1984 - The Tea Party

In a way, the world-view of the Party imposed itself most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality, because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening.
~ from 1984 by George Orwell ~

More than one commentator has noted the irony of the modern day Tea Party in relation to the historical event from which the name was derived. The main issue for those who participated in the Boston Tea Party (circa 1773) was the passage of the Tea Act by the British Parliament. The colonists declared that the tax imposed represented a case of taxation without representation.

The modern day Tea Party has taken this historical event and garbled the underlying message. They have turned no taxation without representation into no new taxation. Period.

Why do these common folks scream, "No new taxes?" Because the well-to-do who provide the funding for the Tea Party have convinced them that taxes -- with representation, by the way -- represent bad policy.

What is lost on many of the average people in today's Tea Party is that some of the colonists who participated in the Boston Tea Party later become leading members of America's new government and that government levied taxes.

Taxes represent part of the lifeblood of any country. This money is used to build and maintain needed infrastructure. Without it, a nation slowly will implode. It will crumble under the people's feet. But this salient fact is lost on most members of this reactionary group. They simply seem incapable of comprehending that many of the services that each of them depends on will be compromised severely if the government doesn't have the requisite revenue to fund them.

This series of posts based on George Orwell's novel, 1984, will be rather avant-garde. My focus will not be to explain Orwell's premises or what HE meant -- it is more about what his prose stirs in me, often in relation to the way I view the world today. Some of my observations may fall in line with Orwell's intent, but others will go off in a wholly different direction. To read my intro to this series, go here.