Tea Party: “OH pleasant exercise of hope and joy!”

On the Students for a Free Economy blog today, the Mackinac Center’s James Hohman quoted a passage on the Protestant Reformation from Jacques Barzun’s From Dawn to Decadence, where he enumerates common characteristics of the first phase of a Revolution.  

 

“First, a piece of news about something said or done travels quickly, more so than usual, because it is uniquely apt; it fits ahalf-conscious mood or caps a situation: a monk questions indulgences, and he does it not just out of the blue–they are being sold again on a large scale. The fact and the challenger’s name generate rumor, exaggeration, misunderstanding, falsehood. People ask each other what is true and what it means. The atmosphere becomes electric, the sense of time changes, grows rapid; a vague future seems nearer.”

 

It’s overstating things, but that does capture the feeling I sensed at the Lansing Tea Party (5,000) and later at the Midland one (500). 

 

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Now if I were to go really over the top in overstating things I could quote an older passage about another revolution, but even so it too conveys a sense of what it felt like there today: 

    

“OH! pleasant exercise of hope and joy!
For mighty were the auxiliars which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.  

But to be young was very heaven!”

         Wordsworth