A Candidate’s Progress (13): There I go, reading again.

I am struck by the juxtaposition in these passages from two books. Both prefigure war, one a literary treatment of 1990’s Belgrade just before NATO air strikes on Serbia, and the other taken from the pages of pre-Civil War history in the state of Missouri, circa 1861.

The italics are mine.

Out in St. Louis, we visit the Forty-Eighters — reviled as the “Damned Dutch” by the Missouri secessionists — refugees from the failed revolution against the monarchs of the German Confederation, who discovered in the slaveholders “exactly what they had come here to escape: a swaggering clique of landed oligarchs, boorish aristocrats obstructing the forces of modernity and progress.”
-- Adam Goodheart

Just because I don’t understand something, replied Marko, doesn’t mean that some dark evil force is behind it, a mysterious organization in collusion with the government, army, police or who knows what. Such things, he said, happen only in American movies, in which, by the way, the entire plot is reduced to the struggle of conspirators to strip free and honest American citizens of their right to information, to knowledge that supposedly belongs to them, if for no other reason than that they regularly pay their taxes …
-- David Albahari

It's fascinating that in America on the verge of a bloody nervous breakdown 150 years ago, immigrants handily identify the source of the problem, while more recently, in the fractious and tragic Balkans, an ordinary citizen offhandedly links contemporary American conspiracies not to conniving Byzantine orders of the Illuminati, but to minor irritations spawned by the tax revolt.

Accordingly, it transpires that Umberto Eco and Dan Brown have wasted the bulk of their writing careers. The modern American, in the midst of the Information Age, and yet not unlike Dan Coffey and systematically deprived of crucial information, responds in Pavlovian fashion by refusing to pay his property taxes. He is duly appeased and enfolded within the loving arms of the Pander Bears, and civil society sinks ever more quickly into an unfunded morass that tea baggers barely notice amid shopping trips to Wal-Mart.

It’s enough to make one wish for the halcyon days of genuine big-ticket issues: Civil Rights, Communism vs. Fascism, the social responsibilities of capitalism (are there any?) and whether or not the Yankees should be broken up now or later – anything rather than the institutionalized selfishness symbolized by the “neither taxation nor human progress” clique spewing intemperance within the city limits of New Albany.

Why is it that while I’m a taxpayer like all the rest, the dimensions of conspiracy do not reveal themselves to me? But what actually is clear to me is that the GOP’s historic property tax caps have so far resulted in my taxes, as well as those of my business, increasing. Meanwhile, it’s obvious that someone, somewhere, is being pandered to via commensurate tax decreases, since all levels of local government are strapped and reduced to begging for scraps from St. Daniels and the Clere Channel fluffers.

Given that so much as mentioning the Local Option Income Tax (LOIT) aloud has become tantamount locally confessing to atheism, animal abuse and book reading – or all three – the only truly heroic utterance I’ve heard to date on the 2011 primary campaign trail came from Suellen Wilkinson.

In essence, at last Friday’s IUS campaign discussion, she refused to duck and cover, openly referred to the taboo concept of LOIT, and brazenly noted that all options should be on the table for consideration when it comes to funding local government and supporting the concept of a civil society.

In doing so, Suellen did something exceedingly rare hereabouts: Not only did she refrain from pandering to taxpayers, but as a taxpayer, she refused to pander to herself. To quote John Gonder, it was “a profile in courage”, and I agree.

Whether any of it matters in the materialist world of today is anyone’s guess, but at least it won't be long until Elector Day. On Tuesday, March 3, Drink and vote early, and often.