Bore On The Fourth Of July

How dead is the Teabag Movement? Even a bought-and-paid-for hack like Roger el-Simon can't get it up for Bagism any more:

The Tea Party Movement has some promise, but it too looks backwards. Madison, Adams and Hamilton were clearly great men, but where are their modern equivalents? Surely we don't want to rely entirely on ideas honed in the Eighteenth Century, laudatory as many of them are. It’s good to be reminded of them, but it's also good to have a plan. I haven't heard one yet, just a lot of no - no to taxes, no to spending, no to socialized medicine. That's all fine as far as it goes, but it's not exactly inspiring.

That leaves inbred law perfesser Glenn Reynolds as the last man holding the teabag.

But disillusionment at his manufactured movement is just a part of Rog el's greater funk, which appears to have started at around the same time sales figures for Blackfisting Myself were released. Roger is really, really, really bummed, and it's all because America won't put out for him, no matter how much he begs:

Don't get me wrong - I love my country. And maybe it's because I love it so much that I am so depressed. Yes, I know it's always darkest before the dawn and all that. And I want to "look at the bright side," as my grandmother always advised. Still, these are dark times and it's hard to pretend otherwise.

I'm guessing Roger's Gran wasn't living in a mini-mansion off royalties and wingnut welfare. And that she was a lot more pleasant to be around than her fatuous mope of a grandson.

Fortunately, Rog has a solution to his malaise, one he lifted from the title of the shittiest Woody Allen film that Rog didn't write:

No, my suggestion is even more radical. We should junk the liberal and conservative orthodoxies that have divided - and blinded - us for so long and go back not to Eighteenth Century America, but Nineteenth, to the days of that most American of philosophies - pragmatism. "The pragmatists rejected all forms of absolutism and insisted that all principles be regarded as working hypotheses that must bear fruit in lived experience." Now there's a thought that might brighten even grumpy me on the Fourth of July.

That's the kind of philosophy we might expect from a man who believes that no one can tell he's bald if he never takes off his hat.