In A Cocked Hat At The Teabaggers’ Ball
When I asked the two cops at the corner where the teabaggers were assembling, they collapsed in giggles. The demonstration was on the other side of City Hall park, but I’d have to walk around Centre Street. “They’ve squeezed them all together, so it’s easier,” said the officer. So off I went in search of these squeezed teabaggers. And when I found them, I was glad I’d left off the Obama button. The heck with courage. I was undercover.
There was a small stand set up at the south end of City Hall park, but I didn’t recognize any of the speakers. We were being told to move along, so there was a constant circulation of curious onlookers and clench-jawed demonstrators up and down both sides of Broadway. A few microwave trucks were parked on the other side of City Hall, but I didn’t see many newspeople, and no Giant Cableheads. The PA speakers blared “USA! USA!” and “We’re taking our country BACK!”
I was frankly a little freaked by the TMJ symptoms exhibited by the jolly baggers, but I covered it by lolloping up to them like a golden retriever and asking them if I could take their picture in a voice several octaves above usual.
No need to worry. This one practically vogued for me.
The roar of his greasepaint was nothing though, beside the ugly note in the roar of the crowd: the PA system picked it up and amplified it until it sounded like a Roman circus. But I noted something, as I walked away, up Broadway: these:
Emptiness. Space. I remember the demonstration against Proposition 8: packed shoulder-to-shoulder all the way up past City Hall. And here were the squeezed Teabaggers:
Yes, friends, on what, two days notice? we filled both sides of Broadway, both, with many times the number of squeezed teabaggers who shouted their nonsense on their ignoble mission today. And to a larger, gentler purpose, too. How pinched, how small, how very inelegant and convenience-food-centric, that these sons of tax liberty couldn’t even locate a replica crate of loose tea!
In 1766, in City Hall Park, the original Sons of Liberty set up a Liberty pole, to protest the Stamp Act. The Tories promptly tore it down. The Sons re-erected the Liberty pole, the Tories sawed it off.
A replica of the Liberty Pole stands in City Hall Park, unbeknownst to the sadly shrunken Teabaggers against taxation. On the way home, I found my friends, the two cops, still patiently guarding their corner, and I showed them pictures of the Teabaggers in their cocked hats, and the Liberty Pole, and they collapsed giggling again. There’s a lot of that going around.
Posted by Mrs. Polly on 04/15/09 at 08:51 PM • Permalink
Categories: Images • News • Politics • Bedwetters • Nutters • Skull Hampers •
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