The Whites of their Eyes Read Online Free PDF Page A

been perceived that some remains of life were left.” 54
    The old media, or what Edward Wagner called the “liberal media,” used to be known as the mainstream media, and its notions of fairness date to the eighteenth century. The elusive pursuit of journalistic objectivity only began in the nineteenth century, but the best eighteenth-century printershad standards, too. 55 “The Business of Printing has chiefly to do with Men’s Opinions,” Benjamin Franklin wrote, in “An Apology for Printers,” in 1731. Printers were bound to offend, Franklin explained, but his conscience was clear so long as he published a sufficient range of opinion: “Printers are educated in the Belief, that when Men differ in Opinion, both Sides ought equally to have the Advantage of being heard by the Publick; and that when Truth and Error have fair Play, the former is always an overmatch for the latter.” 56
    In 2009, while the Tea Party was forming, the newspaper was dying, all over again. This was more than a coincidence; it was a cause. The decline of the newspaper had destabilized American politics. A website called the Newspaper Death Watch kept count, with a column titled “R.I.P.” One hundred and forty-five newspapers either stopped publishing a print edition or shut down entirely that year. Nearly six hundred newspapers laid off employees. On an average day in 2009, forty newspaper employees lost their jobs. 57 And this time around, there was no sign of a reprieve.
    “These meetings are just fun because we do everything else by e-mail,” Christen Varley told me. Varley entered politics by way of the blogosphere. “I’m from Ohio,” she said. “Massachusetts is a foreign country to me.” She moved to Massachusetts in 2004, for her husband’s job, and, although, with the exception of an internship with the Ohio Republican Party in 1992, she’d never been involved in politics before, living in Taxachusetts triggered something in her. “I started blogging in 2006, and in early 2009 I just thought we should have a Tax Day thing.” Varley’s old blog is calledGOPMom: “Mom Knows Best!” She organized Boston’s three Tea Party rallies in 2009: Tax Day, the Fourth of July, and 9/12. Her concerns included “the myth of anthropogenic global warming.”Global warming she believed to be a conspiracy of the liberal media. She had been home raising her daughter, but in 2009 she took a job with the Coalition for Marriage and Family, a nonprofit formed to try to get a ban on same-sex marriage on the ballot. Its motto was “One Man, One Woman.” I asked her whether that didn’t amount to more government interference, but the problem, she said, was that the government had interfered so much already that it had nearly destroyed the family, and the only thing for it was to use the government to repair the damage.
    All evening, people came and went and milled about. Varley stayed put. Behind her hung a huge framed print, depicting a group of patriots, drinking in this very tavern—something, stylistically, between a Currier and Ives engraving and the label on Sam Adams beer. That beer label happens to have been drawn by Jean Paul Tibbels, illustrator of the American Girl doll books. You’d figure the guy on Sam Adams beer must be Adams, who was, briefly, a brewer, but it’s not. It’s a cartoon of a portrait of Paul Revere, painted by Copley in 1768. Copley painted Revere, a silversmith, in a waistcoat andshirtsleeves, sitting at his bench, working. A couple of years later, he painted Adams, too, but as a bewigged and learned gentleman, in a buttoned frock, standing at a desk strewn with papers, not the sort of man to sell beer.
    Varley was sitting, perfectly centered, in front of and just below that picture of the Sons of Liberty, which made it seem as if they were anointing her. That’s what had drawn all those photographers and television crews. I asked her what it meant to her that patriots had plotted here. “We admire