A friend from Australia writes:
So Lawrence, in a nutshell, what’s this Tea Party all about. Who’s hosting it? What tea are they serving? Plastic cups or ceramic?
I reply to her:
Sam, the tea party is made up of people who like tea. Very patriotic, country loving people who like tea. In fact, they love tea. They love tea very much. And they are upset, because there is a rumor going around that President Obama doesn’t like tea. The media has tried to get all the facts, as it always does. They’ve asked the White House if President Obama likes tea. Unfortunately, that information is classified - it is a matter of national security. You need to be a high ranking officer in the CIA before you are allowed to know. Obviously, the enemies of the USA could use the information against us if it was well know. For instance, what if Obama was crazy about Earl Grey? Then the Earl Grey producing nations would know that they could blackmail him, by threatening to cut off all exports to the USA. That would be bad. So the information needs to be classified. And this leads to rumors. Anyway, the tea party is made of a very broad coalition that includes people who like Earl Grey, and people who like Darjeeling, and also people who like green tea, and even people who like white tea. As I said, it is a very broad coalition. They are convinced that Obama is secretly a tea hater, so they are determined to throw him out of power and replace him with someone more tea loving. That is the tea party.
Later she wrote:
Wow, sounds like some people take their tea with a dash of very serious. Is it fair to say some tense times are brewing? Or is that just a silly pun?
I replied:
Sam, indeed, tense is brewing. Also ten-sing, from the province of Guodong. But, see, that is the problem. We’ve imported so much ten-sing from China that now we are in debt. The economy has been destroyed by reckless tea drinkers who bought huge amounts of tea on credit, and were unable to pay it back. It’s given tea a black eye, so to speak. People have forgotten the noble purity of tea, its health benefits, its soothing calm. Thankfully, the Tea Party is here to restore tea’s lost honor. The Tea Party wants to go back to a simpler time, a time of innocence, a time when things were in their proper order, back when men were real men, and women were real women, and China was extremely poor and could be exploited without anyone having to think about what the Chinese themselves wanted. It was a beautiful era, now tragically lost. I should note, some people are under the mistaken impression that the Tea Party is made up of a bunch racist, war-mongering, fear mongering, power hungry, pro-torture, anti-civil-rights, homophobic, xenophobic, authoritarian, pseudo fascists who will stop at nothing to subvert democracy and put the US on a permanent war footing, the better to overlook domestic social injustice by focusing the public’s attention on overseas enemies. But no, its really about the tea. Its really all about restoring the lost honor of tea.
