10,000 Monkeys and a Camera

…And Tax Day will perhaps be forever changed…

Everybody’s talking about teabagging this week (much to Rachel’s amusement!). Even Chattanoogans, who are notoriously non-activist, had some tea parties today. Events all over the country have been getting a lot of media coverage, but I wonder if at least part of the reason for that is the fact that protesters’ choice of language is providing so much amusement for people (and giving at least one poor old woman asthma attacks!).

But besides their unfortunate use of language — which is a place they keep going back to (more here), deliciously — conservatives might also be hurting their reputation in another way: their choice of metaphor just doesn’t ring true, and so it leaves them looking clueless and petulant. The “tea party” is, I gather, supposed to refer back to the Boston Tea Party (where they dumped chests, not bags, of tea into the harbor (not on the sidewalk) — tea which had been siezed, not purchased at the nearest Wal-Mart Asian Import Store). The 1773 Tea Party was part of a protest of the the fact that colonists were being asked to pay levies while not being allowed representation by the taxing authority — but sadly, the reference is willfully ignorant.

The events across the country were not being put together by people who suffer from a lack of representation by the taxing authority. Today’s demonstrators had the opportunity to vote for their representatives in government just last fall. I can only assume that these activists took advantage of that civic opportunity, so at this point, they’re really just being sore losers. These people put politicians in power who demonstrated an incredible incompetence at running a government over a number of recent years, and then they suffered terrific losses at the polls as a result. That is what makes today’s protests not so much like an iconic event that might change the course of history and more like a toddler’s tantrum — complete with the red face, teary eyes, and bulging diaper — after just 86 days in the minority. As Joe says:

I’m all for fighting against big government. My only question is: why just now? With a few exceptions, where have you guys been?

And, I might add, where are your suggestions as to an alternative course? (Come on, be serious — if all you’re going to say is “shut down the government,” then, really, how is that helping?) Given where we are, how should we proceed?