Teabagged By The Devil, 1882

After last year’s hilarity involving the education of a substantial fraction of our culture in the finer points of teabagging, it’s time to share a “nothing-new-under-the-sun” moment that surprised even me. I refer, of course, to an artwork called Calvary. It’s by Felicien Rops, dates from 1882, and it features, among other disturbing imagery, the devil’s own ball sack, squarely planted (ok, not quite square, her head is tilted) on a sacrificial forehead:

Click the image for a larger size.

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.