READING THE TEA LEAVES

I think it will soon be time for the great all-wet national teabag to come out of the cup and go into the garbage.


The craze will persist for a time, but it can't withstand the inevitable discouragement that is in store for it. "The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country." Or rather of their inflated egos.


We have witnessed some teabag candidacies already in this election year, where they have injected their absolutism and sourness into primary races and have lost. There was Debra Medina running for governor of Texas, for example; for a little while she looked like a real threat to get into a GOP runoff. But she said some screwy things and lost ground. Other baggers down the Texas ballot lost out, as well.


A little more losing - and it will occur - and the baggers will realize that starting a revolution is no tea party after all and that most people don't find them inspiring or noble or even palatable. Then it's over and they revert to their accustomed nonpolitical living and their impotent bitching about their moderate taxation and our nonexistent socialism.


These phony rebels are the rightist counterpart of the leftist ones I remember from my youth: the student militants who soared beyond the healthy democratic-radical Port Huron Statement to form wild groups like the Weatherman faction of Students for a Democratic Society and the Symbionese Liberation Army, or to occupy buildings on campuses and riot in the streets.


Their revolution imploded because of a government crackdown plus Nixon's Vietnamization policy which saved many young men from the prospect of fighting in a war they didn't believe in, a prospect that had radicalized them and made them feel they had nothing to lose by going for broke. (I wonder how many of them have become teabaggers?)


Likewise, the teabag contingent doesn't have what it takes to persist. They are not made of the stern stuff of real revolutionaries and, like the kids of the '60s and '70s, are selfish and adolescent and given to acting out. Right now they have intoxicated themselves with the notion that they and their cause are invincible. But you watch.


A friend cautions me that people thought the Black Panthers would fade quickly, too. Not that the Panthers were around for all that long, but they had real grievances and were reminded of them whenever they looked around. No teabagger has to live in ghetto conditions or is denied a job or a business loan because of race.

Also, the Black Panthers were young and were living in a moment when everything seemed possible, while the teabaggers are old and are living in a moment when nothing seems possible.

They're play patriots and unserious revolutionaries who are after angry fun; they can afford to go home and sulk in their mcmansions with their goals unmet.

I predict they will.