Red State Rag

My state, Tennessee, has the fourth most regressive tax structure in America. That's the report of the 2009 edition of Who Pays, the annual analysis by the Washington-based Institute on Taxation and Ecomonic Policy of the distribution of state and local taxes across income groups in different states.

The poorest 20 percent of people in Tennessee, those families making less than $17,000 a year, paid 11.7 percent of their income to state and local taxes, compared to 3.1 percent of income paid by the richest 1 percent of families in the state—families making $414,000 or more a year. This means that the share paid by people making less than $17,000 was nearly four times greater that that paid by people making more than $414,000. In Tennessee the middle 60 percent of the population paid 7.6 percent of income in state and local taxes, more than twice the rate paid by the richest of the Tennessee rich.

As you may have guessed from these numbers, there is no income tax, progressive or otherwise, in Tennessee. Sales taxes make up most, about 70 percent, of total revenues. The state sales tax on food is 5.5 percent; obviously, such necessities are going to take a much bigger bite out of a $17,000 household budget than a $414,000 one.

Clearly this is obscene.

The fair thing to do would be to lower the sales tax, drop the tax on food, and add a progressive state income tax. During the 25 years I’ve lived here, there has been an almost continuous argument over doing just that. Generally the argument doesn’t get too far beyond the word TAX. At that point we are immediately get in tea party territory—we’re angry, we’re not going to take it anymore, don’t tread on me with your big government European socialism—and the discussion is over.

Of course, what this tea party amounts to is 80 percent of the population shoveling their early retirement and their kids’ college education and the vacation in Florida and their daily bread into the harbor, while a tiny group of people making more $414,000 stand on the dock and laugh at them.

If it were just the bottom 20 percent of the population getting screwed here, it would be easier to understand. As we’ve seen in the health care debate, compassion is not a significant political motivator. Nobody above the poverty level, middle class or rich, really cares about the people on the bottom who get shafted the most. We don’t care if they die with no health coverage, we don’t care if they pay taxes that could be going to food and rent. They are the unwashed “them” and they don’t vote and they don’t count.

More interesting is the 60 percent in the middle who are essentially shafting themselves. I live next door to people who get up every morning and start thinking of new ways to shoot themselves in the foot. More often than not these schemes involve shooting me in my feet as well. This is why I’m interested in how these people think.

But I would suggest that what goes on in these people’s brains should be just as important to those who don’t live next door to them. The past year has amply demonstrated that even when the red states lose an election, they can still call the tune for everybody in the country. The majority does not make policy; who makes policy is the guy who casts vote number 60 to cut off debate in the Senate. He can shoot you in the foot, whether you live in Knoxville or Boston or San Francisco.

So, yes, to protect yourself, you first build a majority on your side, and then you build a supermajority.

When was the last durable supermajority? Around 1936.

What do we do while we wait for 1936 to come around again? We make compromises. We sit down with our neighbors and try to talk them down from their ingrained hysteria. We listen to what they have to say. We make the best deal possible, we keep plugging, we do pretty much what Obama is doing right now.

Bob Dylan, Love, and Death in the Mountains

If you listen to your iPod on shuffle play, and you’re in the right meditative state, I swear it can speak to you like the voice of God. For one thing, these are your tunes. If they didn’t have something to say to you in the first place, you had no business putting them on your iPod.

OK, it’s a free country and you can do what you want. But I don’t put whole Beatles albums on my iPod, and there isn’t a Beatles album I don’t love. What I put on my iPod are just those tunes, by the Beatles or anyone else, that say something that matters so much to me that I don’t mind if I hear it over and over again.

The result is that I’ve got about 450 special tunes on my iPod, enough of them to give me the illusion in shuffle play of a random soundtrack, but each of them loaded with a personal message that—depending on what’s happening in my life on the particular day that the particular song jumps out at me from the mix—have the potential to crush me where I stand.

For example, when my friend David died of cancer I held my composure through the yearlong illness and final three months in the hospice and the entire memorial service. My breakdown moment didn’t come until I was sitting in the airport the day after the service waiting for the plane back home. I was listening to my iPod, and each time a song came on that I loved but had never talked to David about, I’d wonder if he had heard that one.

