Here's My Cuppa Tea

I first visited Plimoth Plantation on a second grade field trip. I don’t remember much from that autumn excursion except that I bought a book of postcards in the gift shop and a random comment of a fellow classmate. I don’t know if it was the answer to or the asking of a question. But he supposed the Mayflower was the ship where they threw the coffee overboard. Even as a seven year old, I was smug enough to know he had the wrong filtered beverage. I think the interpreter claimed no recognition of coffee and some startled dismay that anyone would throw away tea. But, still, nearly thirty years later, I got to give the kid some credit. We were seven afterall.

I’ve spent enough time with my head in history for my gorge to rise whenever I hear some academic claim religious testimony to fact. History is gossip. A retelling of what happened by one side of the story. Sometimes we get both sides. And sometimes we get the whitewashed version. And sometimes, the gossip turns into a telephone game so it leads to someone thinking they hurled coffee over the Mayflower to protest the British.

Okay. It’s still amusing. Until we start using hot beverages (that I like to drink by the way) as a denomination for a sensible political argument.

Now I confess. I’m a little less intimately acquainted with our American Revolution. I got a bit of a wake up call to that fact when I started watching HBO’s John Adams two summers ago (good movie – watch it – unless small pox sores make you gag). It painted a less glorious picture of Sam Adams. It made some of these acts of revolution like the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party look… well, a little like the mob idiocy of their descended Red Sox fanatics. It wasn’t a calculated attempt to prove tyranny. It was a malicious, thoughtless CRUEL plot of terrorism.

So maybe the decision of this political ‘movement’ to name themselves after what a bunch of drunken white men did one night (masquerading as American Indians because they were so proud of their stand to take claim for it) isn’t really as stupid as I like to think it is.

This isn’t about Republicans. Because… even though I loathe the fact that anyone can stand by these tea party people… I respect people who disagree with my politics. I DO NOT respect and never will tolerate a mob of people who thinks politics is a forum for racism, homophobia, carrying a gun to display freedom (seriously, WTF is THAT about?), or deciding that any policy with which they disagree is an act akin to Hitler. That there proves again that these freedom loving jingoistic people need to crack open a history book. And just for the elucidation, the teabaggers can do that. Because Obama ISN’T Hitler holding book burning parties.

Tomorrow the Massachusetts Tea Party is descending on Boston Common. I imagine Sarah Palin is going to corrupt our Boston history to make her speech radiate with go get ‘em, freedom lovin, white pride. I’m not going to deny her or her believers the right to believe that interpretation of history. But it isn’t the only way to see that history. Maybe it is right to some people. To me IT IS MOST ABSOLUTELY AND ASSUREDLY NOT.

On one of my many historic ventures in London, I visited the National Army Museum. It has display after display of the history of the British army. I looked forward with anticipation to the part of the American Revolution. Um… yeah, a relatively small display wedged between something about diseases in the Caribbean and the HUGE exhibit on India. Not that big a deal. Maybe they underscore it because it was really an act of negligence that caused them to lose (karma for Agincourt no doubt). Or maybe they had, well, India. I don’t know. 

I don’t know if it was then or at some other point that my literary brain made the connection that these Red Coats we were told were so awful in elementary school were the Captain Wentworths and Mr. Wickhams of Jane Austen. Yeah, all that British oppression that we can’t get away from on Sunday nights when Masterpiece Theater makes our inner girliness swoon for a 19th century Brit in uniform.

What’s your point, Jess?

Anyone can use the past to validate their political argument. It’s a great shield these days to masquerade intolerance. Oooh, let’s celebrate the Confederacy. The Confederacy that existed to preserve the enslavement of an entire RACE of people.

Yeah… before we start chanting the praises and inspiration of our founding fathers, their beliefs, their ‘values,’ and then name ourselves by their acts of madness… let’s stop and think about what that really means.

Well… I suppose, that presumes that a group naming themselves after a sexual act… really thinks.