The Deconstructionist: Death and Taxes

Helping You Choke Down Your Annual Blue Pill Since 2007

If you’re anything like me, it’s been less than 48 hours since you mailed your taxes. Maybe you like to make the IRS get all suited up in their riot gear before giving them what they want. Maybe if we’re lucky, putting that stuff on and taking it off will lead to some chafing in a few sensitive areas, and that will be our payback.

Of course being a government agency, it would be months or even years before the IRS missed the money we were supposed to pay them, if in fact like me you needed to pay them. If instead they owe you, then you just made an interest-free loan to the United States government, and I’m certain that congress appreciates it and they were extra careful to be sure your money went to sensible, responsible causes that you agree with. With me, the delay is two parts procrastination and one part stunned inaction when I realized exactly how much being self-employed cost me. Seriously, the final number rang my bell so hard I spent the weekend stumbling around in a kind of daze: First Kurt Vonnegut passes away, and now I am paying enough taxes to fund the upcoming invasion of Iran myself. It took a screening of the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie to convince me that the world made sense again, and if that’s not a cry for help, I don’t know what is.

It’s the third paragraph, and it’s time I got to the point, and the point is, I don’t feel qualified to contest the government’s right to my money, even if I am often appalled by what they choose to do with it. Also, since this is a sci-fi website, I’ll toss in that taxes are mentioned twice in the original Matrix. Taxes come up because they are the ultimate reacharound in our compliance with the world pulled over our eyes. We are being fucked every day (and not in the good way), and we pay for the privilege.

One reason I put up with it, is because even if I had the stones to disengage myself from my government-issued comfort zone that I know is little more than a series of tubes jammed into my body to turn me into a microscopic cog in this catastrophic plan called America, I’d hardly know where to begin. I mean, I use America’s roads and count on America’s laws to keep me more or less safe, and by accepting the good I’m also in for the parts I don’t like: be it regime changes, ignoring Dufar, aggressively warming the planet or gun laws that may be just a touch too lax. (Side note: My MSW spell checker doesn’t recognize Dufar, and I guess that’s a bug that’s quickly becoming a feature). I’m certain that anyone, anywhere can find things that their government does that they find objectionable if not outright immoral, but they still mail their checks every spring just like I do.

In any case, none of us can pick and choose what our tax dollars support. If we learned anything from the Will Ferrell film ‘Stranger than Fiction,’ it’s that selectively paying your taxes will result in a visit from an amiable IRS representative, which will in turn lead to hot sex, Dustin Hoffman and being hit by a bus. (Side note #2- Ferrell IS in the spellchecker, as is Dustin. This means something).

More seriously, perhaps I should consider selectively paying my taxes. Look what it did for Henry David Thoreau: He was locked up for refusing to fund the Mexican-American War (see, we’ve been ‘welcomed as liberators’ before), and the one night he spent in jail for non-payment of taxes led to writing ‘Civil Disobedience.’ Later, years on the run from the feds found Henry living in a small cabin in the Walden woods, where he wrote one of the most enduring collections of societal criticism ever. His name is even in my spell checker.

And there’s the little fact that the U.S. income tax is illegal. Seriously. The 13th amendment was never fully ratified. Go ahead, google it- it’s true. When the government taxes your income now, it’s no more legal than if a cop just up and mugged you.

Here’s a few other tax facts that many people may not be aware of:

· Stay in school! Full time students aren’t required to pay taxes. This is reason # 14 in the list of why my decision to finish college was a bad one.

· Let the kids slack! As long as your kid in unemployed, under 18 or attending school full time, it’s a dependent. Let any of those change, and you lose a deduction.

· Keep track of your sales tax! You can deduct the sales tax that you pay in a year. It should be obvious- you already paid taxes on the same money- what, they are going to take you for earning AND spending the same dollar? Only if you don’t do the work! This is the first year I’ve taken this deduction, and while I still had to pay up, it helped me quite a bit.

· In June of last year, after a torrential downpour shut down the IRS offices at 1111 Constitutional Avenue, the IRS moved it’s offices to a federal building Costa Rica. This ‘temporary’ move has apparently become permanent, as 1111 is now used for other purposes.

· The native Alaskan people, the Inuit, had no word for taxation when Alaska was acquired as a U.S. Territory in 1867. When they were (in some instances, forcibly) informed of their new responsibilities to their new government, they chose a word that used to mean having a block of ice jammed up your ass to mean ‘taxes.’

· If you mail your return, don’t use that pre-printed label! The IRS schedules audits randomly, but the list of random taxpayers is drawn from the barcode scans of tax returns as they are processed by machine upon arrival. Returns processed manually are not logged into that database.

I know that much of this advice is coming too late to help you, and that’s important because it’s all bullshit that I gathered off of the internet. Except for the Alaska thing, I made that one up. I also fudged some about Henry David Thoreau.