Talking with David’s family about him at dinner the night before, I realized that comparing notes on books, movies, and particularly music was what David and I did for a friendship. When Springsteen’s Born to Run album came out he sat me down, put it on the record player and made me listen. When I discovered he had not tuned into Little Steven’s Underground Garage radio show, I took him to the website and made him listen. Repeatedly, the music that mattered to him mattered to me, and vice versa.

So I’m running my iPod in the airport, counting the songs that I could have asked him if he’d heard had he been sitting beside me. As I listened I got up to walk down to the Starbucks for a snack and Dylan came out of the earbuds, singing an old song, one he didn’t write and David didn’t hear, an Appalachian murder song called Delia.

They knew something about grief management in the mountains back then, because there were plenty of sources of it, so many that sometimes you just let go and created your own. There was a whole class of songs—The Willow Garden, Knoxville Girl, Delia—about murder. First you’d kill your girlfriend; then you’d write a song about it.

In Delia, it’s not the singer who did the killing, it was some other rounder, and Delia took too many chances herself, for that matter. “Delia was a gambling girl,” the singer explains, “she gambled all around. Delia was a gambling girl, she laid her money down. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia’s dear mother took a trip out West. When she returned, little Delia had gone to rest. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia’s mother wept, Delia’s father mourned. Wouldn’t have been so bad if the poor girl died at home. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Cuddy’s looking high, Cuddy’s looking low. He shot poor Delia down with a cruel 44. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Man in Atlanta is trying to pass for white. Delia’s in the graveyard, boys, six feet out of sight. All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Judge says to Cuddy, ‘What’s this noise about?’ ‘All about them rounders, Judge, try to cut me out.

“Cuddy said to the judge, ‘What might be my fine?’ Judge says, ‘Poor boy, you’ve got 99.’ All the friends I ever had are gone.

“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You loved all them rounders, but you never did love me.

“Delia, oh Delia, how can it be? You wanted all them rounders, never had time for me.

“All the friends I ever had are gone.”

I didn’t make it to the Starbucks or even to the end of the song. I was sobbing after the second stanza.

Social Media Blues

What's so sociable about social media?

When we were all sitting staring blankly at TVs, at least we had to fight over the remote every half hour.

Now we sit alone at our computers by ourselves, virtually connected to the entire human population, electronically exchanging snippets of information with people we saw five minutes ago and who are now sitting in the next room at their computer, and with people we haven’t seen in 30 years who are sitting at their computer in Berlin, and while it may constitute a virtual community, it doesn’t add up to being a real community at all.

The little bits of ourselves that we put out there seem to fall into two categories. The bursts of virtual road rage that erupt on political blogs seem to rise out of the protected isolation that people feel at the computer in their room, similar to the protected isolation of the automobile on the road. Because you don’t have to look your correspondent directly in eye, you feel empowered to drop the constrictions of manners and empathy and just let out your inner beast.

The second category of “interaction” is even creepier. This is the avalanche of people at social sites inviting you to join their network of friends, people you sometimes have to scratch your head for 15 minutes to be able to even recall what they looked like, but when you finally pull them out of the memory bank you say, “Sure, I remember you, I’ll be your friend,” because what the hell, there’s a recession on, and the more people I can squeeze into the sinking boat of my career, the more chances are that maybe someone can save me from drowning. [ABSOLUTELY NECESSARY DISCLAIMER: I have real friends, relatives, business partners, and friendly acquaintances on social sites who have at various times enriched my life, spiritually as well as monetarily. But every single one of them I met and stay in contact with offline.]

If you blog, as I do, there’s an entire science of virtual community-building called SEO, search engine optimization. There are even electronic versions of Dear Abby (or Miss Lonelyhearts) who hand out the guidance to online social interaction you need to con people into actually looking at the words that you dump down the rabbit hole of the blogosphere.

Mostly it boils down to being as nice to as many of your fellow bloggers as possible—reading their blogs, commenting positively, making new friends on the site, generating whole streams of insincere comments, linking back and forth, electronically scratching each others’ back as furiously as possible until Google or some other machine out there picks up these signs of electronic interaction and starts sending more people your way for even more back scratching.

