Self-Described Teabaggers

I got in some trouble in this post about the political protesters who (briefly) called themselves teabaggers before they started getting mocked for their sexual and cultural ignorance. Several commenters (the two visible, plus several more who were incivil or explicitly partisan) claimed that, no, they never did call themselves that, it was their opponents who started it. Some quick Google-and-link sorted that out.

Well, now Rachel Maddow (whom I ♥ more than The Nymph approves of, even though it’s the safest possible celebrity crush) has twittered as follows:

And if you follow her link, you’ll see this, published with approval at Free Republic:

Most of a year later, some of them still haven’t gotten the memo.

Update: Doh! Rachel tweets a “maybe” semi-retraction (based on a newspaper article suggesting the guy with the sign was a union man twitting teabaggers for being too wealthy to empathize with unemployed) and “reverts to previous evidence“.

I actually find this more fascinating, because it points out just how dangerous one-liners are to misinterpretation. What you see depends on where you stand. I see the tea partiers (as they now call themselves) as being conservatives of a generally-low economic status, so it never occurred to me that they might be mocked from the working left as being too well-off to understand the plight of the unemployed worker.

I’ve learned by bitter experience that discussions of this sort go partisan and ugly extremely fast if not closely moderated here on ErosBlog, and I’m not going to be at my computer much for the next couple of days (although some posts are pre-scheduled). So, I’ve disabled comments on this post. I’ll try to remember to turn them back on when I get back.

This Party Sucks

A few months back, some folks decided to invoke The Guiding Spirits of Our Founding Fathers by holding political protests in symbolic invocation of the Boston Tea Party. They showed up carrying signs, had noisy speakers make noisy speeches, waved some tea bags around, and in some cases, threw said tea bags into nearby bodies of water.

So far, so normal. Public life in America. Could have happened in any decade of the last couple of hundred years.

But… it turned out there was a small cultural misunderstanding. There are some divergent strands in U.S. culture these days, and as the culture fragments, communication “cross-strand” becomes difficult due to linguistic drift.

Thus, some of the people with the tea bags began to call themselves “tea baggers”; and they started calling their protest efforts “tea bagging”.

Hilarity ensued, because of the the fact that “tea bag” (as a verb) already had a well-established sexual connotation in popular slang. A fact of which the “new” tea baggers appeared to be blissfully ignorant.

I was reminded of all of this when I saw a certain t-shirt. Wouldn’t this shirt have been the very perfect thing to wear to one of those protests?