Except not. It didn't take a very close inspection to see the string-pullers behind the scenes... mostly because their idea of "behind the scenes" means at the front of a crowd yelling about how big and how "grassroots" this mock protest really was. I don't blame Faux News and its ilk for such a shoddy show of pseudo-populism, though. After all, their target demographic aren't usually the brightest crayons in the box. They're the ones who think O'Reilly is a stable human being, and who believe Glenn Beck when he - between bouts of histrionic sobbing fits - foresees the End Times. No, Fox has had 8 years of a lock on every moron idiotically waving an American flag at NASCAR races; the ones who think Paris is a city in central Texas (or a socialite), and the French invented french fries... sorry, freedom fries.
They saw how well a grassroots movement can work with the Obama campaign. How it organically grows, taking on a life and form of its own, even (or, perhaps, especially) without the constant tending of an over-zealous gardener. But they seemed to have missed that last part. Instead of allowing what was a small series of protests to burn and fizzle naturally, Murdoch emerged from the safety of his Secret Kangaroo-Pouch Lair and decreed from on high (or was it from down under?) that the time to act was nigh! I'll get back to that momentarily, though. First I'd like to focus a bit on the protests themselves...
Tea Parties; the theme of the day. A la the infamous Boston Tea Party, in which a small mob of drunken, ill-informed Bostonians dressed up as Indians and threw British tea into the harbor. They did this to protest the fact that Parliament had enacted several new tax laws - including one on, you guessed it, tea - to help pay for the enormous cost of the French and Indian War (known globally as the Seven Years War) that the Americans had started, and then forced the British to fight. The problem was that there were no American representatives to Parliament, and thus they had no say in the enaction of these new taxes.
These days, things are a little different. The tea parties are mostly in landlocked states, mostly in what we'd refer to as the Middle of the West. And the modern protesters have abandoned the time-honored tradition of dressing up as a savage Indian, in favor of khakis and a button-up shirt. The brave ones wore colonial-era costume. And one really brave one wore a big-breasted demon Obama in his underwear outfit. They were, however, united with their colonial forebears on the idea behind this protest: taxation! Specifically, "no taxation without representation!" The battle-cry of Boston!
But wait... they do have representation. I thought they were represented by those aging, pale, well-fed gentlemen sitting around in Washington DC doing their best to uphold traditional American values, such as hyper-capitalism, mudslinging, character-assassination, xenophobia, neo-Conservative expansionisim, ideological imperialism, and feeling-up underaged male pages. You know... the cornerstones of our great society. These are the people they voted for. Some of them even managed to keep their jobs after this last election. Did this somehow escape them? That when they check the box next to a name in a ballot box and cast it, that is their representation?
I'm torn as to the explanation. It could be a simple case of sour grapes. That does seem the liklier answer. After 8 years of the biggest neo-con daisy-chain in history, the party's over for them. They lost... big. And worse, their whole house of cards culminated in the biggest game of 52 trillion card pick-up in history. They're discredited, and they're out of power. It's no surprise they'd be pissy over it.
But there's some part of me thinking it may actually be something worse: they might actually believe that they're currently not being represented. That is to say, these people may feel that being a minority literally equates to tyranny. That's certainly the rhetoric they like to spout.
Regardless, if we're playing by the rules of Godwin's Law, these people lose already. I'll blurb the law, for those of you afraid of hotlinks: Basically it states that as a discussion - especially internet discussion - grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1. And in virtually every situation, the person or persons intellectually vacuous to make such an asinine comparison automatically loses the argument.
I'd like to finish with the sage of our time, who can say it better than I ever could:
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | M - Th 11p / 10c | |||
| Nationwide Tax Protests | ||||
| ||||
(CS)WC Out.
You always entertain me!
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