Jeesh! It's Not Armageddon; It's Only a Protest

Does anyone else find the teabaggers' incense over the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators the least bit ironic?

I mean here's a group that pilfered an American iconic moment - the largest antiestablishment demonstration in the colonies whose objective was to trash private property - to name their grouchy, mean-spirited claque, condemning an antiestablishment demonstration which for the most part hasn't trashed anything. Maybe that's their beef. If only Goldman Sachs had some tea the protestors could dump!

You do realize the original Tea Party participants weren't objecting to taxes as the cranky ones like to portray. They were objecting to the lack of representation, which given the 2010 election results, their namesakes now have in spades. In fact considering their favorability rating in recent polling is only around 25 percent versus the damage Republican legislators are doing in their name in Washington and state capitals, I'd say they're pretty much over represented.

But then what can you expect in the way of historical accuracy from a crowd, one of whose leaders, the self-proclaimed head of the tea party caucus in Congress, Michele Bachmann, believes the Revolutionary War began in Concord New Hampshire?

I haven't shown up at any Occupy demonstrations. I have enough trouble continuing to occupy my own body.

I did show up on the Washington Mall in 2007 with a group of pinko subversives to protest the Iraq war 40 years after an earlier pop-in to protest another insane war. As most of my fellow travelers weren't born in 1967 I was treated with some awe as "the ancient one."

It turned out after standing for several hours in the midst of a hundred thousand people 66-year-old Marty did not have the same physio-political ardor as 26-year-old Marty. When it finally came to actually marching around the Capitol, the ancient one adjourned to a local pub to take in the demonstration on the TV machine.

Could be that's why teabaggers are angry. They're old. Sure they can fill-up folding metal chairs at town hall meetings or ride on one of them fancy Koch brothers'-Freedom Works' busses to picket Congress before the return trip and on-board complimentary Early Bird buffet. But you've got to be young and a little nuts to camp out for weeks in a city park; young being the operable word since they've got nuts down pat.

In any case, let's stop portraying the OWSers as either evil, anti-American demons or idealistic saviors of democracy. Most simply are people fed-up with the effects of big corporate money on politics and the impact of buccaneer capitalism on their lives. And they are, after all, engaging in an American tradition that goes back to 1773. Neither side, nor especially the punditocracy, should make more of it than it is.