I hope that all of this proves a point: life is often unbearably complicated and cruel. Taxes, and the government policies they fund and empower, are but one example of a thing forcibly required of us yet many times larger than our capacity to fully understand (I speak not only of the laws, but of the larger question of our role in a society- go read some term papers on The Matrix if you need to know more). This injustice is augmented by countless attempts by other humans, many ill-meaning and outright malevolent, to confound us in attempts to get our money or if that’s not possible, just to hurt or confuse us.

And that’s why I thought of Kurt Vonnegut when I mailed my taxes this year. That dour chain-smoking bastard understood more than we realize.

The Deconstructionist with Gordon Weir is pleased that MSWord recognizes ‘Vonnegut.’

The Deconstructionist: America's Coffee Problem

Revealing the horrible truths behind the simplest pleasures in your life since 2007.

Why is addiction always presented as a bad, awful thing except where coffee is concerned? Why are alcohol, cigarettes, prescription meds, black tar heroin, and so many other generally harmless entertainments vilified and even considered illegal when it’s okay for They Might Be Giants to spout cheery little tunes about how if you don’t get just the right dosage of coffee in the morning, your world soon collapses into a broken-down, black-and-white traveling-carnival-world filled with leering ghosts and jagged, broken scenery?

We all know that a world without your morning joe is a place where the light hurts your eyes and the shadows hold monsters, where your bowels clench tight, inert as a fertilizer bomb missing the one catalyst that makes the explosion possible, and you blunder through your day, torpid and disorientated, like a raccoon in the final stages of rabies, turning small circles in a suburban driveway at 7:30 a.m., too muddled to retreat from the sunlight, ready to attack anything that comes too close.

And then the headache begins.

That’s the real face of coffee, folks: Billions of people need it every day to just to get to normal, and if their supplies were somehow cut off, that impairment would last for days.

So why is it okay to market coffee this way—to brag, as it were, that people are hooked and can’t do anything about it? To even celebrate this fact? What if cigarette or beer manufacturers took the same approach? “The shaking will stop if you can just have a another smoke. Then all of this won’t look so bad.” or “A few beers, and it will all seem better. You’ll be able to face your loved ones!”

I believe there would be some sort of public outcry.

Yet They Might Be Giants can croon about how America Runs on Dunkin’ till the urn percolates, revealing our nation’s greatest weakness and paving the way for a global shift of power that would rock the world in a way not seen since the first Monsters of Rock brought Rainbow, the Scorpions, and Judas Priest together for one sultry summer night of bee-swallowing majesty.

Flash forward to 2035: The United States has solved its oil dependency through a series of invasions and by making illegal for poor people to own things that use gas.

Yet while our shortsighted republican leaders have focused on the Middle East, the coffee-producing countries of South America have formed an international cabal, with control of coffee beans at the heart of their power: The South American Nation Coffee Alliance (or Sanca for short)

Juan Valdez governs from a mansion high in the Andes Mountains. His wealth and power are absolute. Finding the rigors of Christianity limiting to a man who has himself become a god, he converts to the religions of his ancestors. X'tapalapaquetl, Olmec god of war, appear on the new Peso.

This new world power flexes its might by setting coffee prices at a record high. A latte costs $150, a Box o’ Joe, $2000. A pound of coffee is out of reach of all but the most affluent Americans, but since the nation’s wealthy are doted on by the Romney administration (he finally made it!), no one of any importance raises an outcry, until a lack of caffeine slows America to a crawl.

By 2035, all industrial and manufacturing jobs have long since been shipped overseas, and the only jobs left are in the service industry. Still, the nation reels as the domestic workforce slows to a crawl: burgers go unflipped, bathrooms are left un-cleaned, limousines unwashed, assistants fail to return with the $150 lattes the powerful sent them out for earlier this morning.

America’s rulers deal with the problem in the same old ways: threats, bluster, spying on their own citizens, lying to the U.N.

Juan Valdez laughs at these efforts, and speaks those words made terrible by Master Blaster: ‘Embargo on!’

Completely cut off from coffee, the United States soon knows the pain of Bartertown: the nation plummets into a black hole of lethargy, brain-fog and constipation. Hyperactive young children easily overthrow their lethargic parents and assume control of the country. The nightmarishly ironic ending of the oscar-nominated 1968 ‘Wild in the Streets’ becomes terrible fact.

But it doesn’t last forever. After six days, the fog clears, the scales are lifted. The nation’s underclass (basically the entire population, less about a hundred thousand Friends of Mitt’s), now free of their caffeine addiction and able to go more than two hours without urinating, replace the shattered government with a new vision, one built on fairness and the will of the people, and all is well for several months until the new ruling class decides to legalize marijuana.

Gordon Weir doesn’t have a caffeine problem and thinks you should mind your own fucking business, asshole. Who do you think you are? He can quit any time he wants.

