Monday, August 2, 2010

Tea Partiers Visit Colonial Williamsburg

Bless those first-person interpreters. I did my share of first-person impressions in my reenacting days, and I can only imagine how annoying it must be to give 18th-century responses to visitors who are more interested in 21st-century politics than in 18th-century history.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, my. I know a number of the interpreters who work in CW, and I'm quite sure that these visitors made for some of their more trying work-days.

How much the Tea Party folk must enjoy visiting colonial VA, where all decisions were made by a wealthy, white, Protestant, slave-owning, male upper-class gentry. Them were the good ol' days....

Shadow Boxer said...

I LOVE that the Washington actor gave historically accurate responses, and I really hope they actually HEARD what he said.

Andy Hall said...

Coming from a background of living/dealing with Lost Causers and the Civil War, I can tell you that this is entirely predictable. Can't talk long to a hard-core Southern heritage-type person about ostensibly historical matters before the conversation devolves into one about current politics/culture wars. The last face-to-face conversation I had with someone about a particularly contentious issue of Civil War historiography, it only took about 45 seconds before my interlocutor tossed out the word "Obamacare." For a lot of folks, historical events and personages are nothing more than a convenient proxy to justify their own views of present-day politics.