Remember ten years and two months ago?<\/p>\n
The world was waiting for the calendar to flip over to 2000; more importantly, we waited to see if the world’s computers would shut down, with drastic results (most of them didn’t).<\/p>\n
And as the rest of us celebrated the new Millennium, always on the periphery of things was a thin little film of nerdy, adenoidal pedants clucking away, their voices like Comic Store Guy in “The Simpsons”; “Er, helLO?\u00a0 There was <\/em>no Year Zero; the Millennium doesn’t begin until 2001″.\u00a0 These people – most of them frustrated wannabe scientists who worked at petty government jobs or as office temps – were largely and justly ignored.<\/p>\n The point?\u00a0 Keep your technicalities; there’s a larger point here.\u00a0 We’ celebrated the end of a thousand years of years beginning with “1” (and, for all of us in IT, the end of the biggest crash preventive maintenance job in IT history, so far).<\/p>\n The other point – the one I’m writing about today?\u00a0 Pedants who huff and phumpher about petty technicalities often miss the forest for the trees.<\/p>\n Such is Jeff Van Wychen at liberal think tank “MN2020”, who recycles the hottest non-story of April 2009<\/em> among the lefty clucking classes; he’s T fussing about the purported misuse of history by the \u201cTea Party\u201d Movement.<\/a><\/p>\n An image used by the modern tea party movement shows colonial patriots dressed as American Indians dumping tea off of ships into the Boston harbor in December of 1773.\u00a0 When it comes to selecting a signature event, today\u2019s \u201ctea partiers\u201d have chosen poorly.\u00a0 The tax protests of modern tea partiers have nothing to do with the Boston Tea Party of 1773.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Van Wychen – whose organization<\/a> exists<\/a> largely<\/a> to misappropriate<\/a> facts<\/a> for partisan<\/a> ends<\/a> – certainly has the textbook story of the Boston Tea Party<\/p>\n The impetus behind the Boston Tea Party was the Tea Act of 1773.\u00a0 In response to colonial outrage, Parliament repealed most of the taxes imposed through the Townshend Act of 1767.\u00a0 However, the hated tax on tea was left in place as a demonstration of Parliament\u2019s authority to tax the colonies.\u00a0 Irate colonists would have none of it.\u00a0 Tea laden ships were not allowed to land in New York and Philadelphia.\u00a0 In Boston, tea was taken from the ships and dumped overboard.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Which caused the good folks at “MA1820” to post handbills sniffing that they weren’t un<\/em>represented, since His Highness George III was charged by Almighty God to represent them.<\/p>\n Well, no, I’m not being especially facetious.\u00a0 We’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n The outrage of the colonists was not about the price that they were forced to pay for tea because of tax; in fact, the price of tea declined in the American colonies as a result of the Tea Act because the East India Company was allowed to directly export tea to the colonies rather than having to go through middlemen in London.\u00a0 The rage of the colonists was not about the amount of the tax; rather, they objected to the principle of any tax imposed upon them by government officials that they had no voice in choosing.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Modern tea partiers can make no such claim of \u201ctaxation without representation.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Maybe, maybe not.<\/p>\n Van Wychen and everyone who chants the “Tea Party is bad history!” meme are wrong for two reasons.<\/p>\n The first:\u00a0 When I accuse Jeff Van Wychen of being a “Wet Blanket” who “doesn’t have a leg to stand on”, and that my response to his point will “knock his socks off” and “drive him up the wall”?\u00a0 What do you see?<\/p>\n Someone reading that could, <\/em>in theory, read that and wonder if Mr. Van Wychen is an amputee made from soggy wool, and that the impact of my rhetoric will literally leave him barefoot and wedged up against the ceiling.\u00a0 But that someone would have had to have learned English from a 100 year old textbook in the jungles of Burma, because each of those terms has assumed different, non-literal meanings in American English.<\/p>\n So too with “Tea Party”.\u00a0 The Boston Tea Party was indeed a historical event – but the term Tea Party has had an idiomatic meaning, referring to any group of plucky underdogs taking a symbolic stance against big, distant, uncaring government.\u00a0 And until the Tea Party Movement made every leftist in America into a pointillistic historical pedant, even they understood it.\u00a0 And indeed, they do today – but the mission of left-leaning “think” tanks like MN2020 is to try to discredit the opposition.\u00a0 And so it goes.<\/p>\n But just for laughs, let’s hew to the literal, historical story of the Boston Tea Party.<\/p>\n Van Wychen:<\/p>\n At the federal level and in all 50 states, taxes are imposed by elected representatives.\u00a0 You might not have voted for the current officeholders, but you still had the opportunity to vote.\u00a0 Americans and Minnesotans today are taxed with representation.\u00a0 Thus, there is no connection between modern tax protesters and the patriots who dumped tea into the Boston harbor nearly twelve score years ago.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n This is reminiscent of Mr. Van Wychen’s colleague John Fitzgerald’s claim last summer that public schools were more accountable than charter schools, because public schools have elected boards.\u00a0 I read that claim, and then compared my own kids’ charter school – where the board responds to 200-odd parents, is mostly turned-over every year, and is the launching point for nobody’s <\/em>political career – with the Saint Paul School Board, which spends half a billion dollars a year, does a terrible job, and can only be gotten onto with the aid of the Teachers’ Union and the DFL and an awful lot of money.\u00a0 Am I “represented” on the Saint Paul School Board, to which I pay more and more taxes every year?\u00a0 In theory.\u00a0\u00a0 Am I better-represented there than on my charter’s board?\u00a0 Don’t be an idiot.<\/p>\n Oh, there is <\/em>an elected Saint Paul School Board.\u00a0 But as a political minority in a one-party town, the only vote that really mattered in the end was my protest vote – pulling my kids out of the Saint Paul Public Schools, forever.<\/p>\n Now, I’ve spoken at two Tea Parties.\u00a0 And the Tea Parties are really quite extraordinary events, gathering people from all political parties, and no <\/em>political party at all, together with one big thought in mind; get government back under control.<\/p>\n