Costume Party

Yesterday was April 15 and the well-funded, well-orchestrated anti-tax people were out in force across the country, indulging in some 750 tea parties that harked backed to the days of the original Boston Tea Party.

Many of these folks were in Revolutionary War-era costumes, an attention to detail that obviously improves the verisimilitude of such events.

Unlike the original event in Boston, however, teabags abounded this year, since loose tea can be so inconvenient and messy. I’m happy for these teabag-wearers’ sake that in most places (Philadelphia was an exception) rain held off. There are, after all, few more uncomfortable things than having cold, wet teabags mar one’s period dress and stain the skin.

From one perspective you could view this as just one more special-interest group that needs to grow up.

But then, America is not so much a melting pot of special interests as much as it is an uncomfortable stew of them.

In any case, with assiduous coverage from Fox News (who else?) and anti-tax exhortations from right-wing cable TV and radio personalities, this is a movement that hopes to catch fire, abetted by the usual but increasingly hysterical anti-government, anti-tax vitriol.

What, exactly, is it about taxes that has these people so frothed? What programs, I’d like to ask them, would you be willing to give up that are funded by hated taxes?