Re: Teabaggery

(Picture lifted from FDL --  I think. But who can recall? So many things...)

Organized by FOX "News" and a couple of right wing think tanks, hundreds of thousands turned out on April 15 -- some in clever little 18th Century get ups -- to protest "taxes and spending" by hollering about immigrants and the price of tea and hurling their teabags hither and yon. 

It was the Feel Good uprising of the season, kicking off the Insurrection and Rebellion activities to come.

Or something.

Ten thousand protestors were expected locally; news reports had it that around 5,000 assembled -- still a throng, though hardly a mass movement. They were harangued by radio personalities and FOX "News" presenters, by Republican state representatives, and by anti-taxers from far and wide. I half expected them to come armed -- as they proudly did during the 2000 Election Recount Protests (yes, they were protesting counting the votes, harangued and whipped to a frenzy by many of the same radio personalities and teevee stars), where gun-waving and flag-waving seemed to get equal emphasis. But so far as I know, armaments were mostly kept at home, and the protesters seemed to be having more fun than trying to raise hell.

Of course they said that about the Boston Tea Party, too. So I wouldn't put too much stock in how much "fun" appeared to be under way.

The Left Blogosphere, of course, made a point of mocking and deriding the Teabaggers, and of course they made much of the endless double-entendre "teabagging" provides. The form of "teabagging" I'm familiar with -- a sort of frat-house hijink in which the balls of the teabagger are placed on the head of or in the mouth of a sleeping -- or passed-out-drunk -- brother as a gentle form of good spirited insult -- seemed almost the appropriate metaphor for the actions of the multitude on Teabagging Day, for it seemed they were out more for highjinks than not. These people are not used to taking to the streets, after all, so most of them don't know the correct protocols, don't have the right gravitas for serious marches and sign carrying and full-throated chants. It's not really in them.

The problem for me with the Left Blogistan mockery of all this was the fact that there is still little or no recognition within the higher reaches of the so-called "progressive" blogosphere that the middle and lower classes -- regardless of their political orientation -- are drowning in debt, and their condition and position is made exponentially worse by all the trillions of dollars pledged and paid to those who are already among the very richest in our land (and overseas). There is little or no recognition that in all the frenzy to bailout and stimulate coming from Washington, very little -- indeed, almost nothing -- is being directed toward relieving that enormous debt burden the masses are struggling under, and in fact, that burden is increasing with every bailout.

Part of what the Teabaggers are responding to is the fact that essentially all the money in the whole wide world is being handed over to those who already have more money than God, and people like the poor schmuck in his 18th Century Revolutionary get up have to pay for it. 

Nobody is taking the schmuck's side at all -- except FOX "News" and the various right wing interests that are always on the look out for opportunities and found one in the inchoate rage of the masses.

Masses and rage that the Left (so-called) has avoided like the plague. The Left that never misses and opportunity to miss an opportunity...

I could go on, but we have to get to the Torture Memos before the weekend is out, and -- OT -- there are home hospice care issues that have tended to keep me well away from my own bloggery more often than not.