Always historicize! as someone, I think Papa Smurf, has said. So now that the wingnut Tea Parties are a Thing--no mere flash in the pan, no two-year-old's shiny object--it is time to take them Seriously, as a Cultural Phenomenon, rich with symbolism handed down from our collective past. Needless to say, comparisons to the Boston Tea Party are a bit much, especially since that was a protest against a tax break for the British East India Company, a Large Corporation for whom one of Rick Santelli's cursed ancestors was probably a shill. No, you don't have to go all the way back to the 18th Century to find precedent for these "populist" expressions of outrage at unemployment insurance and the like. You only have to go back to the 1930s, specifically to the Chimpanzees' Tea Parties in Regent's Park, London.
This more historically proximate antecedent need not diminish the nostalgiac aura of contemporary wingnut protests. Take, for example, the restaurant critic A.A. Gill's fond recollection of the chimpy spectacles in the London Times:
"Every day at 4.30pm the zookeepers, who then looked proper, like prison warders, would give the chimpanzees tea with cups and saucers and teapots, and tables and chairs and bananas, and it would be brilliant chaos. The chimps would drink from the pots, steal the food, swing from the ceiling, pour water on the keepers. They’d shriek and run and bounce amok. For small boys who were constantly being told to keep their elbows off the table, eat with their mouths closed, not talk, and ask to get down, it was blissful, a profound anarchy."
A profound anarchy: this is, I believe, the most generous description of what wingnuts want "going John Galt" to mean. And lo, the chimps' tea parties used postcards, the Twitter of the day, to "organize" some 2,000 daily visitors. Technology!
http://whiskeyfire.typepad.com/whiskey_fire/2009/03/the-teavolution-will-be-historicized.htmlHEH!!
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