On teabagging and the Tea Party

I’m a liberal, and I don’t have much regard for the Tea Party. Anyone who puts some effort into making a protest sign about “torte reform” or “tyrrany”  for a congresswoman’s viewing does not win any respect from me. I think Matt Taibbi analyzed the movement in this devastating article in Rolling Stone much better than I can do here; what I would like to comment upon is the characterization of Tea Party members as “teabaggers.”

For the time being, let’s leave aside the inconvenient fact that colonists in Boston, who supposedly are the inspiration for the Tea Party movement, brewed their tea using loose leaves (tea bags weren’t invented until the early 20^th century). That doesn’t stop Tea Party members from dressing up in colonial garb and stapling tea bags to their hats. What I object to is applying a slang term for a sexual practice, teabagging, to Tea Party members. Why should the act of having one’s nuts sucked be equated with someone who looks as if Paul Revere time-traveled to the 21^st century, materialized in the middle of a Lipton Tea company warehouse and angrily emerged from the building with tea bags dangling from his tri-cornered hat?

Suppose that Apple sponsored a prestigious event where all of the techies who worship Steve Jobs showed up en masse, inflating balloons adorned with Jobs’s visage and blowing soap bubbles in some kind of hippy-dippy celebration that Apple is a special company. It wouldn’t be long before some Windows- or Linux-loving fanatic blogs about the event and derisively calls the bubble and balloon inflaters “Blow Jobs Lovers.” Their Apple-hating friends would then link to that blog post, repost it on their blogs, share it on Facebook, and tweet about it, spreading the double entendre far and wide.

Now, “Blow Jobs Lovers” may sound like a put-down, but when you really think about it, that’s not an insult at all, is it? Any man will heartily enjoy a well administered blow job. Don’t believe me? Next time you see a man, kneel before his groin, politely but firmly inform him, “I want to blow you,” and observe his reaction. If you can show me a guy who doesn’t love a pair of lips gently engulfing his glans and sliding up and down his willie, I’ll have you arrested for desecrating a corpse, you sick bastard.

Which brings me back to the left-wing slur of “teabaggers” in reference to members of the Tea Party. I first came across the slang term “teabag” during an episode of the Daily Show in which Jon Stewart referred to someone “teabagging a hooker.” A quick visit to urbandictionary.com defined the word properly, although I more or less guessed its meaning from the context. Jon Stewart’s reference was a year or two before the first Tea Party rally was ever convened.¹

As I perused the letters to the editor column in the Dec. 1 San Diego Citybeat—the usual epistolary kvetching against mundane trivialities such as a story describing a City Heights nursery as a “ghetto garden store” (side-by-side with a letter from the owner of that nursery complimenting the reporter for her wonderful coverage), or a chastising missive on the burning social issue of overlooking Lou Curtiss’s Folk Art Records store  in their “Best of San Diego” issue–my sophisticated, trap-like intellect was drawn to the following genuinely serious complaint with an irresistible compulsion not unlike that of an egg-laden housefly to a steaming, soft swirl of dog poop:

‘Grow up,’ liberals

About Rick Chiszar’s letter to the editor in the Nov. 17 issue: Isn’t it time that you took an equally hard stand against folks calling Tea Party supporters “teabaggers”? This is a thinly disguised homosexual reference. I am a conservative-minded citizen, a veteran and a regular reader of CityBeat. I take great offense at this reference.

Let me put it to you like this: If I sent in a letter that said Nancy Pelosi’s policies are “gay,” I would expect to be blasted by your more liberal readers, assuming it was even published.

Libs, grow up. The majority of the electorate is fed up with both Republicans and Democrats. But, that does not give you license to hurl such thinly veiled insults. Right-wing or left-wing does not matter. The American eagle needs both wings to fly.

Bill Purcell, City Heights

I immediately hammered out a reply to Citybeat, but it took me a while to actually email it to them, because my keyboard was rendered useless—have you ever tried typing with a claw hammer? I still can’t find my right-curly-bracket key. (Next time, I’ll definitely use a tack hammer).

My letter was published in the Jan. 5 issue of Citybeat.  I post it below, so that, like Mr. Purcell’s bald eagle, it may soar over the heads of America’s ignorant masses and drop its persuasive rhetoric, like that grand, noble bird’s scat, on their unenlightened heads:

From: Christian Hertzog
To: editor@sdcitybeat.com
Date: Fri, Dec 3, 2010 at 12:22 PM
Subject: On the Tea Party and teabagging

Dear Citybeat,

Bill Purcell wrote an angry letter published in your Dec. 1 issue, in which he was upset that Tea Party members are often referred to as “teabaggers” by liberals. The source of his misplaced rage (the Tea Party really excels in misdirected anger, doesn’t it?) was his ignorant belief that “teabagging” is a reference to homosexual conduct.

Mr. Purcell, teabagging is practiced by men of all sexual preferences. I too object to the use of the term to describe Tea Party members, because associating an act of heavenly pleasure with an unorganized movement of illiterate, racist, fearmongers cheapens teabagging. Unlike calling someone a “cocksucker”–a person who derives little or no physical pleasure while gratifying the desires of another–a teabagger is the recipient of ecstatic stimulation. If anyone is degraded in the transaction, it is the person–male or female–whose oral cavity serves as a testicular jacuzzi (the “teabaggee”).

So yes, let’s stop calling Tea Party members “teabaggers.” It may discourage people from teabagging.

And Mr. Purcell, please don’t limit teabagging to the exclusive bliss of homosexuals. Any hetero/homo/bi/trans-sexual male can enjoy it, provided they have a scrotum and at least one ball.

Sincerely,

Christian Hertzog

1. Post update: “Teabagging” in the sexual sense of the word goes back at least to 2004, where it is referenced in Jon Stewart’s book, America (The Book) on p. 115, where it is the punchline for a sidebar joke asking potential politicians:

Which of these images should you not include in your campaign ad?

• Waving American flag
• Amber waves of grain
• Your attractive but non-threatening wife and children
• You teabagging a hooker