, after chatting with free market anarchists—Voluntaryists, Agorists—I keep getting the feeling that discord is the name of the game. 

Anyway, the relatively unsophisticated Tea Partiers are all worked-up over Obamacare.  To them, this is just horrible.  Of course, tea is from China, isn’t it? 

I hear the war-drums beating.  The activists on the site are really getting people angry.  Remembering the last revolution, the Sixties revolution, I remember that one of the big tactics was to get people really angry.  As kids, we ate mounds of “Red Hots” that were conveniently packaged in yellow and red boxes.  Yes, the propaganda was fierce in those days.  Rightfully so. 

I ask the Tea Party this: “Red Rover, Red Rover, Come Over, Come Over…!”