Tea is for drinking, not for bagging

There’s nothing more stimulating than a little faux-Revolutionary-Era tea bagging to protest stimulus spending — and on tax day, no less. It’s like a small, kitschy and entirely overblown “Fuck You” from a couple centuries back.


The irony of a group of people, who, taken as a whole, would be appalled by the more prurient connotation of their tea bagging protests — and anything sexual that isn’t marital missionary position (Don’t you dare put those fucking legs up, either!) strictly for the purpose of procreation — holding these tea bag-a-thons has been well explored. And there’s not a sexual takeoff on the stimulus plan that hasn’t been beaten into the ground. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t still funny, and not just in that fifth-grade sexual way, either.

It’s also funny in a snicker-in-the-back-of-history-class way. That image of a collection of rich, gentrified sexta-to-octagenarians running around with brown face on, throwing Lipton Cold Brew Iced Tea bags into the water hazard on hole 7 of their country club just makes me giggle.

On second thought, these people aren’t going to be doing such a historically accurate redux. They wouldn’t paint their faces and dress like Indians. When you have a Roman numeral after your name, looking like anything but a pasty old fart isn’t at all acceptable.

The beautiful thing is, these people have the right to stage these kinds of protests. It’s still in the Constitution. George W. Bush gave it his damnedest to rid us of it — along with most of the other amendments in the Bill of Rights — but we still have the right to peaceably assemble. And what’s more peaceable than a bunch of trust funders getting together to tea bag their government?

The truth is, this thing isn’t alone in its absurdity — most protests look stupid. The Left, whether it’s an overly outlandish gay rights demonstration or the old school hippie sit-in (protesting at it’s laziest), has just as silly-looking civil disobedience as this Tea Party Day.

When you get to the core of all this tea bagging, these conservatives have legitimate ideological beef. Fiscal conservatism is (read: was in pre-Bush days) one of the tenets of the Right. Stand on your principles. It would be the first time in a decade, but you’ve got to start somewhere. My problem is that the philosophy and the actions that they’d like to use — spending freezes and tax cuts — is just as ugly and hirsute as the balls their tea bagging brings to mind.

The last little chuckle I get is from this thought: The 773 scheduled tea-bag-party protests of the Obama administration’s $787 billion economic stimulus plan has inadvertently, but pretty effectively (for the short-term), stimulated the tea industry — I’d assume so, anyway, because these people had to go buy the tea they were using or at least replace the stuff they threw in the water or carried around outside.

It’s just too bad we don’t grow much tea in America.

In other news, Rod Blagojevich is hoping to appear on a Survivor-for-quasi-celebs reality TV show. Since he was just indicted, heading to the Costa Rican jungle to film a reality show doesn’t seem like the best plan. But, after seeing what reality TV did for Flavor Flav’s career, who can really blame the guy?