While working out at the local community gym thoughts began to coalesce about what I might write for this blog, associative threads formed and here it is. The most compelling is my dance to the death with the Arizona tax department and an audit. They are claiming, of course, I owe them money because I have not shown any profit in my writing. After five years I suppose I am to show a profit or I cannot claim on my return all the costs that come with writing. Consequently my writing is labeled more of a hobby than anything else. At first I almost caved, that is, pay them what I owed. On second thought I waited until I saw my accountant who advised that I challenge this because if I don’t they will come after me year after year for past monies and then the Feds will come in to put their grubby hands into my pockets as well. If need be, he would represent me. I had to advocate for myself, and I felt exhausted before I began.
So here I was having to defend that I am in writing to make a profit, that it was not a hobby, that I explain myself to the monolithic tax department, really a latent and manifest assault on my integrity, on my self. I am particularly peeved when I am asked to explain myself especially when I know I am innocent of the alleged lie, fault, crime, malfeasance or misdemeanor. I bit the bullet and did not become ironic nor sarcastic but simply in list form machined gunned out all the awards, 1099 Misc forms (royalties), books published, stories published to substantiate that I am an author seeking to make a profit. Of course, in this nation being an author without earning a profit or not thinking in this manner is viewed as simply ridiculous. Fuck you, America! I felt like the local Muslim who has to justify his existence, explain why other Muslims are malfeasant or not, all the rest of the McCarthy-like attributions Rep. King from New York is yapping about. Of course, he glosses smoothly over his advocacy of and connection with the Irish Republican Army years back. I almost feel like joining the Libyan rebel forces but seeing Jewish stars markered over posters of Hosni Mubarak’s face (Jew hatred to the nth degree) in the last revolt I will defer for now. (No reporter has commented on that.)
It was a quick step for me to consider how corporations rule this country, our two-percent of the population plutocrats who control congressmen (and this is not paranoia, reader), with their offshore tax shelters and teams of accountants who keep them free from taxes with financial murder year after year. I find it remarkable after all these years of living that the obvious basis for this country is still opaque to most of the masses, using that term appropriately here as they are herds. Long ago through lobbying and all the rest of the horseshit we lost this country. We do not have a Republican party, what we have is an ideological group who manifests a Social Darwinian drive. Allow me as a writer or therapist to share some felt-truths and reach some conclusions you may or may not appreciate.
Let us for a moment look at Governor Scott Walker. I don’t need to know about his family, how active he is as a church member, how he is loyal to his wife, how he never has masturbated. Let us just look at his face. Behind those eyes is death. Just his face reveals a coldness to the man, an inability to soften, to negotiate, to reflect. We have seen that face hundreds of times in all the old movies about the western cavalry and its Indian wars. Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld all have that death mask, an inability to really express empathy much less sympathy. I believe it is characterological of the American male in this country, right from our historical beginning. It was the face the black man saw, the Indian saw, women saw, unions saw, an unrelenting, blunt, cold, stone-walling mind set — callous, hard, cruel, stubborn, determinatively driven by causes and racist. Americans run from this assessment, although at one time for more than 100 years we had a caste, mind you, not a class system in this country as rigid as the untouchables in India. Read your An American Dilemma. In my fantasy Glenn beck would be an Indian agent handing out blankets saturated in small box in order to wipe out all the Progressives on the reservation.
It is also my sad contention that Anne Coulter, MIchelle Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Laura Ingraham, Megan Kelly, all the in-house stable of Fox Views are the female versions of the American male, Gorgons all, featuring a stiletto wit, vicious bite-biting asides as crooked as Greta Von Susteren’s mouth, and just an overall toxic perfume issuing from their pretty, dolled-up faces. Very few of them give credit to the feminists who labored hard to set them free, ingrates all.
Given these tangents, I will share further thoughts I have. I recall that in the Thirties artists, writers, actors, quick-witted Jews all sensed the racist rot in Nazi Germany and emigrated to the States. I am contemplating becoming an ex-pat; I really believe we are in a dour decadent period that I want no part of it. I would not leave like a good American because it is cheaper to live in Belize, Ecuador, and Costa Rica. I would say fuck you to Medicare because in some of these countries the care is about third world as it is here in Henderson, Nevada which is a medically unsafe environment to get seriously ill in. This state is so blue-collar that they are gutting the university financially because education is really not important — that is right, it has never been important in this country. So I would leave the USA because it is no longer democratic, is controlled by a hegemonic few. The differing points of political points of view are now taking on a variation of class warfare and it is remarkably close to becoming a feudal country, with the few at the top of the pyramid and the rest pf us fighting like serfs among ourselves. Note: not one stock trader or CEO on Wall Street has had charges brought against him! Americans have the memory resource of a gnat. We get angry, we fight and quarrel but clear thinking is never an aspect of our consciousness.
Will it be better elsewhere? Of course, not. We all know that. The jolly in all this is that I will act upon a sound realization, an awakening of intelligence, if you will, that until i die I can at least choose, for the time being, to act, to opt out. I think watching America from abroad will be self-confirming as the internal tsunami of collective rot will cross the plains and mountains and cleanse both shores.
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