No! ne'er was mingled such a draught In palace, hall, or arbor, As freemen brewed and tyrants quaffed That night in Boston Harbor! -Oliver Wendell Holmes, “A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party”
On December 16, 1773, men got dressed up as Indians and threw tea into Boston Harbor. It’s strange to think that such a weighty moment—a turning point in the birth of our nation—would sound so like a night of drunken, teenage revelry. But it was, I am told, for more than that: It was a matter of principle. Oliver Wendell Holmes, before reading his “A Ballad of the Boston Tea Party” proclaimed,
The tax on tea, which was considered so odious … was but a small matter, only twopence in the pound. But it involved a principle of taxation, to which the Colonies would not submit. Their objection was not to the amount, but the claim.
I should have learned that lesson, I suppose, but what stuck with me was a little different.
“I have never gotten over,” writes Garret Keizer in Harper’s, “the notion that the history of the United States begins with an act of masquerade.” Nor have I. I can’t get the image of George Hewes—a Boston shoemaker—out of my head. I see him putting on “the costume of an Indian, equipped with a small hatchet, which [he] and [his] associates denominated the tomahawk.” I see him carefully smearing his “face and hands with coal dust in the shop of a blacksmith.” I imagine Hewes, and I can’t help but think how much fun it must have been.
I have the same—if somewhat tempered thought—as a new generation of Tea Partiers dons its tricornes and picks up the fife and drum, as the masquerade that began with men in Mohawk costumes finds new life in the trappings of pre-Revolutionary Americana. Tea Partiers flock to historical Williamsburg, the Washington Post reports, to gain insight into the minds of the founders. They cheer as some pretend Patrick Henry cries, “Give me Liberty or give me death!” They pepper the ersatz George Washington with questions about what we ought to do now.
And the dance continues. Like a political Mandelbrot set, the Tea Party creates a fractal structure of masquerade. The billionaire Koch brothers’ groups, Americans for Prosperity and FreedomWorks, pour money into—and the ceaselessly self-satirizing, fair and balanced Fox News Network actively promotes—the “grassroots” Tea Party. A rouge and a rodeo clown, leaders of a leaderless movement, paint themselves part-prophets and part-Average Joes—all without, apparently, any sense of self-awareness or shame. That Glenn Beck would dream that he is akin to Martin Luther King, Jr. or that Sarah Palin would make herself up as representative of Real America stretches irony to its breaking point, but the show must go on.
Largely older and male, and overwhelmingly white and Republican, they are, in demographics and ideology, from the same set that wanted austerity in thirties, wrote paeans to the imagined Leave it to Beaver fifties, and hippie-punched their way though the sixties. “We the people,” their manifestos read, yet they speak for but a sliver of the America. ’Twas ever thus.
But the rage is real—real and raw and born of bereavement for a wished-for America, nursed with fear and perceived persecution. That rage brought them to the Washington Mall to hear Beck take up the mantle of the persecuted prophet. It brought them to the polls this last November to vote in the most reactionary, xenophobic, and mean-spirited congress in years. And, they imagine, it brought Hewes and his cohort to Boston Harbor that fateful night, dressed as Mohawks, wielding hatchets.
On September 29, 2010, firefighters watched a man’s home burn to the ground. Gene Cranick, who lived just outside South Fulton, Tennessee, forgot to pay the 75 dollar fee that the South Fulton fire department required for those living outside the city limits. Fireighters arrived at the scene, but not to put out the flames licking from the Cranicks’ house; they arrived to insure the fire didn’t spread to a neighbor’s house—a neighbor who did pay the fee. Cranick offered to pay anything, if they would just put out the fire. They refused, under strict orders to let the Cranick place burn—and burn it did.
Reportedly, some of the firemen became ill. Some wept. The Cranicks’ son, Timothy, was arrested after he attacked the Fulton fire chief.
Glenn Beck had no tears for the Cranicks, having spent them already, weeping for “the voiceless” in America, for those who feel alone, for his fear of the communist, Marxist, Maoist, Nazi president in the White House. For the Cranicks, Beck had a stern lesson. Behind Beck, as he lectured America about moral hazard and railed against the Cranicks’ attempt to “sponge” off his neighbors, was mounted a picture of Benjamin Franklin, beneath whose face was written, in bold letters, CHARITY.
The policy of the South Fulton Fire Department is that, if one lives outside the city limits, then in order to receive fire protection, one must pay a fee to cover the cost. Otherwise, they are receiving services for which they do not pay. They would be, to use Beck’s word, sponging off their neighbors. (It’s worth noting here that Gene Cranick offered on the spot to pay the fee, a fee that—as he told numerous news outlets—he paid in the past.) And it’s not an altogether uncommon policy: rural towns, without the population densities and tax bases of large cities, can’t afford to pay to extend their fire services to outlying areas—areas that don’t pay taxes. So the Cranick’s house burned.
One might think that another government entity might come into play here. Perhaps the county or state might extend the same protections to its rural citizens that it does to nearly all of us who expect that when we call 911, the men and women who come will do more than stand and watch. One might think that the just as we view charity—just as Ben Franklin and Glenn Beck view charity, apparently—as a noble trait among men, we might view charity in our governments as a good thing, too.
But no, we don’t—or at least the Tea Partiers don’t. If they have a unifying message, it would be that government is doing too much. Government, as Gorver Noquest put it out to be small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.” And long gone are the days that we might dispute that desire; now we spend most of our time bickering about the size of the bathtub. Too bad Cranick’s home couldn’t fit.
I called my parents a few nights after the Cranick’s home burned, and we talked about their plight. There was, in my father’s voice, a thin strand of pain, “People don’t care about the collective good anymore.” My father cried during the finale of M*A*S*H, my sister told me, and I remember once, as a child, watching a movie—I don’t remember what it was now—and being shocked to see tears in his eyes. That phone call hit me the same way. He told me about the cuts in Minnesota’s—my home state—budgets, that the homeless were dying of exposure, that their deaths were on all our hands. We the people, through our inaction, through our governmental representatives’ inaction, were causing the deaths of men in Minneapolis that night.
It’s hard to square the Cranick’s shell of a home or the exposure deaths of the most vulnerable in Minnesota with the idea that government does too much. Already, when our fellow citizens turn to government, government—the embodiment of we the people—as often as not, stands and watches. And so, when the Tea Partiers get together and dress up as revolutionaries, it’s hard to call that anything other than mere masquerade.
On February 14, 2011, thousands gathered in Wisconsin’s state capitol to stand up for the rights of their fellows. The America for which they were fighting—for which they still fight—is one of safety, security, and agency for its citizens. The America for which a Boston shoemaker struck a blow was one of self-determination for its people. And here’s the kicker: the America for which the Tea Partiers pine and hope is one and the same—safety, security, agency, and reasons to hope. But Glenn Beck called the Wisconsin protesters communist tools.
The greatest masquerade in which the Tea Parties dance has no pageantry—no revolutionary regalia, no drums and fifes. It is a dance so subtle, the dancers do its moves without knowing the tune. These are men and women, patriots and concerned citizens who have been taken in by wolves in sheep’s clothing. Beck and Palin, Bachmann and Walker, they play their populist song and all the while dismantle the very things that Americans—union “thugs” and Tea Partiers alike—want America to be.
I’ve learned my lesson, I think: the tea party had nothing to do with taxes; it was a masquerade.
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