teabaggers

the teabaggers were out yesterday, on the corner of El Camino and My Street. They had their idiotic signs, still shiny and legible from April, and a very shrill woman with a megaphone, shouting such winning slogans as:
"Down with the British Empire! Down with the Obama empire!"
"Honk for freedom!"
"Capitalism is good!"

I've given "honk for freedom" nearly a day to reveal its subtle nuance to me, but I guess I'm just too dense to get it. The original members of the Boston Tea Party were ready to die for freedom; all that the modern day equivalent-hopefuls ask of us is to honk. I don't see how honking bolsters our freedom, but then again, I wasn't in a car at the time so perhaps I lacked some contextual framework for getting it.

I came across an article today about the tebaggers, and it struck me with some sadness: dozens, hundreds (if we make it that far), or thousands (fat chance) of years in the future, when schoolkids are learning about Early America, and they use the FutureGoogle to look up "Tea Party", what a tragedy it will be if the insipid, ineffective, ridiculous 2009 version obscures references to the one that helped birth our nation and give my modern-day whinging brethren the freedom to spout their nonsense on my street corner.