You might be a tea drinker

Has the Tea Party made tea drinking popular in America? Back in the day, us real Americans drank coffee and nothing but — at least until Juan Valdez smuggled an unintended ethnic note into the four part harmony.

Tea was so unpopular that Disney actually expurgated most of the snide British tea jokes in Mary Poppins — Uncle Albert's tea party on the ceiling (we call that manic-depressive these days), Marpop's lesson to the wee bairns about how to brew tea and "pour out," the flavor of East India Company cargoes adversely affected by Boston Harbor seawater, etc.

I like tea, myself. Especially idiosyncratic mixtures like Lipton's orange pekoe and pekoe cut black tea dust plus green tea plus English Breakfast plus Golden Yunnan^†. It's still trash, according to British ex-pat tea snobs in Hong Kong, but I like trash, sometimes. Including some of the "You might be a tea drinker" hillbillies from that last election. Yeah, the country's going to hell, but there's still tea.

Although, your average Kentucky tea ceremony is just other name for drinking the Kool-Aid, 'ey?

^†I will admit a certain predilection to Republic of Tea teas, although they use the racist and derogatory term "monkey picked" to describe some their catalog items. The "monkeys" in question are Asian women paid next to nil for the agriculture they support by wage, or possibly overt, slavery.