Tea Party has weak logic

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				THE
Column Archive				VIRGINIA GAZETTE
				WILLIAMSBURG, VIRGINIA
Tea Party has weak logic				April 11, 2009

This afternoon we’re all invited to a tea party.

It won’t be your usual uppercrust tea party, so you don’t have to get all duded up and worry about which finger goes where in some tiny teacup or the proper way to snark a croissant.

No, this tea party in Crim Dell at William & Mary will be thrown by the “Tax Day Tea Party” ensemble and will allegedly replicate in some fashion the Boston Tea Party of 1773.

According to the group’s website and “web strategist” Eric Odom, the tea party movement represents those hurting Americans who are “overtaxed, overgoverned and completely run by an out-of-control Congress. Our government is dead wrong,” claims Odom, “and we’re out to correct that.” The word “revolution” forms the backdrop of the website.

Just how we’re going to correct our runaway government is not clear, though evidently dunking tea bags in the murky waters of Crim Dell will go far toward bringing the issue to a head. Or sending postcards with pictures of tea bags to the White House.

Whatever we do, we must remember that this is a nonpartisan affair. Even Democrats are welcome, though they’ll have to overlook the fact that the enterprise is backed by some of our more muddly-minded friends on the far right, including leaders of the local GOP.

Nor should we roll our eyes at but the loosest connection (tea) that it has with the apparently paradigmatic Boston Tea Party.

That party, you recall, was to protest the Tea Act that was passed by the British Parliament in 1773. Instead of returning the ships full of taxed tea to Britain, the colonists dumped the tea into Boston Harbor. They claimed they had a right to be taxed only by their elected representatives.

In 1774, Parliament passed the so-called Coercive Acts, which closed Boston Harbor to commerce, and in 1775 came the Revolution.

You’ll pardon me for wondering, therefore, what possible connection this Tax Day Tea Party has with the events of 1773.

Is the U.S. Congress the equivalent of the British Parliament? Obviously not.

Are we being forced to pay taxes to a foreign power? I don’t think so.

Are we being taxed without representation? No. Unless you live in Washington D.C.

So what’s the beef?

The beef is that we had our own revolution last November, and the tea troopers and their right-wing sidekicks lost.

In fact, the now-ancient arguments of the tea party partisans, especially in these times of deep recession, remind one more of the logic-bending circularities we’re confronted with at the tea party offered up by the Mad Hatter and March Hare in “Alice in Wonderland” than it does of the Boston Tea Party.

Like the riddle of the Mad Hatter (Why is a raven like a writing desk?), our tea trumpeters’ implied riddle (Why is a chihuahua like a government with no taxes?) leaves us, like Alice, totally flummoxed and without an answer. And in fact there is no answer.

The problem is that time and the times have passed by those who, with their clamor for a tiny government and minimal taxation, would replace the complexity of the present with the simplicity of the past. They’re like the Mad Hatter, who, according to the Queen of Hearts, killed time.

Regardless of what time it is in the real world, it is, by the Hatter’s watch, always 6 o’clock and hence always tea time. When we run out of food or tea at one position, we simply all shift to the next seat and start the same circularly puzzling conversations all over again.

Unfortunately, those advocating rebellion at Tax Day Tea Parties are totally engrossed in timeless political seat shifting. And with each shift they eat the same food and drink the same tea that they did at their previous stations. The fact that, in reality, there may be no food or tea seems to be of little consequence.

They remind me in their futility of the Dormouse’s story about the three girls living down in a treacle well who constantly try to haul up drinking water. (Don’t ask. Alice didn’t understand that one either).

Rather than coping with a changing real world and accepting the rules of the democracy they extol, our tea party prisoners in the treacle well thrive on reenactments of the past by distributing tea bags, calling for some recherche revolution and presenting alternate Wonderland budgets with no numbers. As Alice reminds us, what the Hatter said “seems to have no sort of meaning to it, and yet it was certainly English.”

If you don’t believe me, I suggest you attend the Tax Day Tea Party this afternoon. But don’t be surprised if you, like Alice, find Crim Dell transformed into a wonderland overseen by the logic-defying wizardry of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare.