My quest was easy to define. I wanted to know more about the Tea Party.
Hopefully, I could find a person locally who is affiliated with the organization and ask some questions and turn that into a column.
Easier imagined than accomplished.
That's because there is no Tea Party Party.
I thought there was. After weeks and months of hearing "Tea Party this" and "Tea Party that," I rushed to the conclusion that there was an actual Tea Party out there, with leaders and officers and PR people who would be more than happy to explain why the Democrat and Republican parties should be bulldozed off the face of the political landscape.
But when I went online to find a contact person, I struck out. I inserted the words "Tea" and "Party" in the search engine. I came up with plenty of Web sites dedicated to Tea Party spirit, Tea Party values, Tea Party patriotism, Tea Party activism. I found there have been plenty of tea parties — mostly to protest taxes.
But there is no organized political group called the Tea Party.
A woman named Darcy Van Orden finally set me straight. Darcy is a 30-year-old married mother of one who lives in Layton and works for a construction company by day.
By night, she is a political activist who isn't a member of any particular political party. Instead, she affiliates with a number of groups, such as the Davis County 9/12 Project, which is dedicated to studying the Constitution and working with local lawmakers to bring government back in line with basic constitutional principles.
She's happy to call herself a Tea Party patriot, but that's it.
"We're a grass-roots movement of ordinary citizens who are fed up with all the corruption and overspending in Washington and want to do something about it," said Darcy. "We're not affiliated with any political party, and we're nondenominational. We believe in states' rights and pursuing bills and action without our individual states.
"Like-minded citizen groups are springing up like this all over," she continued. "We are organizing but not in a third-party way. We're ordinary citizens who feel betrayed by the politicians we've voted for. We are not a party, although if all our efforts to work within the existing parties aren't successful, then I think down the road you can fully expect a third party will emerge out of all this."
No one person or group can be pointed to as the catalyst for this activism, Darcy explained. "There are a lot of Ron Paul supporters involved, and Glenn Beck inspired our 9/12 Project," she said. "But you can't point to just one person or thing."
So that's that. The Tea Party, or make that the non-Tea Party, is about as easy to define as Glenn Beck's popularity.
Then again, the original Tea Party isn't easy to explain, either.
The simple reason for the dumping of 342 chests of tea into Boston Harbor on Dec. 16, 1773, is reflected in the statement "No Taxation Without Representation," implying that the American colonists — at the time subject to British rule — were simply fed up with being taxed without having any say in the matter.
Technically that's correct, but the real outrage wasn't because there was a tax on imported tea — it was because the tax was too low. As a result, the tea coming in from England (by way of Asia) was undercutting the business of selling the Dutch tea the colonists were smuggling in and paying no tax on at all.
The irony is, if King George had placed a higher tax on English tea, there'd be no tea at the bottom of Boston Harbor.
Likewise, these modern Tea Party movement types aren't protesting taxation as much as they're protesting what they see as federal government interference. Their complaint is that the government isn't adhering to a Constitution whose very roots can be traced back to those original Tea Party protesters — who, by the way, weren't aligned with any actual political party, either.
That's the same Constitution, it's worth pointing out, that condemns the very kind of activity that went on during the original Tea Party.
Politics. It's always more complicated than you first think.
Lee Benson's column runs Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Please send e-mail to benson@desnews.com.