Flame — HabitableZone

Flame » in reply to Will any of you participate in any teabagging tomorrow?

Teabagging in Tricorns
ER — (archived)

The use of the memory of the Boston Tea Party as a patriotic symbol of resistance to taxation without representation has always struck me as a particularly amusing bit of Americana.

The colonists were NOT protesting British tea taxes. They were protesting the LIFTING of the Tea Tax that threatened to put the American smugglers (John Hancock was one of the most notorious) out of business. These guys had been making a pile bringing in contraband duty-free Dutch tea (not to mention a bunch of other goods), and repeal of the tax was going to shut down their little racket, the Brit stuff undercut the smuggler's product handsomely, after the colonials added their surcharge.

Of course, the whole affair was very complex, with many conflicting interests, none of them innocent. The Brits were not being nice guys by lifting the tax, they wanted to punish the smugglers and their Dutch trade rivals since they had been unable to make the tax a paying proposition. They were also giving their East India Company an effective monopoly on tea in America (no doubt for a healthy under-the-table kickback), a case of good old-fashioned economic imperialism and eighteenth century Mercantilism duking it out with organized crime.

All this gargonzola about noble colonists fighting for freedom by dumping tea in the harbor is a bunch of Johnny Tremayne hooey. Considering the mildly stimulative properties of tea, they were just drug dealers trying to stop the legalization of their drug of choice.

Somehow, probably without realizing it, the teabagging movement has certainly picked an appropriate symbol for their little pissant protest.

Log in or register to post.

The whole thread (94 posts)