Tea, sans sympathy

As a rule, I don't like to blog about what every other blogger and his dog are blogging about. It feels silly, redundant, like voting for a major party or watching Lost. After all, what's the odds of me thinking of something that no-one else has spotted?

But some stories are too funny to pass up.

You've heard of the spate of "spontaneous" tax protests by the name of "tea parties" taking place across the US? Where people who were quite happy to support Bush while he ran up the national debt in times of plenty, are now violently against Obama doing the same thing in a slump? People who are so impoverished that they're turning out in their hundreds to throw away (presumably) perfectly good tea?

Oh dear, I'm getting off track already. There's so much to laugh at, so much to scoff at, so much to just sneer at with the contempt it deserves, if I can muster that much. I know the history, I know what these people are trying to do, and if I could spit in their faces from here, they'd be even wetter than they already are. But what tickled me here, and I'm indebted to my friend Jantar for pointing it out, was the story of one protest in Lafayette Square, Washington, DC, which came unstuck when the protesters, belatedly, discovered that they needed a permit to dump teabags.

So much for the spirit of civil unrest.

Another protest in the city, reportedly, was nixed by the Secret Service, despite having been given the OK by the cops. (If I were the local plod, I'd be writing some extremely sarcastic letters to the Washington Post on that subject.)

It seems to me that nobody has their heart in this "protest". Where are the people who are willing to get arrested, even go to jail, for their beliefs? Even that tree-hugging pansy Thoreau did that much. But then, Thoreau honestly believed that he was opposing an unjust state. These guys aren't even trying, because they don't believe in what they're doing. They're not desperate, they're not even angry, they're just being played by politicians.