The Deconstructionist: Officestar Galactica

This week I’m going to talk about two successful television shows- both remakes- and what their success means for the state of television as well as our culture in general. Now, I’m catching up on these shows via the magic of DVD, so I’m only on the second season of each. This greatly decreases my ability to deliver spoilers, and I’m going to do my best to avoid specifics when I can, so even if you’re only considering watching these programs, you should be safe.

To bring everyone up to speed, ‘Battlestar Galactica’ is the sci-fi channel remake of the old Glen A. Larson (in the words of Stephen King) ‘space turkey’ made brutally adult. ‘The Office’ is a remake of a British sitcom set in a small office where an (seemingly) endless documentary is being shot. So on ‘The Office’ the characters relate to a handheld camera, and all the scenes are presented as if captured by a documentary crew.

The thing that these shows have in common is that they are successful tragedies, and that speaks volumes for the condition of the American television viewer today. Galactica begins, as the original series did, with the near-complete eradication by the cylons of 12 earth-sized planets, each filled with humans. Something less than 100,000 humans escape to flee across the universe in one aging Battlestar, searching for Earth.

The thing to notice here is that both the 1978 series and the new series began exactly the same way, but in 78’, the cylon surprise attack was brutal but the resonance of the near-genocide was short-lived. The entire series may have been a race against death, a search for survival, but it was nevertheless told in gentle, prime-time manner. While the original Galactica was never Happy Days, the crew suffered little more agitation or angst about their predicament than say, the ‘A-Team’ did about the horrors of Vietnam or their wrongful persecution.

Not so the current Galactica. Each episode opens with a survivor count- a fluxtuating number that represents the total number of humans left alive. There’s no forgetting it- the cylons are dedicated to the extinction of the human race to the last child.

Why the difference? The writers of the 70’s show certainly could have been as grim, but I guess they didn’t see the need to be. This wasn’t high drama; it was a way to fill an hour on Wednesday nights while latching on to the Star Wars craze. True, that for a television show, Galactica was the very definition of high concept- it challenged evolution and creationism as a sub-plot- but they didn’t address the issue any more than Knight Rider did the concept of vigilantism. Anyone else remember the episode in the original series when the Galactica captured Baltar and he worked out some kind of trade and demanded his ship and centurions back, and Starbuck and Apollo programmed the centurions to punch the controls of the ship, stranding Baltar on the Galactica’s hangar deck? Good times.

There are absolutely no good times in the new Galactica. This show means something, is about something. In a way, Galactica is just as much a remake of the original Star Trek, as it is the old series, because the show isn’t about some other society and their issues, it’s about us.

The writers of the new series pump up the content by incorporating elements of our current political and social circumstances into the storylines. The cylons want to wipe humans out because they consider human society decedent. There are also serious religious differences. And since the cylons can now experience emotion, every death and atrocity on either side only reinforces the idea that The Universe Isn’t Big Enough For The Two Of Us.

Yet with all that the crew of the Galactica and her rag-tag fleet has gone through, they have a much better chance for happiness and fulfillment than the characters of the Office.

The Office is even more tragic than Galactica for a few reasons. The first is it follows the rules of a tragedy more closely- no hope goes uncrushed. The message of the Office is that the idiots are in charge and they don’t even care enough about you to hate you. I actually cringe whenever any character experiences the slightest bit of joy, because I know that they are being set up for some horrible occurrence. Thematically, it’s the logical progression from Sienfeld, where the central characters suffered endlessly but at least they were all jerks. There are several kind, generous, enviable people in The Office, but because they lack the will to Get Out, they are doomed. Seriously, this show plays like Dante’s Inferno, and the wonder of it is that so much tragedy exists in such unremarkable circumstances.

The Office’s use of a documentary-style format puts me in mind of some MASH episodes that used a similar trick. For these very special episodes, MASH put aside the hilarity while Hawkeye and his mates speak candidly into a camera about how they miss their families and the endless horror of patching up young kids to send them back into the meat grinder.

However, the characters The Office aren’t in a war. They aren’t being pursued through space by murderous toasters. They are living our very lives. Unlike Galactica, there is no mention of any larger world—there is no Iraq War, in the Office. There is only work, and occasionally some small measure of personal life, but only where it touches upon work. Romances are all office romances. If a character experiences a real-life tragedy, it is measured in how it affects their working relationships.

Both of these shows are exceptionally well made, well written, and well acted. Neither has an exit. The characters from Lost will be at home drinking tea and reminiscing about their strange adventures around the hatch long before anyone in Galactica lives a of cylon-free life or anyone in The Office experiences a lasting joy.

The terrible thing, the truly ominous message of these shows, is that they are rooted deeply on our own world, our own lives. They aren’t an escape, like most television is. They are a portrayal of our worst fears made worse still, and worse still, they are closed loops – their formulas preclude a happy ending, or any ending at all. They are perfect pills of misery, and they are our entertainment.

--G