Eventually you end up with oodles of readers—or at least positive commenters—who are just as penniless and starved for real connection as you are, but are incapable of responding like real human beings, because they are locked into responding positively no matter what kind of crap you post. And there’s a whole bunch of these electronic soulless beings responding falsely to your blog, so you feel great. You’re writing for a virtual audience and having virtual interactions with a virtual community of friends.

The problem, of course, is that you spend real hours in this virtual community, until you have to face your real life with its real problems and real people and real bills, none of which can be tended or paid with all the virtual currency in the world.

So that’s my rant. And what am I going to do with it? I’m going to put it right on my blog, and share it to Facebook.

Fond Memories of the Kennedy Murder

The other day at church we had a meeting of what we call our "small group ministry" before the regular service. This is a kind of touchy-feeling session the first and third Sundays of each month of about eight people from the congregation designed to encourage bonding and community with the bodies that are sitting in the next pew in church.

In principle I approve of bonding and community, but in practice I'm not sure that I'm really built for it. For example, we recently filled out a list of questions meant to help reveal our inner selves to our neighbors--what was your childhood ambition, your wildest dream, your proudest moment, your first job, favorite movie, inspiration, soundtrack of your life, etc.

Sometimes I feel safer keeping my inner self tucked away in my innards--Dylan said it; "If my thought dreams could be seen, they'd probably put my head in a guillotine."

I was a bit quirky but safe enough on some of the questions; childhood ambition--"President of the United States," favorite movie--"Duck Soup," first job--"getting my act together." You can read the whole list a couple of blog entries ago, if you want.

But where I got into trouble was "fondest memory." What popped into other people's heads was the puppy they got for Christmas, playing baseball with their dad, their mother singing in the kitchen. What popped into mine was the Kennedy assassination.

I was asked by the group to explain. First of all, I told them, that event certainly cured me of my childhood ambition. And indeed, generally, what I like most in life, and about my baby-boomer childhood in particular, are those moments that pulled the rug out from under me, that upset the apple cart, that made me wake up and think.

Imagine you're 13 years old, you've watched 55 episodes of Leave It to Beaver in a row and in the first five minutes of the 56th episode, Wally walks into the living room, reaches under the sofa cushions, pulls out a shotgun, and blows Ward Cleaver's head off. Then your own father switches off the TV, turns to you and says, "Well, son, you saw what happened there. What do you make of that?"

At the time, few people gave a straight answer to that question. Mrs. Kennedy, refusing to change her bloody dress, was probably on the right track. "Let them to see what they've done," she said bitterly.

Generally though, what people made of the event (those who didn't break into applause at the news) was a bunch of bullshit. There were lame comparisons between Kennedy and Lincoln, the Warren Commission was convened to report that everything was OK, and we went on into Vietnam.

Certainly at 13 I was pretty much in tune with these reactions. But as the Sixties unfolded, and the bullshit kept hitting the fan and getting sprayed across the room like the President's brains, year after year, again and again, it became clearer and clearer that reality was a lot less like the programmed safety of the first 55 episodes of Leave It to Beaver and more like the totally unexpected, disturbing, and astonishing uncertainty of the 56th.

The home of the free and the land of the brave was a bit like what it was billed to be, but also a lot like a chaotic, violent banana republic. My childhood was pleasant, but my adulthood would be more complicated and difficult. Life was good, but suffering was inevitable.

Illusions are pleasant, but dull, dishonest, and dangerous. As a country we've spent the last four decades trying to put the lid on the Sixties. That's what the Reagan and Bush years were all about. Me, I remember the murder of John F. Kennedy, and I remember it fondly.

Afghan from Iowa

Hamid Kazai, following a finding by UN-backed investigators that nearly a million of the votes cast for him in the Afghan presidential election were fraudulent, has decided that he has not won a majority of the vote after all, and must stand for a run-off election November 7.

