July 5th Canton Tea Party 2

It's taking longer to get caught up than we anticipated, so I Hate Canton will make a couple sweeping observations (in separate blogs) and then get back to the day-to-day humdrum that is Canton.

Sunday, July 5 marked Canton's second "Tea Party" Depending on who's talking, it was a resounding success (1000 people crowded in and around the downtown "Kresge lot") or a resounding failure (a few hundred crowded in and around the downtown "Kresge lot"). The Beacon Journal has better coverage, btw.

What actually happened at the "Kresge lot" was not exactly "revolutionary." A bunch of people carrying signs and dim-witted wannabe politicos pimping themselves out as tax cutters, something that is (small c)onstitutionally impossible for them, as members of the professional lying class, to be. Innocent-minded Canton teabaggers apparently didn't boo their speakers as they did in Texas and South Carolina. When's the next tea party?

Judging from pictures we've seen, innocence carried over to signbytes: "Socialism Kills Creativity, Productivity, and Freedom." The over 200-year- old American individualist socialist tradition was anti-government, mutuialist, and self-reliant. It posited that socialism would separate "man" from state through voluntary association; thus, giving time and energy for creativity, productivity, and freedom for those who refused to bow to flag and boss; their labor and fruits thereof, shared amongst them.

These historical socialists were a frightfully unmaterial lot. Think Brook Farm, Oneida (below right) New Harmony, the Rappites, the Shakers, the Moravians, The Christian Commonwealth of Georgia, Amana, Ephrata, Nashoba. Ohio was home to dozens of religious and secular socialist experiments including Kendal (Massillon), Marlborough Association (Alliance) and nearby Zoar and Gnattenhuten, (both in Tusc. County), Teutonia and Spirit Fruit Society ( both in Columbiana County) and the early Mormon community in Kirtland.

If Marx and those damned French hadn't politicized and regimented socialism we could now be spending our time sipping lemonade on the porch, reading Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emerson, drawing pastels, and practicing civil discourse, instead of carping on the pages of the Rep.

I Hate Canton, after deep contemplation, has concluded, though, that neither capitalism nor socialism is fertile soil for creativity, productivity and freedom. Both are anomalies. In the words of that old commie, Bertholt Brecht, "The world is poor and man's a shit/And that is all there is to it!"

I Hate Canton is amused at the number of locals who still don't understand why the term "teabagging" emits guffaws from the rest of us.

Since this is a family friendly blog, go wiki to see what real teabagging is. Frankly, we prefer the Whiskey Rebellion.