FYI: Tea Brewing

I realize that this will probably be of no interest to anyone else, but I found it mildly amusing.

Someone was claiming that the “teabaggers” were going back to the founding principles of the United States. This is probably an attempt to tie what they are doing to what the tea smugglers and small business people in Boston did in the harbor.

As I pointed out earlier, the “teabaggers” are on the side of the Crown when it comes to taxes, because the Boston Tea Party was a protest against a tax cut for the East India Company, which allowed them to sell tea at “low prices everyday”.

The other thing was their fixation with teabags. The teabag was invented rather by accident by a tea merchant during the first decade of the 20^th century, when he shipped people samples of his wares in little silk bags. The paper teabag wasn’t actually introduced until the mid-1940s. A concept that is barely a century old hardly qualifies as going back to the founding of the nation.

They could call themselves the “tea strainers”, as tea infusers, like the tea ball, were just being introduced at the end of the 18^th century, and were unlikely to have been very common in the Colonies. There is a lot to recommend “strainers”, as they are certainly straining to display they have any relevance in the current political climate. Strainers is certainly easier to spell than infusers, and, in the interest of saving keyboards and screens, they really should stay away from the tea ball.

They might consider an alliance with the Anarchists, as that is the only movement with whom they have any common ground. The underlying problem is that to be a successful movement you really have to be for something. It is certainly apparent that they aren’t for reading American history, or much of anything else.