John Waters Talks of Teabagging

Last week, various good citizens of these United States participated in a mass public protest that, because of what as near as we can determine was a voluntary decision made by the organizers, went by the name "teabagging." Apparently this was supposed to call up memories of something that happened in Ye Olde Colonial Days, when some drunken vandals dressed as Indians made a mess in Boston Harbor using somebody else's shipment of tea. (Last week's events were given extensive coverage and promotion on Fox News, which as we all know is all about the destruction of personal property and consumer goods by domestic terrorists.) However, the protests also inspired a certain amount of giggle-puss coverage by media people who know that "teabagging" has another meaning, referring to a nonpolitical act that is also sometimes performed by men dressed as Indians, in some cases at the behest of people who've paid them extra for it. It remains unclear whether the people who organized the protests are genuinely unaware of this or if the whole thing was an elaborate bait and switch to get the on-air staff at MSNBC to admit that they knew about it and reveal to the viewing audience what perverts they are.



Of course, a lot of us first learned about "tagbagging"'s dirtier alternate meaning the same way we learned 75% of the filthy things we know, from watching John Waters movies. "Teabagging" surfaced in the sensitive 1998 coming-of-age story Pecker, a movie that we like to think the DeMille of Baltimore made just so that some hardy soul somewhere would approach the box office and say, "May I please have a ticket to see John Waters's Pecker?" (For God's sake, they call him that because he pecks at his food!) The very good people at Boing Boing initiated an e-mail exchange to confirm with Waters himself that it was he who popularized the term, or at least put it out there where the David Shusters of the world could add it to their vocabulary without risking winding up on some out-of-the-way websites of their own. In addition to Waters's reply, Boing Boing has the history-making clip, as well as a useful clip in which Mr. Waters shares his views on the practice of discouraging smoking in theaters.