So what’s a million votes or so gone wrong? If the man wins in November, he’s the head of a legitimate government, right? And if there’s a legitimate government in Kabul, doesn’t that mean there’s something to fight for here, something a bit more substantial than shadows and dust to grab hold of and shape into an alternative to the Taliban?

Why are we even having this discussion? Having backed corrupt warlords in poverty-stricken Third World settings going back six decades to Chiang Kai-shek in China (remember Chiang Kai-shek? Syngman Rhee? Ngo Dinh Diem? Nguyen Van Thieu? Nguyen Kao Ky? Big Minh? Little Minh?), why should we think this approach is a winner?

Even if Karzai isn’t a hollow substitute for a truly national leader who’s been installed, certified, and propped up by piles of outside guns and money, that’s exactly what he looks like, particularly after he’s been caught stealing hundreds of thousands of votes and has his Western handlers force him to give the election back.

Essentially we’ve got this guy saying, “Oops, I guess that was a sleazy, brazen power grab. Now I’ll run again, this time not as Al Capone, but as George Washington.”

And this is the rock we’re going to build a strategy around? Maybe Afghanistan will never be a real country. Maybe General McChrystal is just looking for a guaranteed 30-year gig. Maybe al-Qaeda isn’t even in Afghanistan.

Definitely the Taliban are crazy, vicious, fundamentalist authoritarians, but they’re the local boys, and at this point, Pashtun or not, Karzai might as well be the candidate from Iowa.

Questionnaire

2006 American Express ad series My Life My Card: 13 standard questions to provoke reflection & expression

my name: John Yates

childhood ambition: President of the United States

fondest memory: Kennedy assassination—cured me of my childhood ambition, as well as a host of other fantasies

soundtrack: Beatles’ Second Album

retreat: safer than attack

wildest dream: Splish-Splash by Bobby Darin

biggest challenge: self-satisfaction

alarm clock: nothing you can do that can’t be done; the clock tells whether it gets done before the alarm sounds

perfect day: today

first job: getting my act together

indulgence: not getting my act together

last purchase: venti Earl Grey tea with two Splendas

favorite movie: Duck Soup

inspiration: Groucho Marx

my life: will end

The New Yippies

“The Democrats and their international leftist allies want America made subservient to the agenda of global redistribution and control. And truly patriotic Americans like you and our Republican Party are the only thing standing in their way.”

Jesus, who wrote this stuff? It’s from a fundraising letter attributed to Michael S. Steele, chairman of the Republican National Committee, and sent out with his signature immediately following the announcement that Barack Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize, but I’ve heard Steele interviewed and am certain he’s incapable of producing language this maniacally grandiose and paranoid.

Pronouncements like this come out of the mouths of melodramatic strongmen haranguing the crowd from a balcony in a banana republic; Steele in the interview I heard sounded more like a petty bureaucrat.

I haven’t heard material like this since I my kids and I used to watch Pinky and the Brain, the latter a cartoon mouse with an enormous cranium and a dream of taking over the world. The style is not quite Joe McCarthy; the tail-gunner from Wisconsin had a more working-class, thuggish feel to his rants. Nixon was as paranoid in his style, but more personal; he wasn’t as obsessed with the international plot for global control as he was with the international plot to get Dick Nixon.

No, I think whoever wrote this was channeling Terry Southern, the genius who co-wrote Dr. Strangelove. This is Colonel Jack D. Ripper, barricaded in his office, clutching his machine gun, chomping on his cigar and laying out with utter conviction the Communist conspiracy to drain our precious bodily fluids. What the hell is “global redistribution and control” anyway? What do the international leftists want to redistribute and control? Our wealth? Our minds? Our guns? Our semen?

All of the above, or none of the above, it doesn’t matter. What matters is the feeling, the fear, the anger. We want people to give money to stop the fear. This material is florid, desperate, and interesting, I suppose, because it’s so emotional.

So was Jonestown. I don’t know about you, but this new, cultish Republican Party makes me nervous. These intense lunatics are certainly more fun to watch than Eisenhower or John Foster Dulles, but I really was more comfortable with the Republicans when they resembled the board of directors of a bank more than they did the Yippies.