History and Spike
Apr. 14th, 2009 12:17 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shipperxYou find Spike mentions in the oddest of places. Hee!
Tea doesn't get much respect in America. This historical snubbing will continue Wednesday, with protests across America meant to evoke the Boston Tea Party, a seminal event in the foundation of our county. How effective these protests will be is going to be open to interpretation, however.
But first, some sympathy for tea itself. Americans consume far more coffee than tea, and don't even realize that the reason they do so can be traced back to the Boston Tea Party itself. Tea is such a quintessentially English drink that during and after the Revolution, not drinking it was a simple political statement: "We're not British, we're Americans." Even today, tea is held to be somewhat suspect, rather feminine, and not as red-blooded American as drinking coffee. A quick observation of any Denny's in the country at breakfast will confirm the ratio of coffee drinkers to tea drinkers among today's Americans. If you don't believe that patriotic feelings get attached to food, then you must not remember "freedom fries" from a few years back. Such feelings sometimes get so ingrained in society that the reason behind them is lost in time. As happened with tea in America.
So tea's an easy target for a protest, once again. The fact that it has absolutely nothing to do with the protest itself is immaterial to the protestors. They mean to evoke a certain historical revolutionary glow to the event by their choice of scapegoat.
When you look closely at even the original event, tea wasn't even central to the debate back then, either. It was symbolic from the beginning, from both the British side and the American side. We all learn a very simplified version of this as schoolchildren, which could best be summed up as: "Americans were protesting higher British taxes on tea."
The reality is a lot more complicated, and is closer to the Main Street protests against big-box stores like WalMart coming to town. Because the law the rebels were actually protesting was a lower tax on tea. They were protesting lower prices for American tea consumers. It sounds pretty backwards to what we all were taught in Elementary School, and it is in a way. But it wasn't even really about the money -- for either side.
The British were preserving a monopoly on tea within Britain and the American Colonies for the British East India Company. They were doing so by a typical move of a monopoly -- undercutting the cost of competitors, in this case tea smuggled in by the Dutch and other European traders. The rest of Europe didn't have a high tea tax (at one point there was a 25 percent tariff on all tea imported into Britain), and so could sell to the Americans cheaper. Even in Britain, smuggling was rampant, which led to the British East India Company ending up with a huge inventory of very expensive tea that they couldn't sell in the British market because they were being undercut by their (black-market) competitors. They were approaching bankruptcy as a result.
So they appealed to the British government for what we would call a "bailout" today. The government responded by slashing the tea tax, and giving the company exemptions to send their tea to the colonies, so that it could be "dumped" on the market -- cheaper than even the smugglers could sell it. full article here
The Spike stuff came at the end of the article:
Full disclosure: I drank two cups of tea while writing this. Both were black, hair-on-your-chest teas, one from England and one from Ireland. I'm not aware of how much tax I paid on either one of these, sorry.]
[Research note: I couldn't find any way to work this in, but the best quote I came across while researching this was from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, where (both these characters are British) the irreverent Spike saves the meek librarian Giles from certain death; and then mocks him by saying: "Did your life pass before your eyes? Cuppa tea, cuppa tea, almost got shagged, cuppa tea?" As I said, it didn't really fit in the article, but I just had to mention it for the Buffy fans out there (who are legion).]
I have to admit that the quote I thought he was going to unearth was the one where Giles said Americans can't make tea. :)
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Date: 2009-04-14 06:03 pm (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2009-04-14 06:21 pm (UTC)just read a gothic romantic suspense by Anne Stuart. INTO THE FIRE. the book was dedicated to Spike. the hero was a peroxide posturing bad boy so it was an obvious homage.
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Date: 2009-04-15 02:42 am (UTC)And I'll have to check that out. I'm curious.
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