Why the tea parties don't matter

[bovil]

The "Tea Party" movement is a symbolic failure.

The original tea partiers engaged in criminal acts and risked arrest and imprisonment to destroy product from a company being propped up by unfair reduced taxes by the government, at the expense of what, at the time, amounted to "small business:" the domestic importers of tea who competed with the East India Company.

The current teabaggers are buying tea and throwing it around. That's it. When the DC teabag crew showed up with a truckload of tea bags (yes, I'm serious) to dump in Lafayette Square (because dumping in the Potomac is illegal, can't do that, after all) they were informed that they didn't have the correct permits to dump their load.

So they took it away. They're a bunch of pussies. "Civil disobedience" and "protest" are just words to them. They'll always cave in to authority rather than take a risk for their alleged principles. Samuel Adams would have dumped the tea right then and there.

If they wanted a real symbolic connection with the original Boston Tea Party they would be stealing Chrysler and GM cars and trucks from distribution centers and dumping them in the drink.

But they're not.

Pussies.

Comments

[deirdremoon.livejournal.com]

Total sidebar note: I hear what you're saying about the lack of real rebellion in the thing. But speaking as a treehugger, I'm very glad that they dumped neither tea nor cars into the drink as the specific form of their protest. That would be damaging an ecosystem that had nothing to do with the original protest, and ironically, (you'd hope) the government would just have to spend MORE money cleaning up the mess afterward.

That said, it's hard to find a symbol of extreme scorn that doesn't involve destroying something, which gives me new respect for King and other nonviolent protests that succeeded in getting so much press.