The Dirt Road Lobby

by Richard Cole
February 16, 2010

I generated some vitriolic responses to a comment I made to a self-described “conservative newsletter” journalist a few months ago. My comment was in response to a question about the Tea Party Movement in Michigan.

The reporter’s question, I was sure, included the word “tea bagger” in it, and I used the word in my response. I should have known better, but I didn’t.

I said something about the “tea baggers” not seeming all that conservative to me, which of course, required an explanation.

The conservative thinking to which I was referring would be inclined to describe rabid anti-government rants as not civil, maybe even anarchistic, and certainly not “conservative.” For example, there is almost nothing about preserving the status quo — the essence of “conserve”-atism — that I see coming out of these tea parties.

That’s when it hit me. I asked the reporter how he thought Russell Kirk would have reacted to the “tea bagger” movement.

The reporter didn’t express any offense, at all, by the reference to “tea baggers,” and, in fact, I do believe he used the word himself throughout the interview. He did ask this, however: “Who is Russell Kirk?”

“Holy crap,” I said. “How could anyone who writes a conservative newsletter not know Russell Kirk?”

And there you have it. My point was made.

By the way, in his newsletter column on my interview, he described Russell Kirk as “a reknown (sic) political theorist who wrote the 1953 book The Conservative Mind.” So, at least he may have learned something from his Google search I sent him on that afternoon. I doubt he went on to read the book, or any of the other 30 or so that Kirk wrote from his home — “Piety Hill” — in Mecosta, Michigan.

The reporter filed his column (and included my e-mail address off a follow-up exchange we had), and the e-mails started coming.

“What if I called you a ‘faggot?’” one e-mailer wrote. “Yes, that is a derogatory word. One that I would not use in public and, note, there is a ‘what if’ in front of that statement. I saw no ‘what if’ in front of your statement. You used an offensive and disgusting phrase to describe me. Perhaps you are totally unaware. My guess, however, is you know full well the slag (sic) meaning of the word ‘tea bagger.’”

Now, I am not going to elaborate on the X-rated, and very homocentric, description of tea bagging I got from this new pen pal. It does occur to me that it takes a special, shall we say, “perspective” to believe that the picture he painted in his e-mail is restricted to a homosexual sex act, as he suggested. But I guess that depends on what you say “is” is.

In a recent opinion piece I was asked to write for the Detroit Free Press, I described our state’s term limit amendment as a contributor to our decline into “Third World” status. Of late, I have come to refer to the organized forces behind this decline as the “dirt road lobby.” I am now self-conscious about using the “tea bagger” phrase I had used innocently enough, but “dirt road lobby” may be more appropriate for reasons other than the objectionable visual that the phrase tea bagger conjures in the minds of the Tea Party people.

A friend recently reminded me that the phrase “dirt road lobby” might not be quite as metaphorical as I had intended. In fact, it seems that unless the governor can figure out a way to get another $85 million or so to match against federal road funds, we’ll lose out on $475 million to repair our state’s bridges and roads (some of which are literally returning to dirt-road status). Avoiding this loss of federal funds apparently requires winning a battle with the forces I call the “dirt road lobby.”

Amy Lane reporting in Crain’s Detroit Business in December said the state highway department has a strategy at the ready that would get us through the tax shortfall caused by our failure to raise the state dollars needed to get matching federal tax funds. She says the alternative strategy simply will delay “more than 375 miles of pavement improvements equating to more than 100 projects, decrease by 575 the number of bridge projects planned, and reduce numerous other state…programs.”

You need to be prepared for anything when you have a majority of both houses of the legislature that apparently believe an anti-tax campaign pledge is more sacred than the oath of office they took when they were sworn in.

I read in today’s Free Press that only 18 percent of the state’s high school graduates are ready to take college-level English, algebra, social sciences and biology courses. That’s five percentage points behind the national average. (Or, said another way, it’s about 30 percent worse than the rest of a nation that is not keeping up with world standards.) But I don’t hear anyone standing up and screaming that we should be spending more money on education. Then again, 18 percent isn’t all that bad in the Third World.

And in that same paper, I read that Jim Blanchard is still getting night sweats over the six felons whose sentences he commuted in his eight years as governor (more than 20 years ago). Our current governor has commuted more than 130 violent felons in her two terms. But I don’t hear anyone standing up and screaming that we should be spending more money on prisons — or that quality education might provide an alternative to prison. But then, many Third World countries have at least as many convicted criminals roaming their streets as we do in our state.

What I am hearing is that the free-lunch bunch and the tea party people and the dirt road lobby believe we have too much government, too much taxation and, apparently, even an unjustifiable interest in leaving our children a better Michigan than the one we found.

Maybe that explains why so many of the 18 percent of the kids who are ready to get their college educations want to get the hell out of Dodge as fast as they can after they graduate.

Oh, by the way, I do want to apologize to those people of either persuasion in the Tea Party movement (or not) who may have thought that my reference to “tea baggers” had anything at all to do what goes on in the bedroom. Keeping what goes on in bedrooms a private matter is just one more thing I thought conservatives believed in.

In addition to serving as professor and chairperson of the Department of Advertising, Public Relations and Retailing at Michigan State University, Richard Cole is co-founder of Michigan’s Next Governor Project (see August Dome feature).The opinions expressed reflect his individual viewpoint and not that of the university.